milermb wrote:
To fully appreciate the greatness of the runner watch his 1964 Olympic 1500 victory and his demolition of Beatty, Grelle and the rest of Igloi's LATC in a mile in (?) 1963. Both available on YouTube. Awesome performances.
His 880yards/800 record on GRASS (!) takes some beating as a great run.
As part of the interesting background to the Compton and Modesto races in '63, Snell was coming from his off season but felt he had to meet Beatty, the coming man and the indoor mile record-holder. Snell said he feared losing all that he had built up since Rome '60 if he wasn't able to beat the American. The pressure on Snell was considerable. His response was emphatic, destroying the field of top US milers and Beatty in the first race, and having the final word in the second. It was the end of Beatty as a threat to the great Kiwi runner.
1964 had also presented some challenges to Snell, with doubtful fitness, injuries and losses to his talented fellow-countryman, John Davies. It was only a solo 800 time-trial at Tokyo, that was less than a second off his own Olympic record, and witnessed by the great Roger Moens, that persuaded him he could go for the double. Moens later expressed the view that Snell was the greatest middle-distance runner he had ever seen.