Articles/Interviews

MANY YEARS AGO, before the young athletes competing in this week's English Schools Milk Athletics Championships, on Channel Four were even contemplated, let alone in running shorts, controversial actor Oliver Reed was a schoolboy sporting hero.

Yes, Reed was a schoolboy once. And, what's more, captain of athletics, and second in the national junior cross-country event.

What Reed had, and apparently still possesses, was a need to win. If the competitors in this week's schools championships, sponsored by the National Dairy Council, can match his determination, they will have more than a head start.

A cardboard box full of tarnished silver cups, gathering dust on a shelf at Reed's old school, Ewell Castle in Surrey, provides ample evidence of his early athletic prowess: Cross country 1951 O R Reed. . . 880 yards open 1953 O R Reed. . .

Oliver Reed's sportsmaster, Geoff Coles, is still at the school, 30 years on. They have kept in touch, and there is mutual affection. 'Oliver always did more than you would have thought possible. He was very, very determined and, if there was a challenge, he would meet it and win. I remember him padding round the school field on his own, lap after lap, in training.'

In his autobiography Reed All About Me, Reed refers to that other absorbing schoolboy obsession. 'Sport,' he writes, 'was the great antidote to sex.' He neglects to mention that sport, for him, played a more serious role.

As he now explains: 'I'm dyslexic. So classwork was a terrible struggle. Sport was the compensation - and when Geoff made me captain of athletics it gave me power.' He applied this power with precocious cunning and decided to organise a school cross-country team.

'Most of the boys I thought might be good at running were the lazy ones, the bad set of the school. They were always up to mischief and being punished, so I made sure that the punishment was a cross-country run. Then, as they were mostly lazy and would rather hide in hedges than run, I'd patrol the course, dig them out of hiding and make them run on.'

The scheme worked. He lead the team at the national junior event, and Ewell Castle won. 'I only came second individually, but I was far more proud of the team winning.'

Each school sports day, Reed would carry off a bagful of trophies, and the day's racing was always followed by an evening dance. One year Reed stayed late at the dance. . . 'I think I'd dallied longer than I should with a young girl. Anyway, I missed the last bus home and had, to start walking. I was strolling along with all those trophies when I met two policemen. They naturally thought I'd pinched the cups - they wouldn't believe I'd won so many. They were on the point of arresting me when I showed a name tag in my blazer which corresponded with the name on the cups from previous wins.'

Reed's father went down to the police station next morning to complain about police tactics. There was, as Peter Reed recalls, 'an altercation - and I walked out'. The Reed spirit is clearly not confined to Oliver.

In actual fact, Reed's wilful determination to win everything was a source of anxiety to his family. 'I was always against his entering all events,' says his father. 'He had been seriously ill as a child, and every time he was competing the strain began to show. Later, in the Army, he finally overdid it and suffered a collapsed lung.'

Even this was not the final obstacle. Oliver Reed, who harboured dreams of becoming a star athlete, continued running throughout his National Service, but was finally undone by poverty.

'It may sound funny but, after the Army, I was living in a flat in Earls Court. All my money went on rent. I couldn't afford the bus fare to the training ground, and I couldn't afford a proper diet. I lived on spaghetti - and herrings when I could buy them. By the time I was earning enough money, I was established as an actor.'

He is now, he claims, a 'professional television athlete' - that is, he watches all the televised sports, even the sheepdog trials, from his armchair.

This is not the complete picture. Although film insurance, and the need to avoid risking injury, have forced him to retire from active sport, he is still game for the odd arm-wrestling bout, and is fiercely competitive in the field of lawn-mower racing.

Lawn-mower racing? It's the truth. 'There's an event coming up. I'll be sitting astride my lawn-mower like a diseased old plum-pudding, and racing round the course.'

Yes, but is he fit at 46? 'Oh, I think I can still come in first.'

And there is an inspiration to us all.