By national sport reporter David Mark
It’s one of the great enigmas of Australian sport. Adrienne Beames would be a household name, if her world record claims could be believed.
On the last day of winter in 1971, the phone rang on the sports desk of The Age newspaper. On the line was a man with a sensational story: a virtually unheard-of Australian had just smashed the marathon world record, becoming the first woman to run the distance in under three hours. It was almost certainly the first time a woman had even run a marathon in Australia, let alone demolished a time barrier many in the male-dominated sport thought impossible for a woman.
On a cold and windy day in Werribee — a country town now subsumed by Melbourne’s south-western sprawl — Adrienne Beames carved 15 minutes off the women’s marathon world record with a time of two hours, 46 minutes, 30 seconds. So the story went. News of the run sent shockwaves through the nascent women’s running world, felt as far away as the USA. But before long, doubts would creep in.
Over the next six months, Adrienne would claim a string of world records in every distance from the mile to 10,000 metres. Such a tally of achievements should have secured her a place among the greats of Australian sport. And yet Adrienne Beames died last year forgotten to history, literally consigned to a footnote in the record books. Instead she remains one of Australian sport’s greatest enigmas, plagued by one question: did she make it all up?
In Melbourne in the middle of last century, Percy Beames was a big deal with a big reputation. He had been a champion sportsman in the 1940s, captaining Melbourne to three consecutive VFL premierships and playing Sheffield Shield cricket for Victoria with a batting average of 50. After retiring from his illustrious sporting career, Percy became the chief football and cricket writer for The Age. His byline would remain in print for more than 30 years.
Adrienne Beames was his daughter.
Percy was an absent father who would work late, miss his kids’ weekend sports games and travel as a cricket reporter for months on end. Adrienne’s brother Colin remembers the siblings “suffered from the fact he had this profile”.
“We couldn’t necessarily live up to that in terms of the expectations of other people,” says Colin. “I think [Adrienne] was always trying to maybe get the approval of him and others in terms of what he achieved.”
As the siblings grew older, they grew apart. In later life they became estranged. But Colin keenly remembers Adrienne emerging from childhood with “a powerful personality and this powerful will to win”. But there was “a lot of underlying anxiety,” he said.
At school, Adrienne proved a gifted athlete in her own right, excelling in tennis and representing Victoria in squash. But running was her true calling.
“She had a very Spartan routine. She was an extremist.”
In the early ’60s, Adrienne began training at Melbourne’s Caulfield racecourse. Occasionally she’d join a group with the biggest name in Australian athletics at the time, Ron Clarke. Another member of the group, Trevor Vincent — himself a gold medallist in the 1962 Commonwealth Games steeplechase — remembers Adrienne as “a very good runner” who would “run along with guys on the racecourse, who were very good quality”.
By the late ’60s, Adrienne was a regular competitor at Melbourne club cross-country races, performing well in a competitive scene without setting the world on fire. Her best result in a national event came in 1969 when she finished second in the Australian Cross-Country Championships. There were flashes of brilliance and there were setbacks.
The following year, she headed to the United States to compete in the International Cross-Country championships in Frederick, Maryland, but finished last in a field of 34 runners over four kilometres. She returned from that trip overweight and out of shape, but remained single-minded — even “an obsessive” according to Colin — in the pursuit of higher performance.
“She had a very Spartan routine in terms of distilled water,” he recalls. “She was an extremist.”
Her kitchen cupboard was stacked with rows of pills and vitamins. Adrienne once said she ate only juices, nuts, salads, raw vegetables and small helpings of fish, and fasted for a two- or three-week stretch every year. It was a dietary regime specified by her coach, life partner and the man who set the course for her controversial career — Fred Warwick.
Meeting the healer
Talk to anyone involved in the Australian running scene in the ’60s and ’70s and they’ll tell you a story about Fred Warwick. He was a professional runner, a coach and a gifted masseur — some would say a healer. He had an interest in the fringe health sciences like naturopathy and osteopathy. In the early 1970s, Warwick studied iridology and kinesiology, which he practiced at the back of his Caulfield home.
“Freddy Warwick was a character,” says John Craven, a former club runner and athletics writer for the Herald. “Freddy would have claimed to be a guru. I liked him. Your average pro cross-country runner or even your advanced pro distance runner on the track, they used to laugh at him a bit. But they respected him as a very, very good masseur.”
