FAYETTEVILLE — Niall O'Shaughnessy, the first in a line of great distance runners at the University of Arkansas and later an Olympian, has died after a battle with brain cancer. He was 59.
O'Shaughnessy was a six-time all-American while competing in three sports for the Razorbacks. Running for legendary coach John McDonnell in the 1970s, O'Shaughnessy became the program's first individual runner to win a Southwest Conference championship indoors.
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His indoor mile time of 3:55.4 is the ninth-fastest in NCAA history and an Arkansas record that has stood for nearly 40 years.
While he never won a national championship, O'Shaughnessy helped establish a line of great Arkansas distance runners that helped the Razorbacks win 40 team national championships and 84 team conference championships under McDonnell's tutelage. Several Irishmen followed in O'Shaughnessy's footsteps to Fayetteville to run for the Irish head coach, McDonnell.
O'Shaughnessy competed for Ireland in two events at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. In 1977, O'Shaughnessy missed on the world record in the mile by four-tenths of a second.
He did not compete in the 1980 Olympics because the U.S. boycotted the games hosted in Russia. O'Shaughnessy became an American citizen who later had a career as an engineer in Little Rock and Atlanta.
O'Shaughnessy will be posthumously inducted in the Southwest Conference Hall of Fame in November. He was inducted in the UA Sports Hall of Honor in 1994.