Wally Hayward

Wallace ("Wally") Henry Hayward (10 July 1908 – 28 April 2006) was a South African endurance athlete with a 60 year career. He has won the Comrades Marathon five times and completed the distance of around 90 km the last time just before his eighty-first birthday.

He was born and died in Johannesburg. He died in 2006 just a few days before the annual Wally Hayward Marathon.

Comrades Marathon

He won the race for the first time on his first attempt in 1930 at age 21 (the youngest runner at that stage). Only twenty years later he competed again and won it from 1950 to 1954, except for 1952 when he choose to rather represent South Africa at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki. He finished tenth in the Olympic marathon event.

In 1951 and 1953 (first athlete under 6 hours) he broke the down-run record, and in 1954 he broke the up-run record and became the oldest man to win the race at age 45 (later overtaken by Vladimir Kotov in 2004).

In 1988 he returned once again to participate. He beat half the finishers with a time of 9h44m. Wally's most dramatic moment came the following year, in 1989, when he completed the down run at the age of 80. There was hardly a dry eye in the stadium as he staggered across the line in an obviously distressed state, making the cut-off time by a mere 1min 57sec, after which he finally quit the race for good. To this day, he has the distinction in the record books of being the oldest finisher in the history of the Comrades Marathon.