Gordon Pirie

English long distance runner

In the Olympics, held in Melbourne later that year, Pirie ran against Kuts in the 10,000 metres and despite the tactics of Kuts, an aggressive front runner whose bursts of speed were particularly damaging to a long striding runner like Pirie, he stayed with him into the last mile when every other competitor had dropped well back. Kuts surrendered the lead for a short while, then made a sprint which Pirie could not match and he dropped back. Kuts said that if Pirie had stayed with him on that last sprint he would have dropped out of the race. In the 5,000 metres Pirie took second place behind Kuts. Christopher Chataway, another British runner, had been selected on past performance. He had not competed at top level for more than a year as he was pursuing a media career. With Pirie and Derek Ibbotson, the third British runner, he was tracking Kuts and had moved ahead of them as they went into a bend. The Soviet runner was setting a much faster pace than Chataway had ever run. Chataway suffered an attack of stomach cramp which caused him to slow down, and as Pirie and Ibbotson came out of the bend they found that Kuts had opened a gap. Pirie and Ibbotson ran round Chataway but Kuts was able to exploit his advantage and won the race with a margin of 11 seconds, the largest ever for this event in Olympic history. For the latter stages of the race Pirie was running what was virtually a front race, as Kuts had broken away, but he was still strong enough to hold off a late challenge by Ibbotson.

Pirie competed for England at the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games and finished fourth in the 1 mile and 3 mile events. Pirie won the British Orienteering Championships in its first two years, 1967 and 1968, and won the first edition of the JK Orienteering Festival. He also represented UK at the 1966 World Orienteering Championships, and again at the 1968 World Orienteering Championships. The 1998 edition of The Guinness Book of Records lists Gordon Pirie under the "Greatest Mileage" entry, stating that he had run a total distance of in 40 years to 1981.

In his book Running Fast and Injury Free Pirie advocated running with initially making ground contact with the midfoot (as opposed to the usual style of long steps with landing on heels), 3–5 steps per second to reduce fatigue, damage to feet, and wasting of energy on vertical movement of body. He also describes his collaboration with Adolf Dassler on designing running shoes with stronger toes (instead of the usual design with stronger heels) for better durability with his advocated running style.