Allan Wells has always been intensely competitive. It was embedded in his nature when he won Olympic gold. It still is. He recalls a fortnight’s holiday to Magaluf in Spain with Margot, his wife, in 1976. The couple splashed out and stayed in a posh five-star hotel, which cost a fortune recalls Allan.
 
As athletes, Allan and Margot had recently joined an elite sprinting squad in Edinburgh, coached by the uncompromising Wilson Young at Meadowbank Stadium, and they were keen to keep up their training regime in the sunshine.
 
“We had been given instructions on what to do,” explains Allan. “We found this football pitch, marked out a course and we trained with trainers on. It was just a dirt pitch, the flattest one we could find. Then towards the end of the holiday a woman came walking across the pitch and she pointed at me and said: ‘You’re terrible, you’ve never let that women beat you once.’”
 
It’s a telling anecdote which reveals something about the character of both Allan and Margot; his determination to keeping winning, her determination to keep trying to win. Allan and Margot Wells, who now runs her own fitness consultancy, displayed commitment to their sport which took them to the very top. Even today they question what they did back in the late 1970s. “We were just mad – or perhaps stupid. You had to be so mentally focused on wanting to achieve something,” says Wells.
 
In Allan’s case it was an Olympic Gold medal in the 100 metres sprint – and a silver in the 200 metres – at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. An outstanding achievement for a Scotsman – and unlikely ever to be surpassed.
 
So how does Allan Wells describe ‘high performance’ in sport?
 
“It’s not easy to answer. It’s a physical thing and you really have to be involved with people. But, for me, it was just a total commitment to what I was trying to achieve. And what you are trying to achieve is excellence on the track,” he explains during a break from inspiring Scotland’s current crop of elite athletes at Grangemouth.
 
“What you’re trying to achieve on top of that is the potential that you have. You are trying to extract that out of the individual –  which I did. It’s about taking the body and mind to the limits. And I, masochistically, say that because I quite enjoyed doing that.” says the former athlete, now in his early fifties with some grey hairs and a few wrinkles but still looking slim and in excellent physical shape.
 
 When did he realise he might have the ability to be the best in the world?
“It’s not something that you know is going to happen. You strive for it,” he says.
 
Wells started out as a youngster in Edinburgh. He was a naturally fast runner even at school. But raw talent was never going to be enough. In 1970 Edinburgh opened a brand new athletics stadium at Meadowbank for the Commonwealth Games that summer. It had one of the best ‘tartan’ synthetic running tracks in the world at the time. While the stadium, now in the hands of City of Edinburgh Leisure, looks dated and a little forlorn, it was the state of the art in the early 1970s. Meadowbank became the centre for a group of talented and motivated world-class sprinters, with Allan Wells its most illustrious member.
 
Wells was a long jumper who reached over 24ft (7m32). The current world record is just over 8ms. “But I always wanted to be a sprinter and there was a transformation when I was getting a bit fed-up. I wasn’t jumping the same distances.”
 
Then one Saturday afternoon one of Wells’ training partners, Drew Hislop, appeared on World of Sport’s indoor athletics event from RAF Cosford. Wells was intrigued, but knew he could match and even beat Hislop, yet he hadn’t seen him for five months. 
“I said to Margot, ‘He’s wasting his money. He’s gone all the way down there to compete on Britain’s only indoor track’. But I was proved wrong.”
 
Wells sat up and watched Hislop powering home in the heats. “His power, speed and co-ordination were phenomenal. He had all the ingredients he didn’t have before. It was a different person. The vibration of this guy physically was phenomenal. And, I thought, that’s what I want: I want some of that.”
 
Hislop went on to win the final, but for Allan Wells it was the Eureka moment.
 
“I always knew I could beat Drew before he disappeared for five months – so it took 30 seconds to work out that that’s what I wanted to do. To win the Cosford Games in a year’s time.”
 
Within 48 hours, Wells had joined the sprinting group – and the following year, in 1977, he was crowned as the indoor sprint champion – at Cosford. One of the finest recollections is being presented with the award that day by Harold Abrahams, the legendary English sprinter who won gold at the 1924 Olympics in  Paris. “It was as if he was passing the Olympic gold baton to me for Moscow,” recalls Allan.
 
“It didn’t really happen for me until I joined a group that had a system that worked. It’s important that if somebody is going to start out with real potential, I’d say go out and search for a coach who is getting results – and I mean world class results - in the event that you want to do. And see if they will take you on.
 
“It is important to develop the potential that you have. At least you have a chance of becoming what you want to become by doing that. It gives you a chance to develop that potential and that potential might be good enough to be a world champion – or an Olympic gold medallist.”
 
Looking back, Wells believes there were a lot of talented sprinters but that he was the most dedicated. “I was just so focused on what I was trying to achieve. If somebody within this group was talking to you and having good laugh, then fine –  I would join in. But if it was somebody from outside the group it would make you feel a bit awkward. And, if it was somebody who was negative, then you just walked away. You had to walk away.”
 
 Wells believes to this day that being negative has no part in the training of high performance athlete. He even reminded his coach, Wilson Young, that he preferred not to hear about the progress of other athletes. Wells was clear; he wanted the focus on his own abilities. Margot gave up hurdling to help Allan and became “my eyes” who watched ever single stride of his explosive bursts of power on the track, watching how he was performing.
 
“I suppose I took it to the nth degree. Inside, the nature of the event is aggression. That is ‘controlled aggression’ and I have to describe it like that. If you can get yourself up aggressively – and that might be the adrenaline pumping – and use it in training, then you will be successful. So that when you come to the competition it will be second nature.”
 
Wells was a 24-year-old mature athlete when he made the conversion from long jumper to sprinter. He had jumped over 24ft and he had been a member of the sprint relay team, running some very fast legs.
 
“I was a strong, physical athlete but the change to becoming a sprinter was the discipline and the intensity of the training. It was just the focus that it created in me to take it further.”
  
Wells concedes it was late in his life to switch events, and he might well have given up athletics completely. But victory indoor at Cosford became a significant turning point, leading to his selection to wear a British vest and then, ultimately, the Moscow Olympics in 1980. The Americans boycotted the Games that year because of the invasion of Afghanistan and some of their best sprinters were missing from the starting line. But within a fortnight of wining the Gold medal, Allan was competing in Koblenz in Germany again Mel Lattany and Stanley Floyd. He beat them both to prove, without question, he was the best in the world at this point in time.
 
How did Wells cope with losing out in a sprint battle? “Even at the top level there are still doubts you can have about yourself. There is always somebody you’ve got to compete against who is better than you. If you get beaten by them it is the character which brings you back to winning ways.”
 
“It has to become an obsession. You have to be fanatical about what you’re doing. That obsession cannot put up with any negative or forces people – whatever.”
 

KK 

© Copyright In The Winning Zone, MMVII, All Rights Reserved