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by Graeme Atkinson (1984)
Surveyor, lan Browne, of Brunswick, Victoria, and his cycling partner, nineteen years old, Tony Marchant, must have had the gods looking favorably down on them when they competed in the 2000 meters tandem event at the 1956 Olympics.
The Australian pair finished last of three in their first round heat, in which winners advanced to the quarter finals and losers to a repechage Later in the day, they lost the two team repechage to Czechoslovakia and should therefore have been eliminated. But, fortunately for them, a fall occurred in the third repechage between Germany and the USSR, and the Russian riders were too badly hurt to take part in a re-run of the race. Officials, therefore, arrived at a solution to the problem of having a team with no one to race against, by ordering the third repechage to consist of Germany and the two teams, Australia and America, who had previously lost their own repechage. This gave Browne and Marchant the chance to cause a complete upset, cycling away to win the race and move into the quarter finals.
The following day, the pair hit top form and won both the quarter final and semi final, both times recording 10.8, the equal fastest time in any of the races so far decided in the competition.
Meeting Czechoslovakia (who had also come through the repechage in the final, Browne and Marchant caused the upset of the games cycling competition by pedalling away to a gold medal, again recording a time of 10.8.
Browne, tallest cyclist in recent years at 6 feet and 1 inch, went on to take the Australian ten miles championship in 1958, and contested the 1000 meters sprint time trial and ten miles event at the Cardiff Empire Games, winning the latter in a games record time of 21:40.2 and covering the final 200 yards in a scintillating 11.9 seconds. Three weeks later, he was off to the world titles in Paris but retired at the end of the 1958 season.
However, he was lured out of inactivity the following year by the prospect of the Rome Olympics. In New Zealand, in 1960, he broke the national ten miles record, and he and new tandem partner, Geoff Smith, took the Australian title. The pair rode together at the Rome Olympics but were unsuccessful in the medal chase. At twenty-nine years of age, Browne was the oldest cyclist to represent Australia in any Olympiad.
He was ready to retire again after the 1962 Commonwealth Games (in which he was third in the sprint), but stayed on the scene to partner Daryl Perkins of Victoria, to the Australian 2000 meters tandem title. This gained selection for the pair of them to go to Tokyo Olympics, this being Browne's third. They were unsuccessful in Tokyo, however, but in the following year they won the Australian title, while Browne also rode on his own to be runner-up in both national and state sprint titles.
From Australian & New Zealand Olympians: The Stories of 100 Great Champions, Graeme Atkinson The Malvern Star tandem ridden to the Gold Medal by Ian Browne and Tony Marchant is now on public display at the Olympic Museum at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Ó Rolf Lunsmann, 2000 How you can help Feedback
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