Seven up: Mark Spitz’s seven golds and seven world records in Munich in 1972 included the medley relay final, where John Mills swam in the British team
SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Chariots of Fire is on the telly, the Paris Games are just five days away, and DAVID MORGAN speaks to the South Croydon-based swim coach about how he raced against one of the greatest Olympians of all time
As with many Olympc competitors, their pathway to success with after a period of adversity.
Olympic memories: John Mills has had a lifetime in swimming
This was true of John Mills, who for more than 20 years served as the senior coach at South Croydon Swimming Club, but who back in the 1970s had his own swimming successes, and the experience of being just a couple of lane ropes away from one of the greatest Olympians of all time, and they were compiling one of the greatest medal-winning feats in the history of the modern Olympics.
When he was aged nine, John Mills spent three months in hospital suffering with kidney problems. The prescribed treatment in the NHS of the early 1960s was bed rest and blood tests, lots of them. When he came out of hospital, his parents decided John needed to do something to get fit. His father, who had been in the Royal Navy, thought that he should try swimming. John was taken to Southwark Swimming Club, who used the Victorian-built baths off the Walworth Road at Manor Place.
Mills was quickly at home in the water, and he soon moved to another club, St James’s, who trained in similarly antiquated old pools at Camberwell and East Dulwich.
Mills’ first big competition was the Surrey County championships when he was 12, which that year were held at the Clapham Manor Baths. He won the butterfly and freestyle races for which he was entered.
“I only did those two strokes,” Mills, now 71, remembers. “I was terrible at breaststroke.”
National title: 1,500 free champion Mills was a ‘newcomer’ in 1971
His early successes saw Mills invited to train at the Crystal Palace, which had opened with its modern, Olympic-sized pool in 1964, and had gyms and weight rooms on site. “It was a godsend,” Mills says.
Swimming as a competitive sport in London, and Britain, in the 1960s and early ’70s was always a struggle, mostly just to find time in the pool, when most facilities were close to one hundred years old, and the only time available for training was in the early mornings before the pool was open to the public, or late in the evenings, after school or work.
It was a time when the premier competitive swimming pool in the country was Derby Baths in Blackpool, a relatively “modern” facility, having been built in 1939. For many years it was the venue for the annual ASA age group championships.
By the time he was 13, Mills swam for the Southern Counties at Blackpool, winning a silver medal in the under-14s 110 yards (note that… Derby Baths’ pool was 55 yards long) butterfly. He won the national title the following year.
Blackpool reached: 30-year-old art deco Derby Baths were among the country’s more ‘modern’ facilities
Several of those events for young swimmers were sponsored by Fox’s Glacier Mints. There were always lots of sweets for the competitors!
The annual age group championships at Blackpool each August were part of the Mills’ family holiday back then, as his parents would enjoy a week by the seaside while their children competed. John’s sister, Denise, was also a talented swimmer and a Surrey champion in her own right.
By 1970, John Mills, by now 17, was a promising freestyler on the verge of the national team. He was selected for the England team for that year’s Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, and given a tough programme of races: the 200 and 1,500m freestyle, the 200m butterfly and was included in the 4x200m freestyle relay team.
Mills returned home to south London from Scotland with a Commonwealth Games bronze medal from the relay.
Britain’s 1972 Olympic swimming were held at Blackpool, and Mills qualified for the 100m butterfly and 200 m freestyle, and was included in relay squads for the 4x100m medley relay and 4x200m free. He was going to be a busy competitor at the Munich Olympics later that summer, though not quite as busy as one of his international rivals…
Still in his teens, Mills embraced the Olympic experience. Even his time at the Commonwealth Games had not prepared him for a sporting event on the scale he encountered in Munich.
Impressive: young John Mills was awe-struck by the scale of the Munich Games as he marched with the Great Britain team at the opening ceremony
Proudly wearing his Great Britain team blazer and uniform, the union flag embroidered in the badge on his chest, he took part in the opening ceremony, marching into the packed and noisy Olympic Stadium.
“Everything was on such a huge scale, the stadium and seeing all the other countries who were taking part,” Mills says.
“I’ve still got my blazer, hanging up in the wardrobe, but it doesn’t really fit me now.”
History-making: with packed stands, Munich’s Olympia Schwimmhalle was scene of one of the greatest feats in sporting history
Nowadays, swimmers don’t always get to take part in the opening ceremony because their events are among the first to be held at the Games and their coaches don’t want their schedules interrupted, their energy sapped.
In 1972, Mills took everything in his stride. Of course, he had a few nerves, especially when stepping forward on to the starting blocks in the magnificent, modern Olympia Schwimmhalle, but he was never overcome by them.
He had a good Games. He just missed out on a place in the final of the 100m butterfly, and he remembers, with a sense of achievement, at reaching the finals of both the relays, especially the medley relay team who beat the Australians in qualification.
Seventh heaven: Spitz and his Munich medals, and moustache
“We had a cracking medley relay team at those Games,” Mills says, “we had David Wilkie on breaststroke.” The Scot had won Olympic silver at 200m breaststroke in Munich, and would go on to become Britain’s first ever swimming world champion, before winning Olympic gold and silver at the 1976 Games in Montreal.
