Statistician Stan inducted into Athletics Hall of Fame

Renowned athletics statistician, Stan Greenberg, was inducted into England Athletics Hall of Fame at the weekend.

The 93-year-old was one of eight inductees and follows in the footsteps of other Jewish names, including track and field athlete Harold Abrahams and Paralympics founder Ludwig Gutman.

A founding member of the National Union of Track Statisticians (NUTS) in 1958, he was at the helm of the BBC’s commentator statistics for 26 years – starting at the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh where he also aided David Colman – and acted as the advisory statistician to the Great Britain team selection committee for nearly 30 years.

Present at numerous Olympic Games (his first being the 1948 Games in London) and tournaments, he says the greatest race he’s ever seen was the 4x400m relay between Jamaica and the USA at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, where he also witnessed 16 world records in the space of a week.

He was also in Munich for the 1972 Olympic Games where 11 members of the Israeli team were murdered, one of whom was track and field coach Amitzur Shapira whom Stan had met and spoken to just two days before he was killed.

The ‘third great honour’ bestowed on him after being awarded the Vikelas Plaque by the International Society of Olympic Historians (which he’s also a founding member of) and Ron Pickering Memorial Award, he says of being inducted into the Hall of Fame: “For someone like me, and at my age, it is wonderful to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, especially as a number of friends and former colleagues are already members.”