BYRON LaBeach recalls an incident at the National Stadium three years ago that not only left him and his family embarrassed but reinforced the indifferent relationship the former Olympian had with Jamaica’s track and field authorities for over 30 years.

“I came down to assist with the World Junior Games, paid my own way and when I went for my accreditation I was not in the system,” he told the Observer. “When Dr (Vin) Lawrence heard about it he was very angry and it was corrected, but it shouldn’t have been. I was very pissed off, very bothered.”

The Jamaica Amateur Athletics Association (JAAA) went a long way in patching up its strained ties with LaBeach last Wednesday night at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel when he was among the first eight persons inducted into its Hall of Fame, a joint initiative with the Victoria Mutual Building Society.

LaBeach, a well-toned 71 year-old, was the alternate member of Jamaica’s storied 4X400 metres relay team that won that event at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland. The win ensured Les Laing, George Rhoden, Arthur Wint and Herb McKenley, the men who ran the actual race, track and field immortality but for LaBeach there has never been any acknowledgment of his participation.

“This (recognition) is way, way overdue, I was shut out since the 1960s. I felt very neglected,” said the bespectacled, shaven-headed LaBeach, a day after the ceremony. “Everyone here (track administrators) knows me but didn’t want to recognise me and I didn’t know why.”

JAAA president, Pat Anderson, says LaBeach deserves his place in the sun. “He was part of the team, the other guys recognise his participation and have always given him his acclaim,” said Anderson.

LaBeach’s record is nowhere as impressive as the famed Helsinki Four. He competed in the 100 metres at the 1952 Games but was eliminated in the second round; at the Central American and Caribbean Games (CAC) in Mexico City two years later, he was fourth and fifth in the finals of the 100 and 200 metres events, respectively.

His only gold medal performance for his country came at that meet when he was a member of the winning 4X100 metres team that also included Laing, Rhoden and Keith Gardner. It was the last time he competed for Jamaica as leading up to the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia he was unable to pay his airfare from the United States where he was serving in the army, to compete in local trials.

To the average Jamaican sports fan, he remains an unknown, but LaBeach comes from a bloodline that has produced quite a few useful athletes.

The last of six sons, he was born in east Kingston to parents originally from St Elizabeth but who had lived for a time in Panama.

His brothers all did well at track, the best of them being Lloyd, a bronze medallist in the 100 and 200 metres at the 1948 Olympics in London. Three other brothers, George (the eldest), and Harold competed at Boys Championships in the 1940s for Kingston College, while another sibling, Sam, ran as a quarter-miler for Panama where all, but Lloyd, was born. George was also coach of the Jamaica team to the CAC Games in Mexico City and served as president of the JAAA.

LaBeach says he was strongly influenced by his brothers, especially Lloyd, to take up track. Based on good performances for the Gaynstead private school, he got a scholarship to St George’s College where he played on their winning Manning Cup teams of 1947 and 1948.

Interestingly, he never won a gold medal in two appearances at ‘Champs’ but did well enough to win another scholarship, to the all-black Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland in 1949.

For Morgan State, LaBeach maintained his consistent form. He was a member of their winning team at the Penn Relays in 1952 and believes that was the run that clinched his place on the Olympic team to Helsinki.

“Herbert McDonald (Jamaican track administrator) was in the States at the time as a representative for the farm workers programme and he was organising the (Olympic) team and came to see me,” LaBeach related. “I got very good recommendation from my coach and I was selected as an alternate.”

Going into the Olympics, LaBeach says Wint and McKenley, in particular, were not in the best of form. “He had finished last in the 400 metres in California in May and was very distraught, he wanted to give it up,” LaBeach stated. “Our win in Helsinki was an upset because we started out with two weak links.”

After the 1954 CAC Games, Byron LaBeach’s track career was limited to the US club circuit and ended in 1959. He got a degree in Physical Education and Sociology from Morgan State and gained another in business from California State College.

He returned to Jamaica in the early 1960s and lived here for two years before returning to the US and settled in The Bronx where he lives today, operating the Agro Foods distribution company. LaBeach — who will be back in Jamaica in July to receive the Prime Minister’s Medal of Appreciation for Service to Jamaica — has been married to wife, Violet, for 40 years and they have three children.