Master athletics coach Arthur Lydiard, who produced two Olympic champions and inspired generations of New Zealanders to run, has died aged 87. Lydiard died of a suspected heart attack yesterday in a Texas hotel while on a lecture tour of the United States. His mother-in-law Gloria Vanvertogt confirmed Lydiard's death in Houston. Paramedicswere called and spent an hour trying unsuccessfully to revive him. Lydiard had been in the US since mid-October on a lecture tour. Earlier he'd been coaching runners in Houston before returning to his hotel about 7pm (local time). Peter Snell and Sir Murray Halberg are his best-known proteges, but Lydiard also inspired a generation of top New Zealand runners through the late-1060s and 1970s, including Dick Tayler, Rod Dixon, Dick Quax and 1976 Olympic 1500m champion John Walker. His influence spread beyond athletics, with coaches in sports ranging from rugby to rowing, canoeing and swimming adopting many of his training methods. Born in Auckland in 1917, Lydiard enjoyed some success as an athlete, but his greatest legacy was in rewriting coaching theory in the second half of the 20th century. In the early post-World War 2 years, Lydiard became concerned with one of the great questions of athletics: if athletes can run at a certain rate over a short distance, why are they unable to continue that pace over a greater distance? His answer was stamina, achieved through a regime of high mileage, later refined through speed work once the foundation had been laid. Lydiard was regarded as something of a radical. His theory flew in the face of coaching practices at the time, which concentrated on interval training and repetitions as a means of increasing basic speed. Under Lydiard's guidance, Murray Halberg won the first of five New Zealand one-mile (1500m) championships in 1954, won gold in the three miles (5000m) at the 1958 Empire Games in Cardiff, and became the first New Zealander to run under four minutes for the mile (3min 57.5sec) in August, 1958. By 1960 Lydiard's group had grown to include Olympic athletes Jeff Julian, Barry Magee and a raw, strapping 21-year-old by the name of Peter Snell.-NZPA
