Ice-cream, cake and Olympic gold: Our last high jump winner’s perfect day

JOHN WINTER: 1924-2007

John Winter was confident enough to win an Olympic gold medal. After all, he had trained to fly Wellington bombers in World War II. Strong and determined when set on a course of action, he was also easygoing and, at least when young, could be almost painfully shy.

John Winter winning the high jump event at the London Olympic Games in 1948. Credit: AP

When Princess Margaret told him after his triumph in the high jump at the 1948 Olympics in London that she liked tall men (he was 193 centimetres tall) he was speechless. When she said she liked his green-and-gold Australian team tie, too, adding, “I’d like to have it”, he proceeded to take it off.

The young Australian was saved from further embarrassment by the laughing princess’s advice that he had better keep it on and it wasn’t much use to her anyway.

To win gold, Winter had to beat more favoured athletes in steady rain and in front of a crowd focused on the great distance runner Emil Zatopek, chanting his name as he strode to victory in the 10,000 metres.

Athlete John Winter, 1948.

After almost 80 years, Winter remains the only Australian to have captured gold in the high jump.

John Arthur Winter was born in Subiaco, Perth, to John Winter, a customs officer, and his wife, Mabel. He attended Subiaco school and Scotch College and frightened his parents and the neighbours by leaping over the clothes line in the family’s backyard. Sometimes he fell into the dahlia patch.

The gangly boy with prominent front teeth was good at sport. He came home from school one day and told his father: “I’ve been having a few jumps. I might do all right.”

His father bought a pair of jumping stands for the backyard. At a school carnival in 1940 the then 15-year-old cleared 1.79 metres to win the under-16 event and 1.85 metres to win the open-age event.

Winter became a bank clerk, standing all day because he believed this improved circulation in his long legs. He would also hop around for a time on one leg, then the other, to strengthen both.

He joined the RAAF during World War II when he was 18, got his wings after seven months, served as a staff pilot at Bairnsdale in Victoria and was posted to England. He was flying Wellingtons when the war ended.

The Australian stayed in England for a period, working in factories and as a film extra, sometimes as an Egyptian, sometimes as a slave, in the film Caesar and Cleopatra, with Margaret Lockwood, Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh.

Back in Australia, he won the national title in 1947 and 1948 before being chosen in the Olympic team. Harry Gordon’s book Australia And The Olympic Games tells how Winter and the great runner Shirley Strickland stood in a boxing ring in Perth, shielding their eyes and heads from the two-shilling donations towards their expenses that were thrown at them.

Twenty-six jumpers began the contest on Winter’s great day in London. After the preliminary rounds in the morning, Winter and his mentor Jack Metcalfe visited a local shop rather than risk the traffic to the team headquarters and back. They lunched on cake and ice-cream.

John Winter after winning the high jump and breaking the Empire Games record in 1949.Credit: Fairfax

The afternoon session lasted two-and-a-half hours in the rain. Winter was one of only two competitors using the so-called eastern cut-off style. The rest used the straddle or the more modern western roll.

Several Americans and Europeans had jumped higher than Winter before the Games. His best-ever jump was 2m, well short of the world record of 2.11m and the Olympic benchmark of 2.03m.

Yet Winter appeared remarkably relaxed, despite the rain and Zatopek. When the bar reached 1.95m, five jumpers, including Winter, remained. At 1.98m, the other four failed with their first attempt. Winter, the last to jump, easily cleared the bar.

The others waited for the crowd noise to subside, becoming colder and wetter. They failed with their other attempts.

John Winter winning the high jump The British Empire v The USA at White City with 1.98m on August 31, 1948.Credit: Sport & General Press Agency Limited

Metcalfe told Gordon that it was Winter’s nonchalance that made the difference. “He was the only one unaffected by the whole drama of the Zatopek run and the highly charged atmosphere.” However, Winter said in 1993: “I was never as relaxed as I looked. It was a good front, a kind of gamesmanship in a way to upset the opposition.”

As to his unorthodox lunch, he said: “I should have drunk something in the tuckshop instead of just eating cake and ice-cream, and the lack of fluid caused pain in my kidneys.”

After the Games, Winter captained the British Empire team that competed against the United States. Again, he won the high jump, clearing 1.98m. He won the gold medal at the Auckland British Empire Games in 1950, and retired 10 months later, at 27.

He returned to the bank, where he stayed for the rest of his working life and became a manager. He married Joan Smith and raised three boys. He coached a generation of junior athletes at the old Leederville track and actively supported the Western Australian Olympic Council.

Members of the Australian Olympic Games team seen on arrival at London Airport on June 28, 1948.Credit: AP

He was awarded the Helms Award as the outstanding Australian athlete of 1947 and was inducted into the Western Australian Hall of Champions in 1985. A year later, he entered the Sport Australia Hall of Fame.

Western Australia’s premier athletics medal, the Winter-Strickland Medal, is named after him and his old teammate.

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