Harold J. St. Croix – Athlete

Inducted March 28, 2009

Harold St. Croix excelled in the sport of athletics. Growing up in the small isolated community of Point La Haye, St. Croix trained countless hours on gravel roads and ran along the rocky beach beside the ocean. His persistence and dedication paid off. St. Croix won the Tely Ten mile road race six times and finished in the top four seven times. At the Tely Ten in 1977, at the age of 19, St. Croix broke Cliff Stones’ 48 year old record with a time of 52 minutes, 6 seconds. St. Croix is one of only two people who have run the Tely Ten in under 50 minutes. He is the only runner who has won the Tely Ten in three consecutive decades – 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s. He was named St. John’s Athlete of the month on three occasions: once in 1990 and twice in 1991. St. Croix currently holds three records: the provincial 20 mile road race record which he set in 1976 with a time of 1 hour 58 minutes; the provincial half marathon record which he set in 1991 with a time of 67 minutes, 25 seconds; and, the provincial record for the Tely Ten 35-39 age bracket which he set in 1997 with a time of 50 minutes, 41 seconds. From 1976-1978, St. Croix won the provincial cross country championships. In 1978, he won the Atlantic Open Cross Country Championships in New Brunswick. St. Croix was named Provincial track athlete of the year in 1977 and 1978. He was a member of the Memorial University cross country team and track teams that competed at the Atlantic University Track and Field Championships in the 1980’s. While with Team Ontario, St. Croix earned a gold medal at the 1995 Timex National Road race in Ottawa. He followed this up with a silver medal at the same event in 1997. While living in Fort McMurray, Alberta, St. Croix represented the city in the 10K road race at the 1985 Alberta Summer Games. At the national level, St. Croix took third place at the National Juvenile Division in 1976, winning Newfoundland’s first ever national cross-country medal. Eighteen years later, St. Croix won a bronze medal at the National Cross Country Running Championships. At the 1977 Canada Summer Games, he competed for Newfoundland and Labrador in the 5K and 2K steeplechase on the track. Internationally, he attended an elite training camp in Mountain View, California in 1978-1979 sponsored by Runners World magazine. At the first Atlantic Coast Games in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1991, St. Croix won a gold medal in the 10K and a bronze medal in the 5K, competing against teams from the United States and Bermuda. In recognition of his athletic achievements, Harold St. Croix was inducted into the Newfoundland and Labrador Athletics Hall of Fame in July 2008.