Wallace Henry Hayward BEM (10 July 1908 – 28 April 2006) was a South African endurance athlete with a 60-year career.

A friend talked Hayward into taking a running job, to put in stakes for diamond mining claims.

In 1931 Hayward broke a bone in his foot while training for Comrades and was told by a doctor that some chest pain he was feeling was due to a strained heart.

[3] Twenty years later he competed again and won it from 1950 to 1954, except for 1952 when he chose to rather represent South Africa at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki.

He held the record for the oldest finisher of the Comrades Marathon for 34 years, until it was broken in 2023 by Maros Johannes Mosehla.

Hayward fought in North Africa and Italy during World War II and in 1942 earned the British Empire Medal for bravery for his actions near El Alamein in Egypt.