The former UK Athletics head coach and hurdles guru talks to George Mallett about a life in athletics that is impossible to imitate in the 21st century.

For over 55 years, the formerly nationally ranked triple jumper Malcolm Arnold coached some of the finest hurdlers the world has ever seen – from helping John Akii-Bua win Uganda’s first ever Olympic gold in 1972, to masterminding the world-beating exploits of Colin Jackson, Mark McKoy and Dai Greene. During his varied career, he was also director of coaching and development, as well as the head coach, at UK Athletics.

When you were a young coach, you found your way to the post of Uganda’s national coach in the late 1960s. How did that come about?

I was a PE teacher. I’d done three years at Marple Hall School [in Cheshire] and then I did three-and-a-half years in Bristol as head of department at a school which had its own track, so I had to organise athletics at everything up to county level.

The Uganda national coach job was advertised in Athletics Weekly. At the time I was still competing myself to a degree and I was working with Dave Kay, who was the national coach for the South West.

As well as coaching myself, Dave was coaching other athletes and strangely enough he was coaching the then British number one 400m hurdler, Colin O'Neill. I earwigged on Dave. This was my education.

I applied for the job, went down to the Ugandan embassy in Trafalgar Square and was interviewed by the Chief Executive Officer of the Uganda Sports council who was went to Loughborough University, like me, and another guy by the name of Aggrey Awori, who was a very good sprint hurdler. I believe the only other person they interviewed was an old lag who'd been a sports officer in colonial Uganda.

Were there any key athletes you were aware of at the time?

My first Olympic finalist, Amos Omolo, a 400m runner. Amos was four years older than me. He was 32, I was 28 and when I started helping him I was warned off him immediately by the powers that be in the Sports Council. [I was told] “He's lazy, he's a waster, he's useless,” and so on.

It's not what I saw at all, so I ignored what they said, got on with coaching him and saw he was quite talented. He had a good history behind him but then he had a poor two or three years before I came.

I learned so much from that guy – where he got his training ideas I don't know. Essentially I was a jumps coach when I went there. I knew quite a bit about running but not at international level. That guy taught me a lot. It stood me in good stead with John Akii-Bua.

We picked Amos for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. They didn't want him in the team really but I insisted, and he made the final and ran an African record, 45.3. He ran an African record first round and second round and then he made a balls of it in the final because he was in lane eight, with Lee Evans inside him who won it with 43.83 – the world record that stood for ages.

Amos ran like he’d been shot out of a gun for 300m and died a death for the last 100m, so that was another big lesson to me on the tactics of the 400m. I got hold of footage of the race and from that I could extrapolate what the split times were. Amos was through 200 in 20.8, I think it was, whereas Evans was through in 21.2 and ate him alive in the home straight.

Being such a similar age you must have almost been friends?

I like to think that every athlete I coached – or almost every athlete I coached – we were friends. That's an important part of it all. With some of the athletes I still have a relationship nowadays. So many coaches cock it up by the authoritarian approach.

When you first begin with an athlete it tends to be an authoritarian approach – “do this, do that. That's your training schedule, get on with it”.

But I always used to say to athletes: “When you get older and as you improve and as your experience improves so you get to the stage where you know more than I do, because I've told you everything I know and you've gone out there and done it.”

If an athlete filters in ideas from their own experience and the coach is such that they don't like being questioned, then it leads to disaster. If you're authoritarian with an international that's been there and done it and probably knows more than you and still you insist on pontificating, that's where relationships blow up.

You developed a famed relationship with John Akii-Bua, the culmination of which was his world-record breaking 400m hurdles triumph at the Olympics Games in Munich. What are your memories of that day, I've heard he had quite an unusual race day?

I remember that athletes got paid by shoe companies but it was all brown envelope stuff in those days. John was paid in them by Puma, who were looked after by [former mile world record-holder] Derek Ibbotson. I knew him very well and Derek had got knowledge of the fact that Adidas had tried to tap John up, promising to pay him and do the dirty on Puma.

You can always tell whether it's the first round or the semi-final [of those Games] according to what shoes John is wearing. Puma in the first round, Adidas in the semi-final. Of course, Puma went spare because they'd paid him money already and were due to pay him before the final.

Derek came to me and said: “Here, put this in your pocket and I want you to promise that you'll give it back to me if he wears Adidas or you can pass it on to John if he wears Puma.” For the final, John was going to wear Puma – he'd had the talking to – but the Adidas people had already put a few coins his way. And Adidas were fuming as well. There were two Adidas guys following John around his warm-up.

He went out carrying Adidas shoes but he had Puma in his bag and wore Puma, so I passed over $5000 to John in a brown envelope. That’s about $50,000 nowadays and that's what I remember about the final. Whether it was a good thing that they were chasing him around, which took his mind off the bad things, I don't know!

John was infamous at the time for his work ethic. Did you ever coach anyone similar?

All of them! Any athlete who succeeds has an incredible work ethic. In fact, for Dai Greene, his work ethic was his downfall because he didn't know when to stop.

He was living with his girlfriend, Sian, quite near to us in Bath. He would train in the morning with me and it wouldn't be an easy session and then Sian told me, eventually, that he would go out and do more stuff in the afternoon. I couldn't work out why he was absolutely knackered the following morning! He didn't know where to stop and he couldn't be told.

Dai was one of four world or Olympic champions you coached alongside Mark McKoy, Colin Jackson and the aforementioned Akii-Bua. Were there any non medal- winning stars that created some different kinds of highs?

Lawrence Clarke was absolutely brilliant. Sir Lawrence now [Sir Charles Lawrence Somerset Clarke to be precise]! Lawrence was an old Etonian, who came to Bristol Uni and he was a decent sort of English Schools athlete, but nothing special. His mother, who is a dominant force in his life, said: “We must find him a coach.” She brought him by the ear to the University of Bath and said: “Here's my son, I would like you to coach him.”

So I said: “I'll consider it. Let him do a couple of training sessions with us first of all and then I'll decide because it's not fair on me, you giving me somebody who's not receptive to coaching and so on.”

There's nothing worse than a dead duck in a good training group so off he goes and he warms up and does this, that and the other and after about a minute I said to his mother: “He can stay”. He had such quick limb motion, which is an absolute must for a sprint hurdler and his big problem at the end of the day was that he wasn’t fast over the ground like Jackson was, or McKoy.

At the 2012 Olympic final I was sitting with his mother, Lady Clarke, and two sisters, just adjacent to the start of the race. They insisted I come and sit with them in this incredibly expensive seat they bought and I saw the race from the back. I said: “Bloody hell, he's come fourth!”

That was an incredible moment really because he shouldn't have come fourth in the Olympic Games, but he did! He was nowhere near a bronze medal but for him to do what he did, achieve what he achieved, European junior champion and so on, was incredible. Really brilliant.