Jerome Drayton

(1945-2025)

Canadian long distance runner

more_vert

25 views

favorite

About

edit

Jump to

Family
Relationships
Associates
Similar

Jerome Drayton (January 10, 1945 – February 10, 2025) was a Canadian long-distance runner who competed internationally. He was born as Peter Buniak in Germany, and came to Canada in the mid-1950s when his mother moved there after divorcing his father. He reportedly based his new name on two famous sprinters he admired: Canadian former world record holder Harry Jerome and American Paul Drayton, former world record holder in the 4 × 100 m as part of the American relay team. However, Drayton denied this, stating that he chose Jerome because it was a name he had always liked, and Drayton because he thought the two names fit well together. A prominent runner in the 1970s, when he was for a time ranked as the top marathoner in the world, he won the Fukuoka Marathon in 1969, 1975, and 1976, as well as the Boston Marathon in 1977. His Canadian men's national record time in the marathon of 2:10:09, set in 1975 at the Fukuoka Marathon, stood for 43 years until broken by Cam Levins in October 2018 with a time of 2:09:25 in the Toronto Waterfront Marathon. Drayton had held the Canadian record since 1969, after breaking the then record of 2:18:55 set by Robert Moore a month earlier.