Racing the butterfly leg of the medley relay – where one swimmer swims two lengths of backstroke, before a team mate takes over for breaststroke, then ‘fly and crawl – a few lanes down from Mills and the British team was an American, Mark Spitz. This was Spitz’s seventh Olympic final in the space of barely a week. It would yield him a seventh gold medal and a seventh world record.
Mills had been in another of those record-breaking finals with Spitz, the 4x200m freestyle, and had raced Spitz in the heats of their first event, the 100m butterfly.
Today, Mills laughs when he remembers a story about Spitz: “You know why he grew a moustache? Spitz told everyone that it helped him breathe in more oxygen during the race, as the air was trapped between the bristles.
“The next thing you knew, you had all the Russians copying him and turning up for competitions with moustaches!”
Spitz was unable to relish his moment of glory in the Athletes’ Village, because the Munich Games became scarred by the massacre of 11 Israeli competitors in a raid by the Black September terrorist group. Spitz was rushed out of Munich by US security agents, afraid that their swimming star, who is Jewish, might be another target for the gunmen.
Black September: the Palestinian raid on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Games would change world sport forever
The swimming programme had been completed by the time of the attack, and on the day that the terrorists struck, Mills and several other British swimmers had gone out for a day trip. They returned to pandemonium. Armed German police were everywhere.
A rumour went round the British team that the IRA might be planning something, too. So for the next few nights, amid heightened security across Germany and the city, all the British men in the swimming team slept in the same dormitory.
The athletes were all on edge, not only because of the security situation, but also wondering whether or not the Games were to be cancelled. This was, and remains today, the greatest crisis faced by the modern Olympics, its terrible outcome something which has influenced and changed the staging of major events, not just sport, ever since.
Mills was one of the competitors who attended a moving memorial service the next day in the Olympic Stadium for the Israeli athletes who lost their lives.
Team announcement: Mills’ name on the list in 1977
When he arrived back home after the Olympics, Mills joined the police, where he would serve for 30 years. He wasn’t really thinking about prolonging his swimming career, but joining the police proved to be just what he needed – a steady, professional income, and the opportunity to put in the endless hours of training.
He came to the attention of Inspector Caldwell, a physical training instructor with the City of London Police. Thanks to the inspector’s influence, Mills was allowed two hours a day to train, using the new pool built in the modern Barbican complex.
He also changed swimming clubs, joining Sutton and Cheam, and began training under the eye of “Dinkie” Thurley, who everybody referred to as “Mrs T”.
Under her guidance, Mills was selected for his second Olympics, in Montreal in 1976.
This time, Mills was a much more experienced campaigner, and together with teammates Jimmy Carter, Wilkie and Brian Brinkley in the medley relay, they came agonisingly close to winning the bronze medal in the final.
National record: in his days at St James’s SC, Mills was winning national titles and setting English records
Mills went on to collect a cabinet-full of medals and trophies, and multiple national titles. In 1978, he and the British medley team did win a medal, the bronze at the World Championships in West Berlin, matching their third place at the previous year’s European Championships, where Mills had won individual bronze in the 100m ‘fly.
Mills returned to Commonwealth Games action in 1978, in Edmonton, Canada, where he won two silvers – in the 100m fly and medley relay. At the grand old age of 25, this was to be his last big international event.
When Mills retired after his long service in the police, he took all his coaching badges so he could use his knowledge and experience to help other swimmers.
He spent nine years as head coach of his local South Croydon Swimming Club, to 2020. In 2021, Croydon Borough Swimming Association awarded him an honorary life membership for his contribution to the development of swimming talent.
That same year he and the club launched a fundraising initiative to help more children in Croydon learn to swim. Nowadays he can be found helping out with the younger age groups at the club.
Long career: by 1978, Mills was still winning national titles, while the women’s events (right-hand column) were being dominated by a Plymouth teenager, Sharron Davies
Mills was a high achiever in an era of the amateur sportsman often with poor facilities, a full-time job and no Lottery funding. Competing in the pool with the likes of Mark Spitz and David Wilkie and facing the might of the East German sporting “machine”, he did so with a quiet determination. In his retirement, he has worked tirelessly to encourage youngsters to learn to swim and to reach standards they didn’t always believe they could reach.
Mills’ memories will bubble to the surface again when he sees the first British swimmer step up on to their starting blocks in Paris next weekend. Adam Peaty is bidding to make a bit of Spitz-like sporting history, hoping to win an unpredented third gold at a third Games in the 100m breaststroke, while Mills’ youthful successors in the British 4x200m freestyle relay team will be defending the Olympic title won so impressively in Tokyo three years ago.
And John Mills, double Olympian, will still have that tingle of anticipation just as he did more than 50 years ago.
David Morgan, pictured right, is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster, who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- The day Norwood-born Burke defeated Hitler’s Germany
- Addiscombe cycle shop-owner who had record-breaking career
- Swimmer who made a splash with Tarzan at Paris Olympics
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
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