SPRINTER DELANO MERIWETHER FEBRUARY 22, 1971

Dr. Delano Meriwether seemed a character out of a tall tale in
1971, when he joined the indoor track circuit and began beating
the world's top sprinters at the unheard-of age of 27. A
brilliant hematologist at the Baltimore Cancer Research Center,
he had started running for exercise one year earlier. He decided
to get serious in the summer of '70 after watching U.S.
sprinters run poorly in a track meet. "I could beat those guys,"
he told his wife, Myrtle, who said something calming like "Sure,
honey." In his first indoor season, he ran six major races and
won two of them.

Meriwether was a huge fan favorite, in part because of his
eccentricity. His "uniform" was gold bathing trunks and
suspenders, which he wore over a white hospital shirt. He had no
coach and did most of his workouts alone, at night, on unlit
outdoor tracks. Nevertheless, in the summer of '71 Meriwether
won the 100-yard dash at the national outdoor championships in a
wind-aided 9.0 seconds, and he might well have made the '72
Olympic team but for a knee injury he suffered while winning
that year's national indoor title in the 60.

The first black graduate of Duke Medical School, Meriwether
retired from competition a few years later and continued to
pursue his principal career. After stints at Harvard Medical
School and Boston's Thorndike Memorial Laboratory, he earned a
master's in public health from Johns Hopkins. He stayed on to
lecture there but was restless. "I wanted to serve directly,
hands-on," he says. So in 1983 he moved to Gazankulu, a remote
homeland in South Africa where children, women and the elderly
had been relocated. For seven years, as one of six physicians
serving more than half a million people, he worked ferrying
refugees, petitioning aid organizations for supplies, teaching
birth control and treating patients. He calls that time "the
most rewarding of my life." In 1990 he returned to the U.S. and
is now working as an emergency room doctor in the Washington,
D.C., area and once a week drives about four hours to West
Virginia to help staff two remote hospitals. He still runs twice
a week and also lifts weights. "There are more exercise options
today," says Meriwether, 53, who now lives in Potomac, Md., with
his second wife, Nomvimbi, and their three children. "Had they
been available 25 years ago, I might have found something more
fitting for a physician to engage in." What a pity that would
have been.

--Merrell Noden

COLOR PHOTO: SHEEDY & LONG [SPORTS ILLUSTRATED cover featuring Delano Meriwether]