Jerome Drayton won the Boston Marathon in 1977, becoming the first Canadian man to win the race in 29 years. None has done so since.
After the race, he criticized officials for allowing a chaotic start and for not supplying water for runners along the course. The criticism infuriated organizers.
“It was a real hassle, like a free-for-all at the start,” he said after finishing the famous Patriots’ Day race in 2 hours, 14 minutes, 46 seconds. “I got jostled, booted, kicked around. There was no notice when the gun was going off. It went off suddenly. One guy grabbed my shirt and nearly pulled me down. I got kicked in the ankle at the start and thought I was a goner.”
Mr. Drayton, who has died at 80, was the greatest male Canadian distance runner of his era and perhaps the greatest of all time.
A lean, wiry figure with a notable chevron mustache, Mr. Drayton excelled at a time of amateurism in his sport. From an impoverished immigrant family, he needed to hold a job to support himself and his athletic ambitions. He sometimes went hungry because he could not afford groceries.
He trained on weekdays before 9 a.m. and after 5 p.m. His regimen included quarter-mile sprints repeated 16 times one day, followed the next day by runs of up to 48 kilometres. Instead of enjoying the massages, whirlpools and other treatments commonly available today, he simply poured himself a hot bath.
After getting a job as a fitness program consultant with the sports and fitness division of Ontario’s youth, culture and recreation ministry, he commuted by jogging from home in suburban Toronto to a downtown office.
The deprivations served only to fuel his desire to win.
He first won the famed Fukuoka International Marathon in Japan in 1969, claiming the unofficial world championship in a time of 2:11:13. The victory catapulted him onto the list of top global runners, though a long series of nagging injuries to his knee, groin, hamstring and Achilles tendon kept him from peak form.
In 1975, Mr. Drayton ran the greatest race of his life, completing the Fukuoka course in 2:10:08, faster than any Canadian had ever run a marathon. The mark he set lasted an astonishing 43 years, an eternity in the world of track and field.
Were it not for a new pair of shoes, he might even have completed the 42.195-kilometre (26-mile, 385-yard) course even faster.
He had signed a deal with a Japanese shoe company and had been outfitted with a new pair just before the race.
“The soles gave way in the last five miles and it caused my ankle to stiffen up,” he told Wayne Scanlan of the Ottawa Citizen in 1992. “I caught the leader with about three miles to go and it was like a Charlie Chaplin routine – I sort of hopped on by. When I think of the possibilities, I could have dropped below 2:10 but I was glad just to win and walk away from it.”
Only 1,500 metres from the finish line, Mr. Drayton trailed David Chettle of Australia by about 45 metres. He went on to win by about the same distance.
Between those two Fukuoka victories, he suffered several disappointments, including finishing 17th at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, New Zealand, and dropping out of the 1975 Boston Marathon with cramps at the 21-mile (34-kilometre) mark. He had finished in third place in Boston the previous year.
In 1976, Mr. Drayton was seen as one of a handful of gold medal hopefuls for Canada when the Olympics were held in Montreal. The marathon was run on July 31, the final day of competition. The host nation had yet to win a gold medal, which had never happened in the Summer Games.
Mr. Drayton, who liked to race from the front of the pack, started out strong and served as pacesetter until slowing about two-thirds of the way through the gruelling race. He finished a respectable sixth behind winner Waldemar Cierpinski, an unheralded rookie runner from East Germany. Blaming his performance on a head cold that sapped his energy, Mr. Drayton later said he bit his lip to prevent himself from crying in disappointment.
He then noticed high jumper Greg Joy standing in the corner of the stadium, a contender late in the competition.
“I stayed around and watched him win the silver medal,” he said. “My emotions did a complete 180-degree change. I stopped thinking about myself.”
The Olympics were unkind to Mr. Drayton, who had been unable to finish the marathon at the 1968 Games in Mexico City because of dysentery. Desperate to compete at the 1972 Games in his birthplace of Germany, Mr. Drayton failed to match the qualifying standard. At the trials, he eased off toward the end when he saw his time, only to later learn the course had been mismeasured.
The solitary pursuit of distance running satisfied a personality forged in the harsh postwar world of defeated Germany.
Jerome Peter Drayton was born Peter Buniak to ethnic Ukrainian parents on Jan. 10, 1945, in the Bavarian town of Kolbermoor in southern Germany.
“My parents had to work, but they couldn’t keep me at home,” he once told Paul Gains of Canadian Running magazine. “I spent four years at a group home. Not speaking German, I got in a lot of fights. The rest of the kids were all German. It wasn’t a good time.
“I was in a group home, but I did not feel part of a group because I was not German. Also, I was a single child – solitude, being alone, but not lonely.”
After his parents separated, the boy immigrated to Canada with his mother in 1956.
He changed his name in 1969. Over the years, many sportswriters incorrectly reported he was honouring fellow runners Harry Jerome of Canada and Paul Drayton of the United States. Mr. Drayton insisted he picked the names because he liked them and sought to forge an identity of his own.
He was a six-time national champion in 10 kilometres, won the Canadian five-kilometre title once, and the national marathon championship twice. He set a national record in the 10,000 metres with a time of 28:25.8 in Hamilton in 1970. He also set two national records in the 10-mile run, once as Buniak (1968) and again as Drayton (1970).
He was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Athletics Ontario Hall of Fame in 2009. A long-time resident of the neighbourhoods of Mimico and New Toronto, he was inducted into the Etobicoke Sports Hall of Fame in 1994.
Mr. Drayton died on Feb. 10. A list of survivors was unavailable.
Mr. Drayton’s Canadian marathon record stood 43 years until Cam Levins of Black Creek, B.C., ran the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in 2:09:25 in 2018. He finished fourth in the race, but was awarded $1,000 for every year Mr. Drayton’s record had lasted. That was $43,000 more than Mr. Drayton had earned when he set the record in Japan so long ago.
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