The 400m hurdles legend recalls how he linked up with Glen Cohen, Bill Hartley and David Jenkins to land European 4x400m victory in Rome in 1974 but then went from striking gold to ending up in the gutter

I kept falling asleep when I was at our training camp in Formia. I barely put one foot in front of the other. I managed to get my act together thanks to Mary Peters, who suggested I had a vitamin B injection, which I did when I got to Rome. All the strength came back and I won the 400m hurdles. 

Winning in Italy and winning in Rome was really important because I’d done a lot the training out there. That stadium in Rome was always special to me because, as a kid, my dad was in the Navy and we were posted out to Malta. 

As a 12-year-old, I went to the Rome Olympics on a school trip so I’d watched all the greats of the 1960 Games in that stadium, and there I was, running in it myself. 

The 4x400m is special because it’s the only real team event in athletics. Yes, there is the 4x100m but the difference in the 4x400m is that you don’t have checkmarks, you just look into eyes of the guy that’s running into you. You know he’s fading. You know he’s dying. You know that, if you go too early, they’re absolutely dead in the water. 

Between the hurdles final and the 400m final, we had worked at the changeovers because it was an era where all the guys seemed to be bigger than me, even though I was 6ft 1in (1.85m), and there was so much pushing and shoving. 

The lining up before you got the baton was something that we worked at, just pushing the guys away so that you have an arm’s length for the incoming runner and take the baton and get away clearly.

We had a team that only had one real runner in it and that was David Jenkins. Me and Bill Hartley were both hurdlers while Glen Cohen, a lovely guy, wasn’t even a finalist in the flat 400m. 

Bill and I had gotten a bit of experience, while Jenks was with me on the Olympic team in 1972 where we got silver. 

The European race was the only 4x400m of significance that we won. We won a couple of international matches but, in terms of medals, they had all been silvers. 

We had a conversation – or at least Bill, Glen and I did – and we decided that we probably weren’t good enough to put Jenkins in the lead on the fourth leg but the biggest mistake would be to put him in front of the Germans because Karl Honz had beaten him in the flat 400m.

David probably should have won that race but he didn’t. We knew that he would be out for revenge, but he was not good at front-running – he was brilliant coming from behind – so the team plan was to keep him as close to the German shoulder as possible.

The plan didn’t look as though it was going to work when the Finns were about four or five yards ahead but they were never going to hold off those two. Hans made a big move down the back straight and David just followed him, then picked him off in the home straight. 

Bill and I, although we didn’t have any breath left, were screaming at David: “Pump your arms, keep it going. Don’t tie up!” And he did it. It was just great teamwork. Everybody ran to their best. 

My contribution to that race was staying on my feet. Having just received the baton, I nearly got pushed over and then, at the 200m mark, a Swede behind me clipped my foot and it took the shoe off. Fortunately, on the next stride, it went back on again. If it had come off, I’d have been in real trouble. 

But all the guys were big. There was so much pushing and shoving that I actually said to the head of World Athletics afterwards that they needed to look at it because it was just becoming so gladiatorial out there. 

If someone went over at the front of the race, everybody would go piling over. A bit like cycling, except you get a second chance in cycling. I remember just being in the melee at 200m and thinking: “Christ how am I even going to survive this?”

After we’d won, when we were jogging around the track waving to the crowd, Glen Cohen said: “I can’t run anymore. I feel sick.” I said: “Listen, you’re on television – smile and keep waving.” I won’t tell you what he said, as nice a lad as he was. 

Brendan Foster had just won the 5000m and we were all dehydrated because it was very hot. Typical of the Italians, they didn’t just have water there, they had beer, so Brendan had two beers and we sat on the coach going back and he gave some terrible rendition of “We Are The Champions”. 

He had his medal round around his finger. We were all laughing at him singing and he was using the medal like a yo-yo and pretending to throw it out the window. 

We just had a glorious night, not helped by the officials. When I’d won the hurdles, one of the officials actually said well done and then went on to tell me how he knew exactly how I felt because he’d won the 200m low hurdles in the Oxford-Cambridge match. Nobody else said anything. And there were no celebrations. 

When the Italians found that out, they took me to the restaurant across the road where all the football teams and everybody go. We got in there and it was jam-packed so the owner moved two cars that were parked outside and put two tables there. We literally sat in the gutter and had a celebratory meal.