Former UK Athletics Director of Coaching Frank Dick looks back at the life of a man who led from the front and created a lasting culture of change in the sport

We are sometimes careless in our appreciation of those whose moment in athletics made a significant and lasting impact. Robbie Brightwell’s moment had a profound impact in the UK.

His personal athletic achievements are impressive in themselves. At English Schools Intermediate as a Shropshire schoolboy he won 220-yard gold before claiming European 400m gold and 4x400m silver in Belgrade 1962 (the year he graduated from Loughborough) as well as silver that same year in both the 400m and 4x400m during the Commonwealth Games in Perth, Australia. Two years later it was 4x400m silver at the Tokyo Olympics. All were medals forged in Charnwood Forest and upon Loughborough’s track.

Brightwell’s real impact, however, was as a leader and influencer in changing our athletics culture.

We’ve had several great national team captains, but Robbie was the greatest, leading the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Team to the best performance of the modern era – four golds, seven silvers and one bronze. It brought to an end the cinder track era, with two of our gold medallists – Mary Rand and Ann Packer (whom Robbie would marry six months later) – setting world records.

What an incredible team achievement, given that all those athletes were self-funded, holding down full-time jobs, competing with nations whose athletes were heavily subsidised and in some cases were benefitting from the world as it was before anti-doping.

But his leadership went beyond that. Before the Games and on behalf of national team athletes, he stood up to the sport’s governing body, demanding that athletes’ rights be respected. The governing body had signed contracts on the basis of athletes being obliged to provide certain services, without the knowledge of the athletes themselves. Even when threatened with the withdrawal of his captaincy and selection, Robbie stood his ground.

This planted the seed from which the International Athletics Club grew under Dave Bedford, Derek Johnson and Mike Winch. Robbie’s courage on this issue would initiate a process of very positive change in the relationship between our administrators and the athletes.

In December 1964, Robbie and Ann married.  They retired as athletes and Robbie, at 24, returned to Loughborough as lecturer, heading the athletics staff.

As an athlete he was a serious student of the performance process. During his lecturing years, what he had learned through working with his coach Geoff Gowan, through understanding and analysis of the programmes Dennis Watts designed for Ann, and inputs from Bill Marlow and Ron Pickering, it was clear he could hold his own at the cutting edge of 400m and 800m coaching.

But coaching was not to be for him – except, of course, in bringing these skills to bear in preparing his three sons David and Ian (football) and Gary (athletics) for their sporting endeavours.

Instead, Robbie became Adidas UK Managing Director and, later, Le Coq Sportif Managing Director.  One reason for this change of direction was that he knew he could help more athletes by supporting them than by coaching them.  Although athletics was moving from the amateur years, sponsorship as we know it was yet to arrive – so what may not seem much now, meant the world then.

“He gave me the most memorable day outside sport and my kids – my first box of free shoes,” says double Olympic decathlon champion Daley Thompson. “I felt like a king, still get goosebumps thinking about it.”

David Moorcroft, the former 5000m world record-holder, adds: “I got my first free Adidas gear from Robbie and John Cooper when I was 18 – I thought all my Christmases had come at once.”

Looking back, Robbie was leading the curve of change through a period of extraordinary transition in domestic and international athletics. He was a gifted communicator, whether announcing at Loughborough Athletics events or in the written word. His book Robbie Brightwell and his Golden Girl is a masterpiece and a most insightful depiction of that period of transition

It also embraces a love story better than Romeo and Juliet or Dr Zhivago and Lara. Although he wrote so openly about something so personal, he was in fact quite a private person. Ann, the boys and their families were more precious to him than any trappings of celebrity.

The book also radiates his depth of thought, his acute powers of perception and judgment and his non-negotiable insistence on setting and living those values we hold highest in sport and in life.

He could recite by heart the poem If by Rudyard Kipling.  He loved it.  It shaped the lives of many young people in those times. When diagnosed with the illness that would eventually take him from us, he would have reflected on those times that characterised his performance on the track and in his life.

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute

with 60 seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,

And which is more, you’ll be a man my son”

So he chose to fight and run the distance to give him three more years with Ann, his boys, their families, and those whose privilege it was to be his friends.

There came the news that the finishing line was close, yet even then he fought for more time, clinging to the poem’s lines.

“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone.

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them ‘hold on!’”

Just before midday on March 6, the fight and the pain were over.  This great man whose life enriched ours and the sport we love was at last at peace. Thoughts and prayers are with Ann and the family.