The Perfect Mile
The Perfect Mile
Neal Bascomb
This edition does not include illustrations.The inspirational story of three international runners attempting to achieve what no one had managed – to break the four-minute mile barrier. It was the ultimate test of endurance, and the human drama that unfolded is told here for the first time.In sport, running the four-minute mile was the elusive Holy Grail, considered by most to be beyond the limits of human endeavour.Then in late 1952, shortly after the Helsinki Olympics, three men set out to challenge the record books: Roger Bannister, the Oxford medical student, the great British hero who epitomised the ideal of the amateur athlete; John Landy, the tireless Australian, the romantic who trained night and day in search of perfection; and the American Wes Santee, son of a Kansas ranch hand, a natural runner and the quickest of the three ('I was just born to run fast').Three men, each of contrasting character, competing thousands of miles apart, but all with the same valedictory goal. The Perfect Mile is the stirring account of their quest for sporting martyrdom, charting their journey through triumph and failure, culminating in the moment when Bannister broke the record in a monumental run at the Iffley Road cinder track in Oxford in May 1954. It was a feat that became one of the most celebrated in the history of British sport.Far from bringing an end to the rivalry, this watershed moment turned out to be merely the prelude to a final climactic battle three months later – the ultimate head-to-head between Bannister and Landy in what was dubbed ‘the mile of the century’ at the Vancouver Empire Games.Bascomb provides a fascinating account of what happened and an invaluable insight into the motivations and characters of three amazing achievers.
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_bf7f4ec2-5a5f-5534-a70c-f0e589e31116)
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First published in Great Britain in 2004.
This edition first published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2005
Copyright © Neal Bascomb 2004
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Neal Bascomb asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007173723
Ebook Edition © MAY 2017 ISBN: 9780007382989
Version: 2017-05-11
DEDICATION (#ulink_dc6d6bc8-2395-5d04-adb8-a7b1e81e1f6d)
To Diane
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_e1da14e1-fe79-50e5-8e52-4c0870a3d54a)
When an author sets out to investigate a legend, and there are few stories as legendary in sport as the pursuit of the four-minute mile, it is initially difficult to see the heroes around whom events unfolded as true flesh-and-blood individuals. Myth tends to wrap its arms around fact, and memory finds a comfortable groove and stays the course. What makes these individuals so interesting – their doubts, vulnerabilities, and failures – is often airbrushed out, and their victories characterised as faits accomplis. But true heroes are never as unalloyed as they first appear (thank goodness). We should admire them all the more for this fact.
Getting past the panegyrics that populate this history has been the real pleasure behind my research. No doubt there have been some very fine articles written about this story, but only by interviewing the principals – Roger Bannister, John Landy, and Wes Santee – and their close friends at the time does one do justice to the depth of this story. Their generosity in this regard has been without measure. These interviews, coupled with contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles as well as memoir accounts by several individuals involved in the events, serve as the basis of The Perfect Mile. With this material, the story almost wrote itself.
I have included collective references for those interested in knowing the sources behind particular conversations and scenes. No dialogue in this book was manufactured; it is either a direct quote from a secondary resource or from an interview. That said, half a century has passed since this story occurred. On some occasions, dialogue is represented as the best recollection of what was in all probability said. Furthermore, memory has its faults, and in those situations where interview subjects contradicted one another I almost always went with what the principal recollected. In those instances when contemporaneous sources (mainly newspaper articles) did not correspond with memory, I primarily went with the former, particularly when there were several sources indicating the same facts. Having inhabited this world for the past eighteen months, aswim in paper and interview tapes, I feel I have been a fairly accurate judge of the events as they happened. I hope that I have served the history of these heroes well.
