Pat Clohessy, the coach behind Rob de Castella, dies at 93
Pat Clohessy, a two-time NCAA champion who coached Rob de Castella to the 1983 world marathon title and led Australia's distance runners for a generation, has died.
Photograph: Clearinghouse for Sport, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Clohessy with Robert de Castella, 1984)Pat Clohessy died in Brisbane on September 28, aged 93. He was one of the great distance coaches Australia has produced.
He was a runner first. Clohessy won back to back NCAA three mile titles for the University of Houston in 1961 and 1962, ran for Australia at the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth, won the AAU three mile title in 1963 and was third at the World Games in Helsinki the same year.
He then taught at Xavier College in Melbourne, where a schoolboy named Robert de Castella started training with him. Together they built one of the best marathon careers of the century: a 2:08:18 world best at Fukuoka in 1981, Commonwealth titles in 1982 and 1986, the first world marathon title in Helsinki in 1983, and Boston in 1986. De Castella called him "like a second father."
Clohessy coached Australia's distance runners at the 1980 and 1984 Olympics and ran the distance program at the Australian Institute of Sport from 1982 to 1994, where his group included Simon Doyle, Shaun Creighton, Krishna Wood and Susan Hobson. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1988 and entered the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1997.
His influence is still on the track. Dick Telford, who coaches 2026 Diamond League 1500m champion Cameron Myers, was one of the coaches he mentored, and sums up Clohessy's method as "first do no harm."
He spent his last years coaching club runners in Brisbane. That says enough.
Sources: World Athletics; Sport Australia Hall of Fame.
