He would remember his gold medal sprint performance for the rest of his life - but they were not happy memories.

There was already a party mood in Hamilton, according to reports in the British newspapers, and when Williams was due to run "all the shops and most of the offices in the city closed at one o' clock and even the local paper had a half-holiday".

Williams had won the sprint double at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, and he set a 100 metres world record of 10.3sec in Toronto a week before the Empire (later Commonwealth) Games Opening Ceremony, at which he had the honour of pledging the athletes' oath of sportsmanship.

The American press said Williams had been a lucky winner in Amsterdam, suited by the new, soft track surface. He proved them wrong by winning 21 of 22 races in the four months after his return, all of them in the United States.

Williams restricted himself to the 100 yards in Hamilton (Commonwealth Games sports retained imperial measurements until 1970) and he told a team-mate that he would take the world record at that distance too "as long as my leg holds out".

It did not. Williams seemed to be on course for another world record, but soon after halfway he tore a muscle near his groin on his left leg.

Although he stumbled over the line for victory, in agony, he would never fully recover, not least because the Canadian team did not have a doctor on duty in Hamilton that day.

"I felt the muscle go," he later recalled. "Two things can happen. The leg collapses and you fall down. Or it keeps flipping and you manage to finish the race." His kept flipping, and despite the excruciating pain Williams held on.

He was unable to hobble back out for the medal ceremony, heavily bandaged, until an hour after the race.

Nobody knew how bad the injury was, including Williams. He was told before the 1932 Olympics, where he failed to reach the final, that only an immediate operation in Hamilton would have saved his running career.

Williams helped to promote the 1954 Empire and Commonwealth Games in his home town of Vancouver, and was named Canada's greatest ever Olympian in 1972 - but by then he was leading a troubled life.

He had always been shy, far happier out of the limelight than in it, and he devoted his time instead to his insurance company.

He became reclusive, drank too much, and said he hated running. Despite his fame and status he declined an invitation to attend the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.

In November 1982, Canada's greatest Olympian used a shotgun to take his own life