CONTENTS
Cover (#u07f6861e-bb91-5576-81a5-3bf2f0030ca0)
Title Page (#u0381d3b4-2786-5c8a-b88f-28325bea5527)
Copyright (#ulink_5f9055c3-4e4a-54e3-b5cc-061ce512d212)
Dedication (#ulink_9ff080da-0f89-57c5-af81-f3b779a499f5)
Author’s Note (#ulink_a51a20ac-4617-597c-b723-4d0afbb136b3)
Prologue (#ulink_09806cfb-2d3f-51ad-abb5-619807002ef6)
PART I (#ulink_b29d09f4-12c7-52d6-a5a3-3e5e4bc6a1da)
A Reason to Run (#ulink_b29d09f4-12c7-52d6-a5a3-3e5e4bc6a1da)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_dfd39348-c130-5778-a80d-68be6f816957)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_e00248d1-d801-550f-90a7-b1132b7bb4eb)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_9607c189-a9bb-5e17-8c0c-a754b7f43e83)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_d1d0f072-b19a-5fb8-8f27-1fa6aa9bc029)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_7f335eaa-1dd0-5acc-8aa1-dc1c9e4a5b5d)
PART II (#litres_trial_promo)
The Barrier (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
PART III (#litres_trial_promo)
The Perfect Mile (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
References (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_7d366724-b62e-58dd-8907-c9ac482d1565)
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
Rudyard Kipling, ‘If …’
‘How did he know he would not die?’ a Frenchman asked of the first runner to break the four-minute mile. Half a century ago the ambition to achieve that goal equalled scaling Everest or sailing alone around the world. Most people considered running four laps of the track in four minutes to be beyond the limits of human speed. It was foolhardy and possibly dangerous to attempt. Some thought that rather than a lifetime of glory, honour, and fortune, a hearse would be waiting for the first man to accomplish the feat.
The four-minute mile: this was the barrier, both physical and psychological, that begged to be broken. The number had a certain mathematical elegance. As one writer explained, the figure ‘seemed so perfectly round – four laps, four quarter miles, four-point-oh-oh minutes – that it seemed God himself had established it as man’s limit’. Under four minutes: the place had the mysterious and heroic resonance of reaching sport’s Valhalla. For decades the world’s best middle-distance runners tried and failed. They came to within a second or so, but that was as close as they were able to get. Attempt after spirited attempt proved futile. Each effort was like a stone added to a wall that looked increasingly impossible to breach.
The four-minute mile had a fascination beyond its mathematical roundness and assumed impossibility. Running the mile was an art form in itself. The distance, unlike the 100-yard sprint or marathon, required a balance of speed and stamina. The person to break that barrier would have to be fast, diligently trained, and supremely aware of his body, so that he would cross the finish line just at the point of complete exhaustion. Further, the four-minute mile had to be won alone. There could be no team-mates to blame, no coach during half-time to inspire a comeback. One might hide behind the excuses of cold weather, an unkind wind, a slow track, or jostling competition, but ultimately, these obstacles had to be defied. Winning a foot race, particularly one waged against the clock, was a battle with oneself, over oneself.
In August 1952 the battle commenced. Three young men in their early twenties set out to be the first to break the barrier. One of them was Wes Santee, the ‘Dizzy Dean of the Cinders’. Santee was a natural athlete, the son of a Kansas ranch hand, born to run fast. He amazed crowds with his running feats, basked in the publicity, and was the first to announce his intention of running the mile in four minutes. ‘He just flat believed he was better than anybody else,’ said one sportswriter. Few knew that running was his escape from a brutal childhood.
Then there was John Landy, the Australian who trained harder than anyone else and had the weight of a nation’s expectations on his shoulders. The mile for Landy was more aesthetic achievement than foot race. He said, ‘I’d rather lose a 3:58 mile than win one in 4:10.’ Landy ran night and day, across fields, through woods, up sand dunes, along the beach in knee-deep surf. Running revealed to him a self-discipline he never knew he possessed.
And finally there was Roger Bannister, the English medical student who epitomised the ideal of the amateur athlete in a world being overrun by professionals and the commercialisation of sport. For Bannister the four-minute mile was ‘a challenge of the human spirit’, but one to be realised with a calculated plan. It required scientific experiments, the wisdom of a man who knew great suffering, and a magnificent finishing kick.
All three runners endured thousands of hours of training to shape their bodies and minds. They ran more miles in a year than many of us walk in a lifetime. They spent a large part of their youths struggling for breath. They trained week after week to the point of collapse, all to shave off a second, maybe two, during a mile race – the time it takes to snap one’s fingers and register the sound. There were sleepless nights, training sessions in rain, sleet, snow, and scorching heat. There were times when they wanted to go out for a beer or a date yet knew they couldn’t. They understood that life was somehow different for them, that idle happiness would elude them. If they weren’t training or racing or gathering the will required for these, they were trying not to think about training and racing at all.
