By Rob Cole

Ron Jones, one of Wales’ greatest athletes and the former Great Britain Olympic men’s athletics team captain in Mexico City in 1968, has died at the age of 87.

One of the few Welsh athletes ever to hold a world record in athletics, he was part of the British 4 x 110 yards relay squad that trounced the Americans and matched their world record at the White City in 1963.

If that was the highest point of a remarkable career on the track, there were many other notable achievements. Even so, his career had an accidental start.

“I was a late starter in the sport and, after knocking on the front door of Bernard Baldwin, the Welsh AAA secretary, at his house in Mountain Ash to ask for advice he suggested I ran in the Glamorgan Championships in Swansea,” recalled Jones, who was 21 at the time.

“With very little training or preparation, I won the 440 yards but came nowhere in the 100. I had already entered the Welsh Championships in both events and as the 100 yards was before the 440 I ran it and, to my great surprise, won it.

“It was only the second or third 100 I had ever run. Perhaps if the 440 had been first I might have just run that and never bothered with the 100 again.”

He joined Birchgrove Harriers in Cardiff, where he benefitted from the coaching of Jack Collard and Jim Thomas, and then switched to Woodford Green when he moved to London.

 

Very sad to hear the passing of Ron Jones, it was a privilege for me and @AnnCrimmings1 to meet him when we opened the new athletics stadium at the Ynys in Aberdare and named it after Ron. His name will live on proudly in RCT @WelshAthletics https://t.co/82pBQOzIoP pic.twitter.com/ZpTF2QhMNj

— Cllr Andrew Morgan (@AndrewMorganRCT) December 30, 2021

His first title may have been a surprise in 1956, but he topped the podium regularly after that. He won 12 Welsh sprint titles from 1956-1970 and set 22 Welsh records.

He equalled the Welsh 100 yards record of 9.8 sec at Paignton in July 1958 and then made the record his own a year later at the White City with 9.7 sec. A month later he stripped a tenth of a second off Ken Jones’ Welsh 100 metre hand time record set at the 1948 Olympic Games in London with a scintillating run of 10.5 sec in Moscow.

Ken Jones had retired by the time his namesake hit the track, but Welsh championships in the late fifties and sixties were littered with talented sprinters. Jones had to be at his best to stay ahead of Nick Whitehead, Berwyn Jones, Dewi Bebb, Lynn Davies, Brian Coles, David England, Terry Davies and JJ Williams.

In 1969, at the age of 34, he became only the third Welshman to win the 100 metres title at the AAA Championships, following Fred Cooper (1898) and Berwyn Jones (1963). His two fastest times both came at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, where he clocked 10.43 and 10.42 sec to set a standard that would last for 22 years until Colin Jackson lowered the Welsh record to 10.24 sec.

He competed at nine major championships – 4 Commonwealth Games, 3 European Championships and 2 Olympic Games – and retired at the end of the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh a month short of his 36th birthday.

His first Commonwealth Games came on home soil in Cardiff in 1958. It was a competition that remained dear to his heart.

“It was a wonderful event, even though it felt like the make-do games. We even had to stay at the RAF base in St Athan where I had been stationed six years earlier,” he recalled.

“We slept in the barracks and ate in the officer’s mess. It was all very amateur and a little clumsy, but the warmth of the Welsh reception made a mark on everyone involved.”

He won 31 British international vests and picked up two relay bronze medals in 1962. The first was as part of the GB squad at the European Championships in Belgrade and the second with Wales at the Commonwealth Games in Perth.

England, Whitehead and Berwyn Jones joined him in the Welsh quartet down under as they came in just behind England and Ghana. The two Joneses, Ron and Berwyn, teamed up together again in the British sprint relay team that took on the Americans on 3 August 1963.

Former Cardiff College of Education students, Peter Radford and David Jones joined them as they ran 40.0 sec to beat the USA and earn their small part in British athletics history.

Away from athletics, Jones became Chief Executive of Queens Park Rangers in 1976. He rose to that job after spending nine years on the staff as a part-time coaching adviser.

After leaving Loftus Road he became Managing Director at Cardiff City in 1980, where Bob Grogan launched the Cardiff City Blue Dragons rugby league team a year later. He left Ninian Park in June 1988, to rejoin his former QPR boss, John Gregory, as Managing Director at Portsmouth FC.

He became governor of the sports charity Sports Aid Cymru Wales in 1997, becoming the driving force of charity that helped thousands of young Welsh sportsmen and women achieve their sporting ambitions.

He was awarded the MBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List for his services to sport and charity and in 2018 a new £3m athletics track in Aberdare was named in his honour, ‘The Ron Jones Stadium’.

Ronald Jones (Athlete and Sports Administrator) Born in Cwmaman on 19 August 1934; Died in Cambridge on 30 December 2021; survived by his wife Linda