Athletics books (Fiction)

Some of us were talking about athletics and who our heroes were at the weekend and my two big heroes as athletes were Herb Elliott and Peter Snell but in the conversation about what had inspired us the names of Wilson of the Wizard and Alf Tupper came up. So who were they? Alf Tupper was a character in a boys' comic of the time called the Rover which was a weekly collection of stories in prose with hardly any pictures which we all devoured. Alf was a welder to trade who slept under the railway arches and ate lots of fish and chips with loads of salt and vinegar. A real working class hero who loved beating the toffs from University clubs who always cheated. Wilson of the Wizard (the amazing Wilson) had been born sometime in the 18th century and lived alone on the moors. His secret for long life was the Elixir of Life - a potion the secret of which had been given to him by an old man when he was but a boy! We all read them as well as the other stories every week and talked about them on the way to school, at school and even after school if the story that week was particularly good. I looked them up on the net on Saturday night and suggest that if you are interested in what children read in the 1940's and 50's, or athletics fiction or the standard of literacy at the time, you could go to www.britishcomics.20m.com where you will find out about the five real boys comics - the Wizard and Adventure that came out on a Tuesday and the Rover and Hotspur that came out on a Thursday.

What has this to do with the price of eggs? Well there used to be a fairly good market in athletics fiction, some of which was filmed. In recent years Tom MacNab had Flanagan's Run about the TransAmerica footrace and The Fast Men about sprinters in the Old West but I can't thinlk of any more that were any good. Has athletics fiction died out? And can we blame Geoff Wightman?