She was Junaidah Aman, who produced an exhilarating run in the 400m to set a new Games record of 56.1 seconds.
Six months earlier, Malaysia’s head coach, American Bob Schul, had speculated Junaidah would beat the national record of 56.3 held by M Rajamani.
He made the observation after watching her at the Malaysian schools athletics championships in Kuala Lumpur.
Junaidah, who won the girls’ 200m (26.2) and 400m (59.0) at the schools meet impressed Schul as a relaxed runner, according to a Straits Times report.
Schul was reported saying Junaidah however moved her shoulders too much, hindering the fluid movement of her strides.
“She can beat the national 400m record if this is corrected,” said Schul, who was hired as the national coach under the US Peace Corps programme for a year from April 1971.
Together with Junaidah’s coach Shamsuddin Jaafar, Schul helped her to improve her technique, and she went on to also win gold in the 4x100m and 4x400m relays and a silver in the 200m at the SEAP Games.
A year later, she competed in the 400m at the Munich Olympics, finishing sixth in the first round in 57.36.
Robert Keyser Schul died on June 16 at a nursing home in Ohio, US. He was 86 and had been living with dementia.
He is the only American ever to win Olympic gold medal in the 5000m, doing it with a remarkable sprint in the final yards on a muddy track in Tokyo 60 years ago.
His withering sprint finish to beat a top-class field in 13:48.8 helped spark the first running boom in the US. His dominance was all the more compelling considering he had battled asthma and allergies.
Sadly, his Olympic medal was stolen from a locked cabinet back home in the US in 1971 while he was coaching in Malaysia.
School of Schul
As the chief coach, he had 10 local coaches under him and several of the athletes were already at their peak or were peaking, and all that was needed was competitions and training abroad.
The sprinters were somewhat in their element while the distance runners struggled despite the tactical genius of Schul.
The then Malaysian Amateur Athletics Union (MAAU) had reasoned that the country’s distance racers could have done better at the ’71 SEAP Games if Schul had more time with them.
At the Games, M Arumugam and A Ramasamy finished third in the 5000m and 10,000m respectively while in the 3000m steeplechase, Dilbagh Singh Kler took silver and Stephen Nathan the bronze.
Junaidah recalled she had trained under Schul and competed in the US and West Germany, together with several Malaysian athletes, before the Olympics in Munich.
Malaysia’s track team to the ’72 Olympics included sprinters T Krishnan, S Sabapathy, Zainuddin Wahab, PLBS Peyadesa, Hassan Osman and 110m hurdler Ishtiaq Mobarak.
“I was fortunate to have been trained by a super coach and to be inspired by some of the finest athletes in the country,” said Junaidah, the national sportswoman of the year in 1971 and 1972.
The former superintendent of police and a grandmother of seven turns 70 next February.
Schul’s crystal ball
At the same schools meet at Merdeka Stadium where Schul picked Junaidah as a potential record breaker, he also identified several other promising talents as future stars.
They included female sprinters Marina Chin and Yamuna Nair, and long jumper Mona Chin, who would later become the wife of hockey icon Poon Fook Loke.
He spoke highly of Pahang’s 13-year-old schoolgirl C Ambiga who he described as “a girl with tremendous potential.”
Ambiga had beaten the national mark of Ratan Kaur Kler by 7.5 seconds in the women’s 1500m with a time of 5:05.7.
Ambiga did not achieve international acclaim while Marina, Yamuna and Mona excelled at the ’71 SEAP Games.
Marina and her co-runners, Noreen Pereira, Fadzillah Ahmad, and Junaidah took the gold medal in the women’s 4x400m relay in 3:59.0.
Yamuna was a member of the 4x100m relay squad that emerged champions in 48.4, the others being Junaidah, Fadzillah and Noreen.
Mona Chin leapt to 5.57m in the women’s long jump to add to Malaysia’s overall haul of 14 gold, six silver and eight bronze medals in athletics.
Two other women, Chong Soo Luan (women’s 200m hurdles, 29.8) and P Savithri (pentathlon, 3020 points) were also on top of the podium.
The men’s gold medallists were T Krishnan (400m, 47.8), R Subramaniam (800m, 1:51.7), Ishtiaq Mobarak (110m hurdles, 14.6), AS Nathan, R Subramaniam, S Sivaraman, T Krishnan (men’s 4x400m relay, 3:15.4), Khoo Chong Beng (20km walk, 1:46:30.0), Khalil Abdul Aziz (50km walk, 5:18:22.4), Nashatar Singh (javelin, 70.52m), M Dattaya (men’s hammer throw).
They provided the bulk of the gold medals to Malaysia’s grand scoop of 41 gold, 43 silver and 55 bronze, just three top finishes behind overall champions Thailand.
5K 64 GLD
A half-century after his 5000m victory, Schul’s pride in winning an Olympic championship remained undimmed. His car’s licence plate read “5K 64 GLD.”
As for the whereabouts of his Olympic gold medal: “Now you’ll make me cry,” he told Runner’s World. “It was stolen.”