In 1953 and 1954, as Santee, Landy, and Bannister attacked the four-minute barrier, getting closer with every passing month, their stories were splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world, alongside headlines of the Korean War, the atomic arms race, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, and Edmund Hillary’s climb towards the world’s rooftop. Their performances outdrew golf majors, Ashes Tests, horse derbies, football and rugby matches, and baseball pennant races. Stanley Matthews, Ben Hogan, Rocky Marciano, Mike Hawthorn and Surrey County Cricket Club were often in the shadows of the three runners, whose achievements attracted media attention to athletics that has never been equalled. For weeks in advance of every race the headlines heralded an impending break in the barrier: ‘Landy Likely to Achieve Impossible!’; ‘Bannister Gets Chance of 4-Minute Mile!’; ‘Santee Admits Getting Closer to Phantom Mile’. Articles dissected track conditions and the latest weather forecasts. Millions around the world followed every attempt. Whenever any of the runners failed – and there were many failures – he was criticised for coming up short, for not having what it took. Each such episode only motivated the others to try harder.
They fought on, reluctant heroes whose ambition was fuelled by a desire to achieve the goal and to be the best. They had fame, undeniably, but of the three men only Santee enjoyed the publicity, and that proved to be more of a burden than an advantage. As for riches, financial reward was hardly a factor. They were all amateurs. They had to scrape around for pocket change, relying on their hosts at races for decent room and board. The prize for winning a meet was usually a watch or a small trophy. At that time, the dawn of television, when amateur sport was losing its innocence to the new spirit of win-at-any-cost, these three strove only for the sake of the attempt. The reward was in the effort.
After four soul-crushing laps around the track, one of the three finally breasted the tape in 3:59.4, but the race did not end there. The barrier was broken, and a media maelstrom descended on the victor, yet the ultimate question remained: who would be the best when they toed the starting line together?
The answer came in the perfect mile, a race no longer fought against the clock, rather against one another. It was won with a terrific burst around the final bend in front of an audience that spanned the globe.
If sport, as a chronicler of this battle once said, is a ‘tapestry of alternating triumph and tragedy’, then the first thread of this story begins with tragedy. It occurred in a race 120 yards short of a mile, at the Olympic 1,500m final in Helsinki, Finland, almost two years to the day before the greatest of triumphs.
I (#ulink_f6c8016b-4e92-5c89-97db-46e3ac82adfd)
A REASON TO RUN (#ulink_f6c8016b-4e92-5c89-97db-46e3ac82adfd)
1 (#ulink_8f274829-0b36-5658-b313-b28f65adf2b8)
I have now learned better than to have my races dictated by the public and the press, so I did not throw away a certain championship merely to amuse the crowd and be spectacular.
Jack Lovelock, 1,500m gold medallist, 1936 Olympics
On 16 July 1952 at Motspur Park, south London, two men were running around a black cinder track in singlets and shorts. The stands were empty, and only a scattering of people watched former Cambridge miler Ronnie Williams as he tried to stay even with Roger Bannister, who was tearing down the straight. It was inadequate to describe Bannister as simply ‘running’: eating up yards at a rate of seven per second, he was moving too fast to call it running. His pacesetter for the first half of the time trial, Chris Chataway, had been exhausted, and the only reason Williams hadn’t folded was that all he needed to do was maintain the pace for a lap and a half. What most distinguished Bannister was his stride. Daily Mail journalist Terry O’Connor tried to describe it: ‘Bannister had terrific grace, a terrific long stride, he seemed to ooze power. It was as if the Greeks had come back and brought to show you what the true Olympic runner was like.’
Bannister was tall – six foot one – and slender of limb. He had a chest like an engine block and long arms that moved like pistons. He flowed over the track, the very picture of economy of motion. Some said he could have walked a tightrope as easily, so balanced and even was his foot placement. There was no jarring shift of gears when he accelerated, as he did in the last stage of the three-quarter-mile time trial, only a quiet, even increase in tempo. Bannister loved that moment of acceleration at the end of a race, when he drew upon the strength of leg, lung, and will to surge ahead. Yes, Bannister ran, but it was so much more than that.
