A member of Oughterard AC in Galway and the first athlete from a rural Irish base to be selected for Olympic competition since Paddy Fahey in 1948, Molloy was a former NACAI athlete who was among the first to benefit from the amalgamation that created BLE in 1967. He devoted an entire year of training specifically to marathon running with the aim of winning the national title and achieving Olympic selection. The mission was accomplished in August 1968 when he won the BLE national marathon in 2:22:52 – only his second marathon – and eight weeks later he stood on the Olympic starting line for his third attempt at the distance.

In Mexico, blisters began to form in the intense heat. One of his Tiger Cub shoes came apart at the heel; after trying to adjust it several times he discarded the footwear entirely and ran the final six miles on the Mexican road surface. ‘I thought it would be better to run barefoot, but it was horrible,’ he later recalled. ‘I could make no progress. It was like running on a real dead surface.’