'I went into it quite confident, if you don't, you haven't a hope' – Fifty years ago Neil Cusack shook the world of athletics

Few had seen it coming. But Neil Cusack was one of them. The night before the 1974 Boston Marathon, the Limerickman was at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in the city centre, listening to Tom Fleming, a US star, talking about how he reckoned he’d win.

Fleming was runner-up the previous year and the reigning New York City Marathon champion. He was a justified favourite, but not in the mind of a certain 22-year-old Irishman. “I’m thinking, ‘You are in your f*****g arse going to win it,’” says Cusack, 50 years on. “It’s my title.”