By Virginia Winder

More than 40 years on from winning his first Olympic gold medal, Peter Snell is still getting fan mail.

"I get about two letters a week, mainly from Europe, from people that are wanting signatures and so on," says New Zealand's Athlete of the 20th Century.

The written affirmations remind Peter of his achievements, of his gold medals and his world records.

The Opunake-born man finds strength in the memories, which nobody can take from him. They are his foundation, as solid as the victory dais he stood on after winning the 1500 metres at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

Knowing where he comes from helps Peter in the highly competitive world of science.

"There are people who like to say you're no good," he says. "Well sorry, here's a medal to prove otherwise. Science is so cut-throat too, it can be vicious. Scientists can be very territorial and there's a pecking order. And I don't care being fairly low down in the pecking order because I'm not scrambling desperately for recognition in that area. I like where I'm at using science to help me understand the world rather than a vehicle for recognition and achievement."

Peter is now an associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas. In 1977, he completed a Bachelor of Science in Exercise Physiology at the University of California in Davis and followed this with a PhD in Human Performance at Washington State University.

Moving on from failure

But Peter wasn't always so academically minded.

He failed School Certificate when he first sat it while attending school in Te Aroha. The following year he went to Mt Albert Boys' Grammar School in Auckland where he passed his exams.

"Then I went and missed University Entrance (UE) twice. I can say that because now, holding a PhD, I can deal with it," he says.

Peter's high school mathematics teacher saw his potential. "Many years afterwards, when I was in a prestigious medical school, I came back and saw Herbie (Towers) and said, 'Herbie, you wouldn't have ever thought that I could be successful academically?' He said, 'Yes I did, I thought you could have done anything you wanted to, if you decided you wanted to do it'. So that was his rub," Peter says.

Herbie Towers was a track and field man, who went on to become an Olympic selector. "Well he must have seen it through athletics because he taught me math and I was pretty awful at it and I didn't do my homework…"

Sport, sport and more sport

The young athlete was too busy playing sport. He was an Auckland representative tennis player, had been picked for the high school cricket 1st XI, was a worthy badminton opponent, good at golf, played hockey and badminton and, of course, was a runner.

"Yeah, my excuse was that the sports field was where I was getting my strokes," he says, Americanisms slipping into his sentences like ketchup into burgers.

"I really enjoy academic stuff - now that I understand it."

But when he was a teenager, he couldn't see where his studies would lead him. With his mind always on sport, he had no real career focus.

"I thought I wanted to be a (land) surveyor where you could be outdoors and tramp around… you had to have UE for that and I actually interviewed to do that on the expectation I'd pass UE and I didn't. That was sort of awkward," he says.

Instead, he became a quantity surveyor, which didn't require UE. While the names are similar the jobs aren't. "It's absolutely not related at all; you just sit in an office and look at plans and figure out how many feet of timber and yards of concrete are going into buildings."

Tobacco company offers deal

He lasted four years in that job, finally leaving because of financial frustrations and a better offer. "I found myself wanting to get married and earning nothing still," Peter says.

"Here I was Olympic champion and world record holder on the most meagre salary and so Rothmans came a long and said, 'We'll give you a salary of twice what you're getting now and provide a car and we'll train you for a career in advertising'.

"I thought, 'well that sounds respectable - don't like the product very much but if I become competent in advertising that would be good'. Well, while that may have been their intention, the plans changed. But I could afford to get married."

In 1963, Peter married Sally Turner from Papakura. "I married a non-athletic smoker, so there weren't a lot of common interests, which I now feel are very important to a marriage."

His Rothmans job suited Sally, but Peter says: "We nearly didn't get married over the smoking issue."

The new job also came with drawbacks. Peter found travel and a mixed routine weren't conducive to training, so in 1965 he retired from competitive running.

Pushing sport

But he stayed on with Rothmans, working for the tobacco company for 12 years.

In 1965, the Rothmans Sports Foundation was launched, with Peter, Arthur Lydiard, cricketer Bert Sutcliffe and another coastal Taranaki son, former All Black Don Clark, travelling New Zealand to give talks and promote sport.

Peter says the head of Rothmans told the men: "This might seem to be a contradiction, but in actual fact we're just a New Zealand Company putting something back into the community. We know New Zealanders like sport and that's what were doing; these guys are not there to promote our products."

Peter supported the idea. "It sounded very convincing and slick and so on. And I thought 'that sounds reasonable'. Bert smoked anyway but Don didn't and I didn't and Arthur certainly didn't. Arthur used to say, 'you'd be doing better if you ate those (cigarettes)'."

These days, Peter is outspoken in his abhorrence of smoking.

An academic revelation

But he does have reason to be thankful to Rothmans. "They sent me overseas because I was starting to get jaded with this life and I think they noticed that, and they said, 'we'll give you a sabbatical, we'll send you over to England where you can find out about coaching schemes and you can be based at a university and you can sit in and do some courses in physiology and get some ideas and come back refreshed'."

Way more than that happened to Peter - he had a revelation.