As he sped to the finish with Williams at his heels, Bannister’s friend Norris McWhirter prepared to take the time on the sidelines. He held his thumb firmly on the stopwatch button, knowing that because of the thumb’s fleshiness, having it poised only lightly added a tenth of a second at least. Bannister shot across the finish; McWhirter punched the button. When he read the time, he gasped.
Norris and his twin brother Ross had been close to Bannister since their days at Oxford University. They were three years older than the miler, having served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, but they had been Blues together in the university’s athletic club. Norris had always known there was something special about Roger. Once, during an Italian tour with the Achilles Club (the combined Oxford and Cambridge athletic club), which Bannister had dominated, McWhirter had looked over with amazement at his friend sleeping on the floor of a train heading to Florence and thought, ‘There lies the body that perhaps one day will prove itself to possess a known physical ability beyond that of any of the one billion other men on earth.’ Sure enough, as McWhirter stared down at his stopwatch that July afternoon, he could hardly believe the time: Bannister had run three-quarters of a mile in 2:52.9, four seconds faster than the world record held by the great Swedish miler Arne Andersson.
After gathering his breath, Bannister walked over to see what the stopwatch read. Cinders clung to his running spikes. At the time, athletics shoes were simply a couple of pieces of thin leather that moulded themselves so tightly to the feet when the laces were drawn that one could see the ridges of the toes. The soles were embedded with six or more half-inch-long steel spikes for traction. Running surfaces, too, had advanced very little over the years. They were mostly oval dirt strips layered on top with ash cinders that were taken from boilers at coal-fired electricity plants. Track quality depended on how well the cinders were maintained, since in the sun they became loose and tended to blow away, and when it rained the track turned to muck. Motspur Park’s track benefited from the country’s best groundskeeper, and it was one of the fastest, which was why Bannister had chosen it for this time trial.
He always ran a three-quarter-mile trial before a race to fix in his mind his fitness level and pace judgement. This trial was particularly important because in ten days’ time, given that he qualified in the heats, he would run the race he had dedicated the past two years to winning: the Olympic 1,500m final. A good time this afternoon was crucial for his confidence.
‘Two fifty-two nine,’ McWhirter said.
Bannister was taken aback. Williams and Chataway were just as incredulous. The time had to be wrong.
‘At least, Norris, you could have brought a watch we could rely on,’ Bannister said.
McWhirter was cross at such a suggestion. But he knew one way to make sure his stopwatch was accurate. He dashed to the telephone booth near the concrete stadium stands, put in a penny coin, and dialled the letters T-I-M. The phone rang dully before a disembodied voice came on to the line, tonelessly saying, ‘And on the third stroke, the time will be two thirty-two and ten seconds – bip–bip–bip – and on the third stroke, the time will be two thirty-two and twenty seconds – bip–bip–bip …’ Norris checked his stopwatch: it was accurate.
After McWhirter returned and confirmed the result to the others, they agreed that Bannister was certain of a very good show in Helsinki. They dared not predict a gold medal, but they knew that Bannister considered a three-minute three-quarter mile the measure of top racing shape. He was now seven seconds under this benchmark. All of his training for the last two years had been focused on reaching his peak at exactly this moment – and what a peak it was. He was in a class by himself. The critics – coaches and newspaper columnists – who had condemned him for following his own training schedule and not running in enough pre-Olympic races would soon be silenced.
There was, however, a complication, which McWhirter had yet to tell Bannister. As a journalist for the Star, McWhirter kept his ear to the ground for any breaking news, and he had recently heard something very troubling from British Olympic official Harold Abrahams. Because of the increased number of entrants, a semi-final had been added to the 1,500m contest. In Helsinki, Bannister would have to run not only a first-round heat, but also a semi-final before reaching the final.
The four men bundled into McWhirter’s black Humber and headed back to the city for the afternoon.
When Bannister was not racing around the track, where he looked invincible, the 23-year-old appeared slighter. In trousers and a shirt, his long corded muscles were no longer visible, and it was his face one noticed. His long cheekbones, fair complexion, and haphazard flop of straw-coloured hair across the forehead gave him an earnest expression that turned boyish when he smiled. However, there was quiet aggression in his eyes. They looked at you as if he was sizing you up.