Fred was also quite a good runner, though not without his quirks. But there’s no doubt he was ahead of his time in the attention he paid to diet and training. Adrienne took on Fred as a coach sometime around 1970, after she returned from her failed run at the cross-country world championships. His ideas on diet and training meshed with hers. She saw a kindred spirit; he saw potential. Fred was married at the time with four children but was smitten by Adrienne. Their relationship became all-encompassing and despite their 20-year age difference, the two became partners for more than four decades.
Colin watched the developing relationship between his sister and the enigmatic Freddy from a distance. “We didn’t have a lot of time for Fred,” he says. “He adopted the title of ‘Dr Fred Warwick’ and he had no qualifications. But he had genuine abilities in terms of treating power, be it for sports injuries or other things. They were suited to each other in that they probably had some insecurities and were seeking recognition.”
And they were undoubtedly suited as athlete and coach. Under his guidance, Adrienne adopted an astonishing regime for a female athlete at the time: running twice a day and up to 120 miles (193km) a week. According to athletics historian Roger Robinson, she was one of just two women in the world who were regularly clocking 100 miles a week and thinking seriously about diet and training.
Her involvement with Fred would eventually cause a falling out with the administrators of amateur athletics, as the pair made a series of dubious world record claims still debated today. For the time being, though, it didn’t matter. Her coach had plans for his prodigy to push the limits of female athletic performance at a time when women were breaking down the barriers in a sport that had only ever existed for men.
To say women’s distance running was lagging in the late ’60s and early ’70s is an understatement.
There was no distance running for women.
However, a small but determined band of women were starting to demand a spot on the starting line.
In 1960, the 800 metres was the longest women’s distance race at the Olympics. Women didn’t contest the 1,500m until the 1972 Munich Games. As for the marathon, it was an event that men alone had run since the first modern Olympics at Athens in 1896.
Roger Robinson believes the first woman to run a marathon was Dale Gregg, who competed in the Isle of Wight race in 1964. In 1966, 23-year-old Roberta Gibb applied to run in the Boston Marathon. When a letter arrived from the organisers, she opened it expecting to find her competition number inside but instead found a letter disqualifying her. The letter noted that women were “not physiologically able to run a marathon.” She ignored the letter and decided to compete.
But instead of joining the start line, she hid behind a bush and only joined in after half the field had begun. Gibb unsuccessfully tried to disguise her gender by wearing a hoodie and her brother’s Bermuda shorts, but nevertheless found support among the spectators. “Way to go girlie,” they yelled as she became the first woman to finish the race.
A year later, 19-year-old journalism student Kathrine Switzer registered for the Boston Marathon under the ambiguous name “KV Switzer”. She ran without incident for the first four miles until a flat-bed truck packed with photographers pulled out in front of her. “They were getting pretty excited to see a woman in the race,” she wrote in her memoir, Marathon Woman.
Also on the truck was one of the marathon’s organisers, Jock Semple, a fiery Scotsman. The sight of a woman in “his” race set him off. Semple jumped off the truck and tried to physically restrain Switzer, yelling “get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!” Switzer’s boyfriend “Big Tom” Miller — a 106-kilogram ex-All-American football player — launched himself at Semple and knocked him off the road, with all the drama captured by photographers in perhaps the most iconic images in the history of women’s distance running. Switzer finished the race in 4 hours and 20 minutes, setting off a storm of publicity that did so much to legitimise women’s distance running.
In the years that followed, various women managed to lower what was then known as the “world’s best” time for the marathon. When American Elizabeth Bonner ran an official time of three hours, one minute and 42 seconds in May 1971, the three-hour mark was suddenly in sight. “We knew women were running marathons in America and Europe,” Adrienne said in 2013. “We knew I had done the work for that distance. I’d run 10 miles in 57 minutes and regularly ran 20-plus miles.”
Adrienne and Fred had something to prove.
The run of a lifetime
It was a Tuesday, August 31, 1971, and a cold front was edging up through the Tasman Sea bringing frigid conditions under a grey sky. The temperature in Werribee hovered between 8 and 12 degrees Celsius. At 9:55am, with Freddy Warwick at her side, Adrienne Beames set off on her historic run.
