Few men were as relentlessly competitive as Chris Brasher — or as formidably energetic. Olympic steeplechase gold medallist, newspaper and television journalist, multi-millionaire businessman and founder of the London Marathon, he brought a potent combination of idealism and cussedness to almost everything he did. As a colleague on The Observer, where he was sports editor from 1957 to 1961, put it: “You went with him or you got out of his way fast. I have never met anybody with such self-belief.”

Brasher’s life was dominated by an unquenchable faith in sport as a means of liberation and self-discovery and by a near-fanatical devotion to the outdoor life. It was entirely in character that he was also a fervent advocate of the Olympics, or at least of the original Olympic ideal.

The bloated, money-making extravagance of the Olympics in the television age, soured by drugs, corruption and commerce, filled him with despair. “I believe hugely in Olympism”, he said in 1996. “But my love affair with the Games themselves has finally hit the divorce courts. All the magic has dissolved.”

His victory in the 3,000 metres steeplechase in the 1956 Melbourne Games epitomised the inspiration he took from the Olympics. He was never the most naturally gifted of athletes — “I squeezed out what little talent I possessed,” he said. His gold medal was not least a triumph of bloodyminded determination over more obviously talented athletes.

It was this same singlemindedness that led to the creation of the London Marathon in 1981. Surmounting formidable logistical problems and sweeping aside opposition, Brasher, ably supported by a dedicated team, organised the first race in only 17 months. Yet despite the instant and enormous success of the marathon, there were mutterings about Brasher’s high-handed management and autocratic manner almost from the start.

They came to a head when Brasher and his business partner and co-director of the race, John Disley, were accused in the Channel 4 programme Dispatches of using the marathon to promote their sports shoe distribution company. They met the challenge head on, suing Channel 4 and the New Statesman, which had printed the original accusations. After a bruising legal battle, Channel 4 and the magazine withdrew all the accusations and Brasher and Disley were awarded a £1.1 million settlement.

Christopher William Brasher was born in British Guiana, where his father, a radio engineer, worked for the Colonial Office. After a transfer to Jerusalem, the family returned to England when Brasher was seven.

He was educated at Rugby and St John’s College, Cambridge. Already a convert to outdoor adventure — he led two expeditions to the Arctic before he was 22 — it was at Cambridge that he discovered athletics, even if it was obvious from the start that he was more willing workhorse than track thoroughbred. But he was a good enough — and dogged enough — runner to be picked for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. If his performance there was undistinguished — he finished second to last in the steeplechase final — the experience confirmed his infatuation with the Olympics.

An imperishable moment of British sporting glory followed two years later when, on May 6, 1954, with Chris Chataway, he helped to pace Roger Bannister to the first sub-four-minute mile, at the Iffley Road track in Oxford. At the gun, Brasher shot into the lead as the first pacemaker, reeling off a fast first lap to help keep Bannister’s record bid on target. With Chataway taking up the running when Brasher tired, Bannister powered past with 200 yards to go, to come home in the historic time of 3min 59.4 secs.

Acknowledging the superior talents of Bannister and Chataway, yet desperate to emulate their fame, Brasher decided to devote himself to the 1956 Olympics. With help from a sympathetic employer, Mobil Oil, which he had joined as a management trainee in 1951, Brasher threw himself into a training regime of exceptional severity for the period.

Nonetheless, John Disley, his later business partner, was widely regarded as a much better bet for a medal. Brasher, only the third-choice steeplechaser in the British team, had never won an international race before Melbourne. Yet, as the field came down the home straight in the Olympic final he held his place at the front. The drama was not over at the tape, though. Brasher was disqualified for obstructing the third-placed man, Ernst Larsen of Norway. However, neither the Norwegian nor Sandor Rozsnyol, who came in second, would support a disqualification. After three hours of deliberations from an Olympic jury of appeal, Brasher was reinstated as the winner.

After sitting up most of that night with Chataway and two journalists, all of them, in his words, “very thirsty”, he had an equally alcoholic lunch the next day with the 13-strong British press corps, each of whom bought him a large gin, so he arrived on the podium, by his own admission, in a state of some inebriation.

As an Olympic champion, doors suddenly opened to him (not that he was averse to leaning on them). The following year, he was appointed sports editor of The Observer. Though he worked there full-time for only four years, he continued to write freelance for the paper as its Olympic correspondent until 1991.