As Norris McWhirter turned out of the park, he finally said, ‘Roger … they put in a semi-final.’
They all knew what he meant: three races in three days. Bannister had trained for two races, not three. Three required a significantly higher level of stamina; Bannister had concentrated on speed work. With two prior races, the nervous energy he relied on would be exhausted by the final – if he made the final. It was as if he were a marksman who had precisely calibrated the distance to his target, then found that his target had been moved out of range. Now it was too late to readjust the sights.
Bannister looked out the window, saying nothing. Away from Motspur Park with its trees and long stretches of open green fields, the roads were choked with exhaust fumes and bordered by drab houses and abandoned lots overgrown with weeds. The closer they got to London, the more they could see of the war’s destruction, the craters and bombed-out walls that had yet to be bulldozed and rebuilt. A fine layer of soot clouded the windows and greyed the rooftops.
The young miler didn’t complain to his friends, although they knew he was burdened by the fact that he was Britain’s great hope for the 1952 Olympics. He was to be the hero of a country in desperate need of a hero.
To pin the hopes of a nation on the singlet of one athlete seemed to invite disaster, but Britain at that time was desperate to win at something. So much had gone wrong for so long that many questioned their country’s standing in the world. Their very way of life had come to seem precarious. ‘It is gone,’ wrote James Morris of his country in the 1950s. ‘Empire, forelock, channel and all … the world has overtaken [us]. We are getting out of date, like incipient dodos. We have reached, none too soon, one of those immense shifts in the rhythm of a nation’s history which occur when the momentum of old success is running out at last.’ The First World War had put an end to Britain’s economic and military might. The depression of the 1930s slowly drained the country’s reserves, and its grasp on India started to slip. Britain moved reluctantly into the Second World War, knowing it couldn’t stand alone against Hitler’s armies. Once the British joined the fight, they had to throw everything into the effort to keep the Nazis from overrunning them. When the war was over they discovered, like the Blitz survivors who emerged onto the street after the sirens had died away, that they were alive, but that they had grim days ahead of them.
Grim days they were. Britain owed £3 billion, principally to the United States, and the sum was growing. Exports had dried up, in large part because half of the country’s merchant fleet had been sunk. Returning soldiers found rubble where their homes had once stood. Finding work was hard, finding a place to live harder. Shop windows remained boarded up. Smog from coal fires deadened the air. Trash littered the alleys. There were queues for even the most basic staples, and when one got to the front of the line, a ration card was required for bread (three and a half pounds per person per week), eggs (one per week), and everything else (which wasn’t much). Children needed ration books to buy their sweets. Trains were overcrowded, hours off schedule, and good luck finding a taxi. If this was victory, asked a journalist, why was it ‘we still bathed in water that wouldn’t come over your knees unless you flattened them?’
And the blows kept falling. The winter of 1946–7, the century’s worst, brought the country to a standstill. Blizzards and power outages ushered in what the Chancellor of the Exchequer called the ‘Annus Horrendus’. It was so cold that the hands of Big Ben iced up, as if time itself had stopped. Spring brought severe flooding, and summer witnessed extremely high temperatures. To add to the misery, there was a polio scare.
Throughout the next five years, ‘austerity’ remained the reality, despite numerous attempts to put the country back in order. Key industries were nationalised, and thousands of dreary prefabricated houses were built for the homeless. In 1951 the Festival of Britain was staged to brighten what critic Cyril Connolly deemed ‘the largest, saddest and dirtiest of the great cities, with its miles of unpainted half-inhabited houses, its chopless chop-houses, its beerless beer pubs … its crowds mooning around the stained green wicker of the cafeterias in their shabby raincoats, under a sky permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover’. The festival, though a nice party, was an obvious attempt to gloss over people’s exhaustion after years of hardship. Those who were particularly bitter said that the festival’s soaring Skylon was ‘just like Britain’, standing there without support. To cap it all, on 6 February 1952 London newspapers rolled off the presses with black-bordered pages: the king was dead. Crowds wearing black armbands waited in lines miles long to see George VI lying in state in Westminster Abbey. As they entered the hall, only the sounds of footsteps and weeping were heard. A great age had passed.