Werribee’s flat topography and lack of traffic made it a regular fixture for Victoria’s Amateur Athletics Association races in the 1970s. The Victorian Marathon Championship had been held there exactly one month earlier, but no-one knows whether Adrienne ran the same route. In fact, much remains unknown about that day in Werribee. No reporter or photographer was there to witness the run. If Adrienne ever had a photo of that day, it’s lost to history — she later burned the family’s photo albums.
There was just one contemporary report about it on the back page of The Age the following day, accompanied by a photo of Adrienne in training. That report was based on a phone call to the newspaper’s athletics reporter, Ron Carter. The man who called in the result? Her coach, Fred Warwick. It was the beginning of a pattern of publicity seeking that would come to dog Adrienne’s reputation.
In the meantime, news that the three-hour barrier had been broken just three months after Elizabeth Bonner’s run hit like a bombshell in the small women’s marathon community in the US. “We were all shocked,” Kathrine Switzer recalls. “No one had heard of Adrienne Beames, or of Werribee. The whole running community was talking about it because it was so off the charts in every way.”
“It’s like doing a 100 in mum’s backyard. People claim things. Nobody else saw it.”
Not everyone was convinced. Some supporters of women’s running in the US became angry, Swtizer recalls, branding Adrienne’s claim “impossible” and “a fraud”. “We thought we knew all the women around the world who had credentials in any kind of long-distance race,” Switzer says.
The Age reported that Adrienne was “claiming it as a world record, even if it is unofficial”.
“I knew I had the three hours well and truly beaten after 20 miles, even though there was a stiff headwind at times over the last few miles,” Adrienne told the paper. “The only real excitement was when we were chased by dogs at odd times during the run — the pace quickened then.”
The doubts expressed by Switzer and others in the US quickly began to surface in Australia’s small and tight-knit running community.
“When we heard the news, we thought, well that’s completely unlikely,” says Lavinia Petrie, who used to compete against Adrienne in the late ’60s.
The Victorian Marathon Club seemed supportive but wanted more evidence, demanding “verification by three official watches as well as certification of the course being the required length, in spite of being prepared to hail Adrienne’s effort as an outstanding trailblazer in women’s athletics”.
For the doubters, the course distance was a major sticking point. Marathons might be strictly measured at 26 miles and 385 yards (42.195km) these days but in the 1970s, course lengths were often dubious. Some were measured by driving a car around the proposed track and recording the distance using the car’s speedometer.
Fred was resolute. He assured The Age there were “no worries” about the time or distance. “We had three timekeepers — the chief one being Mr Jack Logan who has been an official for years,” he said.
John Craven knew Jack Logan well and trusted him. “I had no doubt that the time was accurate,” he said. “But was the course accurate? Twenty-six miles, 385 yards? That I don’t know.”
Despite scepticism, many involved in long-distance running in the ’70s believe the idea of Adrienne Beames clocking a sub three-hour marathon is perfectly plausible.
“There’s nothing to indicate that a time of three hours for women was that great and I think Adrienne proved that,” says Trevor Vincent. “We ran with her and we knew that she could run very well. She was right up with it.”
After all, it was an era of quantum leaps in a sport where records were ripe for the taking. The running revolution of the ’70s was yet to hit. Adrienne, under Fred’s tutelage, was years ahead of her time in terms of the distances she was already running, her training regime and her diet.
“I reserved judgment,” says Switzer. “Because I believed that as longer events developed for women, unknown new talents would emerge — sometimes suddenly — as did in fact happen all through the 1970s.”
Just four years earlier another Australian, Derek Clayton, had broken through the men’s marathon record in Japan, shredding almost two-and-a-half minutes off the time to under two hours and 10 minutes. Adrienne had seemingly made one of the most significant leaps in the history of athletics.
But she was only just warming up.
Over the course of 23 extraordinary days in January 1972, Adrienne claimed to have broken or equalled world records in every event from the 1,500 metres to the 10,000 metres.
The times were recorded in a series of privately-run time trials held away from the scrutiny of official races, and organised by Fred Warwick.
If there had been scepticism about Adrienne’s Werribee run before, now there was outright disbelief.
