EN
Peter Hildreth died peacefully, according to his wife Carol, on Friday evening (February 25), at 19.30. Hildreth, 82 was a six-time AAA high hurdles champion, a three-time Olympian, 1952-60, and won a bronze medal at the European Championships in 1950.
He equalled the UK record of 14.3sec for his speciality on five occasions. He went on to become Sunday Telegraph athletics correspondent, and provide commentary for BBC Radio.
Hildreth was the first (and most persistent) person in the British media to proclaim the extent of drug-taking in athletics. His opinion, as he told anyone who was prepared to listen, was based on his own experience of international athletes, himself included, being prepared to do almost anything, “to get an edge”.
One of his major contentions was that any athlete coming into the sport in the last 40 years or so (here he included all the major stars, including the Brits) was entering a contaminated field, and forced to follow suit. He even managed to get some of this in print. But athletes chose to ignore it, rather than open what may have proved to be a large can of worms.
His views and his quietly spoken patrician character did not endear him to many of his media colleagues, who saw him as little more than a conspiracy theorist. But it has long since become obvious that he was well ahead of the game, for he was closer to the truth than any of us.
Unlike many retired athletes, he maintained his slender physique throughout his life, and every Christmas undertook the annual task of completing numerous finger-tip push-ups. As recently as two years ago, he told me that, having failed to manage the annual task, he was so annoyed with himself, he went for along walk to aid his concentration, got back home, and achieved it.
Similarly, into his seventies, he would demonstrate hurdling technique (to considerable astonishment) by stepping over chairs in hotel lounges on the athletics circuit.
Quirky behaviour like that got him banned from a local department store ‘on safety grounds’ two and a half years ago, when he set himself the exploit of running up the ‘down’ escalator in Elphick’s in his home town of Farnham, Surrey. He was 80 years old.
That ‘feat’ was celebrated by the British magazine ‘The Oldie’ to whose annual dinner he was invited to speak, and was given the award in the accompanying photograph.
Hildreth was born in Bedford on July 8, 1928, and spent his early life in India, where his father Wilfrid set a national 200 metres record that lasted two decades. ‘Will’ also represented India at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.
Peter finished his secondary schooling at Ratcliffe College near Leicester, where his athletics career began in earnest. It continued at Downing College, Cambridge University, where he took a history degree, and subsequently in the RAF, where he did his national service.
As a history graduate, and what used to be called ‘old school’, he was a great admirer of Winston Churchill. His treasured possession was a pigskin bound edition of Churchill’s six-volume ‘The Second World War’, from which he could quote at great length.
He had two sons from his first marriage; his second wife, Carol, a textile artist survives him.
Pat Butchers BLOG