The ideals of that bygone age – esprit de corps, self-control, dignity, tireless effort, fair play, and discipline – were often credited to the country’s long sporting tradition. It was said that throughout the empire’s history, ‘England has owed her sovereignty to her sports.’ Yet even in sport she had recently faltered. The 1948 Olympic Games in London had begun badly when the Olympic flame was accidentally snuffed out on reaching England from Greece. America (the ‘United, Euphoric, You-name-it-they-had-it States’ as writer Peter Lewis put it) dominated the games, winning thirty-eight gold medals to Britain’s three. After that the country had to learn the sour lesson of being a ‘good loser’ in everything from football and cricket to rugby, boxing, tennis, golf, athletics, even swimming the Channel. It looked as though the quintessential English amateur – one who played his sport solely for the enjoyment of the effort and never at the cost of a complete life – simply couldn’t handle the competition. He now looked outdated, inadequate, and tired. For a country that considered its sporting prowess symbolic of its place in the world, this was a distressing situation.
Roger Bannister, born into the last generation of the age that ended with George VI’s death, typified the gentleman amateur. He didn’t come from a family with a long athletic tradition, nor one in which it was assumed he would go to Oxford, as he did, to study medicine and spend late afternoons at Vincent’s, the club whose hundred members represented the university’s elite.
His father, Ralph, was the youngest of eleven children raised in Lancashire, the heart of the English cotton industry and an area often hit by depression. Ralph left home at 15, took the British Civil Service exams, qualified as a low-level clerk, and moved to London. Over a decade later, after working earnestly within the government bureaucracy, he felt settled enough to marry. He met his wife Alice on a visit back to Lancashire, and on 23 March 1929 she gave birth to their first son and second child, Roger Gilbert. The family lived in a modest home in Harrow, north-west London. Forced to abandon their education before reaching university (his mother had worked in a cotton mill), Roger’s parents valued books and learning above everything else. All Roger knew of his father’s athletic interests was that he had once won his school mile and then fainted. Only later in life did he learn that his father carried the gold medal from that race on his watch chain.
Bannister discovered the joy of running on his own while playing on the beach. ‘I was startled and frightened,’ he later wrote of his sudden movement forward on the sand in bare feet. ‘I glanced round uneasily to see if anyone was watching. A few more steps – self-consciously … the earth seemed almost to move with me. I was running now, and a fresh rhythm entered my body.’ Apart from an early passion for moving quickly, nothing out of the ordinary marked his early childhood. He spent the years largely alone, building models, imagining heroic adventures, and dodging neighbourhood bullies, like many boys his age.
When he was 10 this world was broken; an air-raid siren sent him scrambling back to his house with a model boat secured under his arm. The Luftwaffe didn’t come that time, but soon they would. His family evacuated to Bath, but no place was safe. One night, when the sirens sounded and the family took refuge underneath the basement stairs of their new house, a thundering explosion shook the walls. The roof caved in around them, and the Bannister family had to escape to the woods for shelter.
Although the war continued to intrude on their daily lives, mostly in the form of ration books and blacked-out windows, Roger had other problems. As an awkward, serious-minded 12-year-old who was prone to nervous headaches, he had trouble fitting in among the many strangers at his new school in Bath. He won acceptance by winning the annual cross-country race. The year before, after he had finished eighteenth, his house captain had advised him to train, which Bannister had done by running the two-and-a-half-mile course at top speed a couple of times a week. The night before the race the following year he was restless, thinking about how he would chase the ‘third form giant’ who was the favourite. The next day Bannister eyed his rival, noting his cockiness and general state of unfitness. When the race started, he ran head down and came in first. His friends’ surprise would have been trophy enough, but somehow this race seemed to right the imbalance in his life as well. Soon he was able to pursue his studies, as well as interests in acting, music, and archaeology, without feeling at risk of being an outcast – as long as he kept winning races. Possessed of a passion for running, a surfeit of energy, and a preternatural ability to push himself, he won virtually all of them, usually wheezing for breath by the end.
