Wally Hayward

Wallace Henry Hayward, born in Durban on 10 July 1908, was a South African endurance athlete with a 60-year career who became one of the greatest 100-mile runners in history. He won the Comrades Marathon five times, first on his debut in 1930 at age 21 and then from 1950 to 1954, and he completed the roughly 90 km course in 1989 just before his eighty-first birthday, holding the record as oldest finisher for 34 years. In 1954 he became the oldest man to win the race at age 45. He finished tenth in the marathon at the 1952 Summer Olympics, set records at London to Brighton and Bath to London in 1953, and earned the British Empire Medal for bravery near El Alamein in 1942.