On a grass track at Narrabeen, in Sydney’s northern beaches, Adrienne claimed to have run a time of 15 minutes, 48.6 seconds over 5,000 metres. It was five seconds faster than the previous world record for the distance, set in 1969.
Two days later, on the same track, she claimed to have run a mile in four minutes, 28.8 seconds — six-and-a-half seconds faster than the world’s best. It would have made her the first woman in the world to run the distance in under four minutes and 30 seconds.
“We thought that she dreamed up all these performances that she did. We used to call her Adrienne Dreams.”
She also claimed to have equalled the 1,500m world record of four minutes, 9.6 seconds that had been set at the World Championships in Helsinki the previous August. Later in the month she went to Adelaide to run a 10,000m in another private time trial in 34 minutes and eight seconds, shaving three seconds off the existing world’s best. “One of the best performances I have seen,” Warwick told the paper. “It was a phenomenal run.”
To those on the outside, Adrienne and Fred’s private time trials were met with suspicion. Adrienne had obvious quality as a runner, but the times were viewed as not only unofficial but unlikely. Looking back on those 1972 times, Athletics Australia’s statistician Paul Jenes thinks the marks are simply “too good to be true”.
“They’re miles ahead of the (then) world records on the track,” he says. “She ran time trials basically with her coach timing her. It’s like doing a 100 in mum’s backyard. People claim things. Nobody else saw it.”
With the 1972 Munich Olympics looming, Adrienne had a golden opportunity to prove her credentials in the most highly scrutinised athletics event of them all. The Age reported she was a gold medal chance. There was so much to run for during a busy period leading up to the Australian championships in March, which doubled as the Olympic selection trials. And yet Adrienne was missing out on important state championships in the early months of the year in favour of her private runs.
Running the Sydney and Adelaide time trials raised the ire of local officials, who blocked her from competing in an official event in Adelaide. She failed to appear at the New South Wales Championships in February. She had hoped to compete in the 1,500m because, as she put it, “the chances to qualify for the Olympics are so limited”.
The Age reported she hadn’t applied for accreditation to race in NSW, but that allegation was denied by Fred Warwick. “This is the biggest blow of all time,” he told The Age. “Given a good track and good conditions Adrienne would have tried to beat the world record.”
Confounding the mystery was a report that the head of Australia’s women’s Amateur Athletics Association had invited Adrienne to seek Olympic selection. The Olympic trials for Munich were held in March. Adrienne didn’t show up.
‘You start to question them all’
When people talk about Adrienne Beames, one word repeatedly comes up: “Enigma”.
“If she was as good as she claimed, she would certainly have been maybe an Olympic champion, Commonwealth champion, who knows?” says Paul Jenes. “And she would go down in history as one of the great runners. But if you can do that, why don’t you run in the proper meets and qualify? That we’ll never know. It’s pretty sad in a sense.”
Why didn’t she put herself up to scrutiny and back up the claims that she and Warwick were making in the press? It’s a mystery. There are many theories. Was it her war with amateur athletics? A prejudice against her dogged determination to go her own way?
Could it have been arrogance? Lavinia Petrie seems to think so. “She thought she was beyond all those events because she was so good,” she says.
Colin Beames believes it may have been due to her self-doubt, that she “lacked the mental resilience and the ability to perform under pressure”. Or was she just making it all up? Colin recalls that his sister and Warwick seemed to live in a world that was a “mix of fantasy and realism.”
What happened to the records?
All the world record times that Adrienne Beames claimed during that 23-day stretch — as well as her marathon run at Werribee — are still listed in the International Association of Athletics Federations’ official guide to the progression of world records as a footnote.
None of them are official. They’re listed as a supplement to the 1,500m world record list. The guide says the performances should be viewed as doubtful, “particularly since she never faced competition in any big meeting.”
Adrienne Beames was written out of the record books.
“How can I put it politely?” Colin says of Warwick. “He was a bit like my sister in that they claimed things that weren’t really necessarily real or true. I think my sister had some psychological issues, there’s no question about that. She was obsessive-compulsive and narcissistic in terms of her needs over and above anybody else.”
And, yes, sometimes she lied.
“We thought that she dreamed up all these performances that she did,” says Petrie. “We used to call her Adrienne Dreams.”
