Olympic marathoners: Billy Sherring

William D. "Billy" Sherring (September 18, 1878 - September 5, 1964) was a Canadian athlete, winner of the marathon race at the 1906 Summer Olympics.

The 1906 Games were not awarded the title of Olympiad, rather they are called the Intercalated Games. They were held in Athens, Greece as part of a new schedule, where every four years, in between the internationally organized games, there would be intermediate games always held in Athens. Pierre de Coubertin did not like this at all, as they would not follow De Coubertin's idea of organizing them in different countries to make the Olympic Movement more international.

In the early 1900s, Billy Sherring from Hamilton, Ontario was acknowledged to be the world premier marathoner. He had won a second place behind a fellow countryman Jack Caffery at the "Boston Marathon" in 1900. He also had won the Hamilton "Round-the-Bay Marathon" on two occasions.

In 1906, Sherring was chosen to represent Canada in the Athens Olympic Games. However, it was left up to him, a working man with meager resources (he was a brakeman at the Grand Trunk Railway), to finance his journey to Athens. Sherring managed to collect an amount claimed to be between $45 and $90 (a clearly insufficient amount to travel to Athens), which he then bet on a horse named Cicely which luckily won with good odds. He arrived to Athens seven weeks before the Olympic Games and started to work as a porter at the Athens railway station.

At the marathon race, the 45 kilograms (98 pounds) Sherring led almost all the distance. Prince George of Greece ran the last 50 metres of the marathon alongside Sherring. Sherring received a live lamb and a statue of Athena as a reward. When he returned to Canada, Hamilton City Council awarded him $5000 and the City of Toronto awarded him a further $400. Upon his triumphant return from the marathon, Sherring quit athletics and worked as a Customs Officer in Hamilton until his retirement in 1942.

After his death, his original claim-to-fame, the "Round-the-Bay Road Race" was renamed to the "Billy Sherring Memorial Road Race", and Hamilton has since built a Billy Sherring Park to commemorate their most famous athlete.