The day that I beat Batman… Well sort of (but not really).

Having hung around the sport of track and field for over a decade now, I have at some point lined up against most of the big names in male sprinting over that time period, and by ‘big names’ in track and field, for many of you, that means either ‘guy you have kind of heard of’ or ‘guy you saw run at the Olympics that one time but didn’t know their name’.

For every questionable upset victory I’ve somehow shanked that doesn’t really count, there have been ten times I’ve had the pleasure of admiring just how clean the pair of heels is on one of my idols as they run away from me.

My trail of empty ‘victories’ over notables started back in 2001 when I beat future six time national 100m champion Josh Ross in of all things, the triple jump, and was bookended in April this year when I knocked off London bound 4x400m Olympian Joel Milburn over 200m while he was still on the mend from a hamstring injury.

And so it was that when I faced one of my heroes Daniel Batman back in February 2008, that I technically (but not really) came out ahead.

If you are reading this blog you likely know that Daniel Batman was tragically killed in a car accident in June while he was in Darwin to visit two of his three children. For me the accident was a saddening reminder of the inevitable mortality and numbing shortness of life.

While I raced Batman several times over the years, I only spoke to him a few times, and those exchanges usually either involved wishing him luck out on the warmup track, or congratulating him after he had just destroyed me in a race. Nevertheless, to see a man who was both influential to me and younger than me have his life cut short, was quite confronting.

Batman was arguably Australia’s best all round sprinter, starting out as a 400m specialist, always strong over 200m, and later in his career laying the smack down over 100m. He was an inspiration to me, as a short man running the 400m event. Most 400m runners are tall (well taller than me) and relatively slender, but here was Daniel Batman, all 175cm of him, legs like tree trunks, and somehow able to get those stumps moving fast enough to trounce those who took many less steps to cover the distance.

By the time the NSW State titles rolled around in 2008, he was already transitioning more toward the shorter sprints and running less 400m races, but he ran all three sprints at the championships that year and raced through the Friday night 400m heats. For the final the following night, I had to cut my long jump event short, quickly shake the sand out of my shoes and set up my blocks to line up in one of the most stacked 400m races I’d ever been a part of, with Batman, as well as Olympian Clinton Hill, World Championship rep Kurt Mulcahy, and future Olympian Joel Milburn in the field.

Batty was in a lane outside me, and I got a solid start. As I ran the first bend I noticed something strange… I was keeping up with him, a man who was at the time the 7^th fastest Australian ever over the distance… Something wasn’t right. Sure enough, as we entered the back straight, he pulled up and stopped. Momentarily distracted, I got back into my race and had a good view from my lane as Joel Milburn stormed away in the home straight for a breakthrough victory over Clinton Hill that would foreshadow him making the semi final later that year at the Beijing Olympics.

Technically, a victory over Batman as he failed to finish, but in reality it was a shellacking by Milburn and co. As I returned to the long jump with my lactic haze in a laughable attempt to continue jumping, I realized what had happened when Batty lined up for the 100m final, healthy as a horse. He had obviously decided that his best chance of getting to Beijing lay in the 4x100m relay, and didn’t want to tire himself out by running the entire 400m final right before the 100m. He did however, have to at least start the race, as under IAAF rules if he had pulled out of the 400m final he’d have had to withdraw from the 100m final as well.

It is funny that, when I think of Daniel Batman, this is the memory that comes to mind… Perhaps it is because I have conveniently wiped from my consciousness all the times when he soundly whomped me on the track, or maybe it’s because for 100 metres, I got to run alongside one of the men who eight years earlier at the Sydney Olympics, inspired me to return to a sport I'd given up on after high school.

It has been three weeks now since Daniel Batman was tragically killed, but I for one don’t easily forget those I draw inspiration from, and Batman was certainly that for me. I invite anyone reading who has one, to share a memory of Batty in the comments as a tribute to one of Australia’s best ever sprinters.