Final Lap: ‘He projected a glamour image, but he was different to that’

Frank Murphy was a two-time Olympian and European Championship silver medalist.

The Fitzwilliam Card Club, at 2am on a Thursday morning, is not the kind of place you tend to encounter athletic greatness. It was the spring of 2010, and there we were — students, athletes, gamblers — taking our seat at the final table of a poker tournament with men who looked like life’s victims.

All apart from one. Sitting quietly, impeccably dressed in a navy suit, was a man in his 60s. At the other end of the table, an ultra-marathon runner regaled us with tales of his heroism; describing the conditions he had braved to finish the most sadistic races on earth. Where he placed in these races was conveniently omitted, but we, being fellow runners, indulged his ego.