In 1973, Adrienne was awarded a four-year athletics scholarship with the University of Texas. During that time, she largely disappeared from public view in Australia. Meanwhile in the US, she gained infamy rather than athletic success. The events of those years further damaged the credibility of her earlier world record claims among many of her peers.
Adrienne was the first woman to finish in the most famous fun run in the world, San Francisco’s Bay to Breakers, in 1974. But she was later disqualified for course cutting. Anecdotal reports claim she may have got a lift in a car for part of the route. She also crossed the line first during the 1977 Fiesta Bowl Marathon in Scottsdale Arizona. Her finishing time of two hours, 46 minutes and 32 seconds was claimed to be a course record. Once again, she was later disqualified for course cutting.
Even though she was caught cheating, she steadfastly continued the public lie, referring to those runs as legitimate. In 1978, she was nominated for the Age-Caltex Sports Star of the year. The following year she did an extensive interview with The Age, referring to the Arizona run as a Commonwealth record.
By now she had returned to Australia and was again being coached by Fred, who had taken up where he left off in terms of his big claims about his protege.
“She has won 19 races in America,” he insisted. “She is the best-known Australian athlete in the US including Ron Clarke and Herb Elliot.”
And yet Adrienne did run some legitimate and competitive times. She competed in the very first Melbourne Marathon in 1978, finishing second in three hours, 50 seconds. The following year she ran the Bakersfield Marathon in California in three hours, one minute, 43 seconds, finishing third.
But perhaps even more than the unverified records in Australia, her failure to acknowledge the two disqualifications in the US sullied her name and reputation. For Jenes, Adrienne had “so many of those doubtful, questionable performances, you start to question all of them”.
A lonely end
Fred Warwick died of a heart attack in 2008. A few months earlier, Adrienne had a serious car accident which damaged her leg and shoulder leaving her “tilted and limping”, according to Robinson, who visited her in 2013. He says she was “socially inept and anxious about things” and says he sensed the ever-present ghost of Fred.
“She was lonely and felt totally out of it,” Robinson says. “[She was] living in the past and living in this really weird house with all this antiquated chiropractic equipment lying around the place. The house just hadn’t been touched since his death five years earlier. The whole house was just so bleak. I won’t say masculine, it was just neutral and bare.”
Adrienne died of liver cancer last December, aged 77. She lived her final 10 years alone, her movement crippled from the car accident. “I hate it,” she told Robinson of her life five years before she died.
The minister at her funeral at St Kilda’s United Church, David Pargeter, got to know Adrienne in those last few years and came to “admire her greatly”.
“She came to me as an incredibly courageous woman,” he says. “She was a difficult character. She didn’t suffer fools gladly. She spoke her mind and burnt a lot of relationships. That was the shadow side of what was a human being with some deep, deep faculties for focus and discipline.”
Despite dying lonely and alone, almost 100 people turned up at her funeral. Reverend Pargeter is sure that would have lifted her spirits.
Colin spoke at the service. He says it was cathartic.
“I’m proud of the fact that she ran that time,” he says of his sister’s marathon at Werribee. “But I’m not necessarily proud of some of the things she did. I know that probably some of those achievements came at a cost in terms of her relationships with other people.”
Not many people can claim to have one outstanding highlight in their life. For Adrienne Beames, that marathon run at Werribee in August 1971 stands out like a beacon.
Perhaps the tragedy is that there is simply no way of knowing whether she really did achieve one of the great triumphs in Australian sporting history. If it were true, her name would be remembered alongside Herb Elliot, Betty Cuthbert, Ron Clarke, Raelene Boyle, Robert De Castella and Cathy Freeman in the pantheon of Australian athletics.
And maybe it doesn’t matter. The news of her run spurred on the women’s distance running community in the United States and Europe, helping to start a chain-reaction that spread around the world.
“Pretty soon it was obvious that Adrienne’s time was not impossible, as only a year or two later other women who trained hard began to match it or beat it,” says Switzer.
That may be Adrienne Beames’ greatest legacy.
Credits
- Reporting: David Mark
- Graphic design: Emma Machan
- Video editing: Johanna McDiarmid
- Production: Matt Henry
Topics: sport, marathon, women, olympics-summer, werribee-3030