By Bill Jones
Reviewed by Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

I came across this book just by chance. I have never heard of John Tarrant, Bill Jones (the author) or The Ghost Runner. But the title was intriguing enough to check what this book was about. Subtitled “The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn’t Stop. The True Story of John Tarrant”, it seemed worth a try. I am glad I gave it a chance.

Bill Jones is an award-winning documentarist for British television. This is his first book. Back in 1984, while working on a documentary about the Centennial of the Salford Harriers, an athletic club based in North Manchester, came along the name John Tarrant and an awkwardly written autobiography he left behind. The more he learned about the man labeled “The Ghost Runner”, the more intrigued he became. In March 2013, the book was released.

John Tarrant was born in 1932 in London. As a young child he was shipped with his younger brother to the safety of a boarding school during the Nazi indiscriminate bombings of London during World War II. After 7 years in a living hell, he came back to a sick mother who died shortly after. His father remarried and the family situation was not very loving.

Tarrant focused his energy on sports and became a boxer. He participated in a handful of low-level fights, earning £17. But John hated boxing and promptly discovered not just the joys of running, but that he had a talent for it. But his meager earnings from his past marked Tarrant’s life, as he became a professional athlete. Back in those days, especially in a classist and discriminatory society like the English, disqualified him from athletics. Not just boxing, but everything.

In the shadows of Britain\’s elite schools, a contrasting ethos emerged—the cult of the gentleman amateur. Rooted in the belief that the working class couldn\’t be trusted to compete fairly due to their perceived penchant for money, these beliefs gained traction. By 1880, the Amateur Athletic Association was established, defining an amateur as someone who, from age 16 onward, never competed for prizes, engaged in monetary considerations, wagered, taught sports for profit, or exploited their abilities for personal gain. This strict definition left figures like John Tarrant uneasy, underscoring a profound shift in sports culture.

Unable to participate in races, he resorted to jumping into them unregistered. He was a talented runner who sometimes even won. The press christened him as “The Ghost Runner” and a legend was quickly born. An adversarial relationship grew with the British Amateur Athletics Association and eventually he was reinstated, only to find at the time to choose the marathon team for the Rome Olympics, that this reinstatement did not include international representation of his country.

John Tarrant

While today jumping into races is frowned upon, the world of road racing in the 1950s and 1960s was a niche community. Bobbi Gibb also jumped into the Boston Marathon in 1966 and is today seen as hero. Tarrant became a star and the races looked forward to having him as an unregistered runner because his celebrity enhanced its profile.

The book goes in depth into Tarrant’s early childhood. Sometimes you may feel it is a bit too much, but then you find it is important so you may find justification for the adulthood of the protagonist. His persona off the asphalt is as equally important of a character as his running self. Both are registered masterfully but this first-time author.

Even though Tarrant set a handful of world records and won a handful of marathons and many local races, this is not the story of one of the great runners of all time. It is, though, the story of someone for whom running was not part of his life, but his life. It is about the hypocrisy of British athletics in the mid-20th century and one man’s, a working-class man, fight to overcome it.

That author says: “The way he saw it, the ghost runner wasn\’t simply a person. He – John Tarrant – was the living embodiment of a cause. The ghost was his alter ego, his weapon, and his disguise.”

Tarrant died in obscurity in 1975 at the age of 42 due to a misdiagnosed stomach cancer. Maybe this early death cost him his place in the pantheon of interesting running characters of our time.

I highly recommend the book. It is well researched, well written and worth the money and time to read it.