Harrison Dillard

• Born: July 8, 1923
• Birthplace: Cleveland, Ohio
• Died: November 15, 2019
• Place of death: Cleveland, Ohio

Sport: Track and field (hurdles)

Early Life

William Harrison Dillard was born on July 8, 1923, in Cleveland, Ohio, the hometown of Jesse Owens, the winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. The first time Dillard saw Owens was when Owens returned to Cleveland for a parade held in his honor following his Olympic victories. The youngster ran home and told his mother that he was going to be just like Owens. In 1936, at the age of thirteen, he began to dream about sprinting to an Olympic victory like his hero had done.

A year later, as a student at Cannard Junior High, Dillard began to run in organized track competitions. His track coach discouraged him from becoming a sprinter because he was so small and weighed only 85 pounds—hence his nickname “Bones.”

Dillard’s idol, Owens, who worked on Cleveland’s East Side, dropped by track practice one day to encourage and instruct the young athletes. Owens left Dillard with two things, a pair of track shoes and some advice—try the hurdles.

The Road to Excellence

Dillard attended East Technical High School in Cleveland, just like Owens had done years before. He also took Owens’s suggestion and began to run the hurdles. In fact, he ran the hurdles so well that he won the Ohio state championships in both the high and low hurdles his senior year.

In the fall of 1941, Dillard planned to attend Ohio State University, where Owens had run collegiate track. At the last minute, however, he decided to go to Baldwin-Wallace, a college of seventeen hundred students in Berea, Ohio, a town not far from his home. There, he ran track under the direction of Coach Eddie Finnegan.

Together, Dillard and Coach Finnegan made hurdling an exact science. Dillard’s speed had helped him win hurdle races in high school. Now speed and technique were joined together to make hurdling history.

An explosive start and great speed allowed Dillard to reach the first hurdle in exactly eight steps. Because of his somewhat short stature for a high hurdler, 5 feet 10 inches, he developed a new hurdling technique using his phenomenal leaping ability. He took off 8 feet from the hurdle and landed 5 feet beyond it, about 2 feet farther than most hurdlers. Generally, longer time in the air slows down the hurdler, but Dillard was able to use his speed to get his trailing leg down almost as quickly as his leading leg. The Baldwin-Wallace trackster was something that most track fans had never seen before—a great hurdler who was also a great sprinter.

The Emerging Champion

While Dillard was competing in track during his first two years at Baldwin-Wallace, the United States was fighting in World War II. In 1943, after his sophomore year, he was drafted into the United States Army.

At the end of the war, Dillard participated in the Army’s Olympics held in Frankfurt, Germany, and won four gold medals in the sprints and the hurdles. After viewing Dillard’s performance, General George S. Patton Jr., himself a medalist in the decathalon in the 1912 Olympics, remarked that Dillard was the best athlete he had ever seen.

Dillard returned to Baldwin-Wallace to finish his education and continue to run track. At the conclusion of his collegiate career, he had won 201 out of 207 sprints and hurdle finals. From May 1947, to June 1948, he scored eighty-two consecutive victories, a record that was not surpassed until Edwin Moses’s dominance in the 400-meter hurdles in the 1970s and 1980s.

Dillard’s consecutive victory streak ended at the Olympic trials in the summer of 1948. He wanted to “clean up” in the London games like Jesse Owens had done in Berlin, so he tried to make the US team in three events—the 110-meter hurdles, the 100-meter dash, and the 4 100-meter relay.

Continuing the Story

Because he finished third in the 100-meter dash, behind Barney Ewell and Mel Patton, Dillard went to the 1948 London Olympics an underdog. Having run the race in 10.3 seconds, which was one-tenth of a second off the world record, he was confident of his chances and believed that he could run with any sprinter in the world on a given day.

The 100-meter Olympic final was close. Both Dillard and Ewell claimed victory in a photo finish. The official photograph showed that Dillard had won the race by one foot. He tied the Olympic record of 10.3 seconds, set by his hero Owens in 1936, and by another great Black sprinter, Eddie Tolan, in the 1932 Olympic Games. He also won another gold medal as part of the 4 100-meter relay team.

Two gold medals could not compensate for the disappointment Dillard felt at not winning the Olympic hurdles. After graduating from college in 1949, he began training for the 1952 Helsinski Olympics and his anticipated gold medal in the 110-meter hurdles.

At the age of twenty-nine, Dillard made the Olympic team and won the gold medal in the hurdles. The race was decided at the last hurdle, where he touched down first and sprinted to the finish line. Another gold medal in the 4x100-meter relay brought his career gold medal total to four, the same total as Owens.

Summary

After the 1952 Olympics, Harrison Dillard continued to hurdle and win championships. His heroics were acknowledged in 1955, when he received the James E. Sullivan Memorial Award as the nation’s outstanding amateur athlete. He became a charter member of the USA Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1974, and in 1983, he was inducted into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame.

After his track career ended, in addition to providing sports reports for a local radio station and a column for a local paper, Dillard returned to where it began—the Cleveland Public School System—and served as an administrator in charge of business affairs. In 1984, he returned to his alma mater, Baldwin-Wallace, and received an honorary doctorate of human letters for his track achievements as well as his contributions to the Cleveland community. In 1993, he retired from his position with the Cleveland Board of Education. Baldwin-Wallace further honored its alumnus by placing a statue of him in front of the entrance to its George Finnie Stadium in 2015.

Following a battle with stomach cancer, Dillard died in Cleveland on November 15, 2019, at the age of ninety-six.

Bibliography

Ashe, Arthur. A Hard Road to Glory, Track and Field: The African American Athlete in Track and Field. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Collins, Bud. “Hurdles Dream Dashed, Dillard Turned a Chance into Gold in 1948.” The New York Times, September 17, 2000, p. 19.

Findling, John E., and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds. Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Litsky, Frank. "Harrison Dillard, World's Best Hurdler in the 1940s, Dies at 96." The New York Times, 17 Nov. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/obituaries/harrison-dillard-dead.html. Accessed 29 July 2020.

Wallechinsky, David, and Jaime Loucky. The Complete Book of the Olympics: 2008 Edition. London: Aurum Press, 2008.