Reg Spiers

Reginald James "Reg" Spiers (born 14 December 1941) is an Australian former athlete who competed in the javelin throw at the 1962 Commonwealth Games, before his later conviction on drug smuggling charges. He is best known for successfully posting himself in a box from England to Australia to avoid paying for a plane ticket.

Athletic career Born in Adelaide, South Australia, Spiers, who grew to be over two metres tall and strongly built, took up javelin and became one of the leading javelin throwers in Australia while still a teenager, placing third in the 1960/61 Australian Track and Field Championships and second in 1961/62.

Spiers continued to compete but his performances during the 1963/64 Australian summer were not enough to gain admission to the 1964 Australian Olympic team so Spiers travelled to England in an attempt to qualify during the English summer.

Spiers's 1964 journey as airfreight from London to Australia was highly publicised after McSorley became concerned about his friend's welfare and contacted sports correspondent James Coote from The Telegraph newspaper in London. Following his six-year disappearance after skipping bail from Adelaide with his girlfriend in 1981, Spiers declined a television interview with Channel 9 in 1988. Scant details had survived about Spiers's sixty-three-hour stowaway flight, and little was known about his time on the run, until he endorsed a book by McSorley's wife and son.

After a brief retirement, Spiers returned to competitive athletics in the 1966/67 season, winning the national javelin championship with a throw of 73.77 metres. but disappeared from Adelaide in October 1981.

Spiers next appeared in India, where he was arrested on 5 January 1982 on charges of being a drug courier,

After escaping from India, Spiers was next arrested at Bandaranaike Airport in Sri Lanka on 1 December 1984 while travelling on a French passport under the name Patrick Claude Albert Ledoux. A successful appeal earned Spiers a reprieve, but he was forced to serve a five-year prison term in Adelaide.

In 2011, Spiers's daughter Jane was convicted on counts of manufacturing a controlled drug, and one count of doing so for sale. Jane Spiers was jailed for six years, with a three-year non-parole period.

In 2014, a book was released Out Of The Box: The Highs and Lows of a Champion Smuggler, published by Roaring Forties Press in the US. The book was endorsed by Spiers and covers details of his journey from England to Australia as airfreight, as well as his years on the run as a fugitive that led to death row.