"The Flying Scotsman": Ming Campbell's athletics career

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Athletics Weekly marked the passing of the former Liberal Democrat leader Ming Campbell with a short article on his career as a sprinter:

Despite being best known as a former Liberal Democrat leader, Campbell held the British 100m record in the 1960s.

Menzies "Ming" Campbell, the Scottish sprinter who ran at the 1964 Olympics and held the UK 100m record with 10.2 before a successful career as a politician, has died aged 84.

Campbell was dubbed the "Flying Scotsman" and occasionally "the fastest white man on the planet" and ran for Britain in the 1964 Olympics in addition to representing Scotland at the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games.

His UK record of 10.2 for 100m was set in 1967 – a time he achieved twice, in Modesto and San Jose, to equal MacDonald Bailey's 1951 mark – and the time stood as the national record until 1972.

At the 1964 Tokyo Games, Campbell, who was aged 23, reached the 200m quarter-finals and ran in the 4x100m relay.

As a student at Stanford, he famously raced and beat OJ Simpson, before Simpson switched his attentions to NFL. Campbell also finished runner-up to Tommie Smith, the American athlete who later won the 200m at the 1968 Olympics.

Born in Glasgow on May 22, 1941, Campbell studied at Glasgow and Stanford universities and was a barrister before becoming a politician.

He was initially a quarter-miler while studying in Glasgow – winning four Scottish titles at 440 yards – but gravitated to the shorter distances of 100 and 220 yards and their metric equivalents.

At the AAA Championships he won two titles over 220 yards, equalling the championships record of 21.1 in 1964, and he won medals at three editions of the World Student Games in the 1960s.

At the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 he won his 200m heat in 21.33 but was knocked out in the second round.

His impressive athleticism and natural leadership abilities meant he was named British athletics captain in 1965 and 1966. Similarly, he was the captain of the Scottish team at the 1966 Commonwealth Games.

He retired from athletics in 1968 to pursue his law career.

Tommie Smith and his protest at the 1968 Olympics are largely forgotten now. You can read about him in a guest post Matt Roebuck wrote for me some years ago.

And it's possible that I saw Ming as a sprinter myself. I can remember Grandstand - the BBC's Saturday afternoon sports programme - in the 1960s, when "indoor athletics from RAF Cosford" was a recurrent item.