"When I got over there and started sitting in on these courses, I thought, 'gee this stuff's fun and people are getting degrees for this, I need one'.

"And that was the beginning of the end of Rothmans. I feel a bit bad that they'd sent me overseas, but what that did was open my eyes to what I was able to do academically."

Two years after his sabbatical, Peter and wife Sally sold their Mt Albert house and moved to the United States. "I was in a university where they had a world-renowned adult fitness programme," he says of the University of California at Davis.

Hooked on study

When Peter began studying in 1974, he had planned to return to New Zealand to be a fitness consultant. "But I was getting turned on to (studying). I wanted to go further, and I was doing well enough. I did my degree in three years - it's a four-year degree - which is surprising for a New Zealand failure, and had a good enough grade point average to go to graduate school."

The money to continue studying came via his sporting talents.

"In my last year, I got invited to ABC Superstars and I ended up winning all this money, which paid for my graduate education."

He has fellow Kiwi John Walker to thank for that, as the then 1500-metre star turned down the offer and referred the organisers to Peter. The ABC television network's programme pitted top sportspeople against each other in seven different events - except their speciality. Because of his all-round talents, this challenge was perfect for Peter.

Given a sporting chance

"I just was cleaning up at this event and should have won the whole thing. At 36, I was older than most of the others who were in their 20s. I ended up winning the tennis, the rowing, and the cycling."

But in the final, Peter crashed out in the cycle race. That pedal-into-the-ground accident was costly. "I would've won $25,000 dollars in that race alone, instead I came away with about $7000. I still think about that when I'm riding my bike around."

Still, he earned enough to pay for his post-graduate study at Washington State University, beginning in 1977. That was also when his first marriage ended.

"I was now independent and my wife could also say, 'Bye-bye, you can go off and do your graduate education, I'm staying here'."

Peter and Sally have two daughters.

New wife, new life

"So, that's when I learned to cook and that has stood me in good stead because my second wife is a flight attendant and just hates cooking," he says of Miki Snell, who is also a top US orienteering athlete.

"I said, 'don't worry, I'm happy to do it; you do the clean up, I'll do the cooking'. I get to pick what we're having. Well I have the Edmonds Cookbook, so I'm in good shape."

So is his academic record.

After earning his PhD at Washington State, in four years, Peter was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, where he is now an associate professor and director of the human performance laboratory. He has been author or co-author of 60 published papers and abstracts on exercise-related research. In 1999 he was an inaugural inductee into the International Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame located at the University of Rhode Island.

Chewing the fat

These days he is involved in clinical trials in the areas of cardiology, metabolism and diabetes.

"I work particularly closely with Dr Abhimanyu Garg, who is an expert on metabolic abnormalities, where body fat is not distributed normally," he says.

People may store fat in strange places, like their hip cavities, their eyeballs, on the back of the neck, causing a "buffalo hump". While some cases are genetic, others are caused by drugs given to people who are HIV-positive, to prevent AIDS.

"So the (US) Government via the National Institute of Health put out a request for proposals for researchers to come up with ways of dealing with this problem - novel therapies."

The proposal put forward by Peter's university involves a three-phase programme of drugs, nutrition and exercise.

"I'm in charge of the exercise intervention," he says. "So that occupies a fair bit of my time. At UT Southwestern I am the resident exercise physiologist, so I do exercise testing in my lab and I have a tank to determine body composition by underwater weighing, and I measure metabolic rates when they're needed."

Good will towards NZ

Peter is also connected with worthy projects at home, including the Parkinsonism Society of New Zealand and the Peter Snell Institute of Sport.

"I feel good about my association with Parkinson's and being able to help. And I certainly feel good about the institute idea because it really fits with my own circumstances of almost accidentally discovering athletics at 19, when it wasn't apparent at 17 that I had potential."

He is the patron of Parkinsons New Zealand, which is a cause close to his heart. People may presume that's because John Walker, the first runner to go under 3 minutes 50 seconds for the mile, suffers from the progressive neurological condition.

But Peter became involved because his older brother, Jack, has the disease.

Naturally, the athletic associate professor believes in the "use it or lose it" strategy, saying that muscles can atrophy if they become inactive.

"Exercise is not going to fix Parkinson's, but it's going to keep your muscles in shape and perhaps prevent falling and those sorts of problems. And I think psychologically as well, the more self-reliant you are the better," he says.

"My brother Jack has done an excellent job in that regard. He's really done everything you could possibly do. And in so doing, I think, has managed his disease pretty well."

Egocentric - but that's OK

Walking the talk is Peter's way, although in his case he's definitely a messenger on the run.

Another one of his New Zealand-based projects is producing a book with journalist Garth Gilmour. It's about life in the Third Age and advocates keeping active and healthy in the latter years of one's life.

This is the second book the men have worked on together. The first is Peter Snell's candid biography.

"I am a lot more mature now," Peter says. "When I read No Bugles No Drums I think, 'how self-centred I was then'."

Looking back over the years at those untouchable golden moments, Peter excuses the young man and his ego. "Well, that's really what it took and, therefore, it's OK."