Before he left Bath to attend the University College School in London, the headmaster warned, ‘You’ll be dead before you’re 21 if you go on at this rate.’ His new school had little regard for running, and Bannister struggled to find his place once again. He was miserable. He tried rugby but wasn’t stocky or quick enough; he tried rowing but was placed on the third eight. After a year he wanted out, so at 16 he sat for the Cambridge University entrance exam. At 17 he chose to take a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, since Cambridge had put him off for a year. He never had a problem knowing what he wanted.
Bannister intended to study to become a doctor, but he knew he needed a way not only to fit in but to excel among his fellow students, most of whom, in 1946, were eight years older than he, having deferred placement because of the war. A schoolboy among ex-majors and brigadiers, he realised that running was his best chance to distinguish himself. The year before, his father had taken him to see the gutsy, diminutive English miler Sydney Wooderson take on the six-foot giant Arne Andersson at the first international athletics competition since the war’s end. White City stadium, located in west London, was bedlam as Andersson narrowly beat Wooderson. ‘If there was a moment when things began, that was it for me,’ Bannister later said. In a foot race, unlike other sports, greatness could be won with sheer heart. He sensed he had plenty of that.
Before he even unpacked his bags at Oxford, Bannister sought out athletes at the track. He found no one there, but discovered a notice on a college bulletin board for the University Athletic Club. He promptly mailed a guinea to join but received no response. He decided to go running on the track anyway, even though one of the groundskeepers advised, ‘I’m afraid that you’ll never be any good. You just haven’t got the strength or the build for it.’ Apparently the groundskeeper thought everyone needed to look like Jack Lovelock, the famous Oxford miler: short, compact, with thick, powerful legs. The long-limbed, almost ungainly Bannister persisted nonetheless. Three weeks later, having finally received his membership card, he entered the Freshman’s Sport mile wearing an oil-spotted jersey from his rowing days. He thought it best to lead from the start – a strategy he would afterwards discard – and finished the race in second place with a time of 4:52. After the race, the secretary of the British Olympic Association advised him, ‘Stop bouncing, and you’ll knock twenty seconds off.’ Bannister had never before worn running spikes, and their grip on the track had made him, as he later described, ‘over-stride in a series of kangaroo-like bounds’.
The cruel winter of 1946–7, with its ten-foot snowdrifts, meant that someone had to shovel out a path on the track so the athletes could train; Bannister took to the yeoman’s task, and for his effort won a third-string spot in the Oxford versus Cambridge mile race on 22 March 1947. On that dreary spring day, on the very track at White City where he had watched Wooderson compete, Bannister discovered his true gift for running. He stepped up to the mark feeling the pressure to run well against his university’s arch rival. From the start Bannister held back, letting the others set the pace. The track was wet, and the front of his singlet was spotted black with cinder ash kicked up by the runners ahead of him. After the bell for the final lap, Bannister was exhausted but still close enough to the leaders to finish respectably. All of a sudden, though, he was overwhelmed by a feeling that he just had to win. It was instinct, a ‘crazy desire to overtake the whole field’, as he later explained. Through a cold, high wind on the back straight, he increased the tempo of his stride, and to everyone’s shock, team-mates and competitors alike, he surged past on the outside. In the effort inspired by the confluence of body and will, he felt more alive than ever before. He pushed through the tape twenty yards ahead of the others in 4:30.8. It wasn’t the time that mattered, rather the rush of passing the field with his long, devouring stride. This was ecstasy, and it was the first time Bannister knew for sure there was something remarkable in the way he ran – and something remarkable in the feeling that went with it.
After the race he met Jack Lovelock, the gold medallist in the 1,500m at the 1936 Olympics and the former world record holder in the mile. ‘You mean the Jack Lovelock,’ Bannister said on being introduced. Lovelock was a national hero, Exeter graduate, doctor, and blessed with tremendous speed. It didn’t take much insight on his part to see in Bannister the potential resurrection of British athletics.
Bannister didn’t disappoint. On 5 June he clocked a 4:24.6 mile, beating the time set by his hero Wooderson when he was the same age, 18. In the summer Bannister travelled with the English team on its first post-war international tour, putting in several good runs. In November he was selected as a ‘possible’ for the 1948 Olympics, then turned down the invitation. He wasn’t ready, he decided, to some criticism.
It was in his nature to listen to his own counsel, not that of others. He had taken a coach, Bill Thomas, who had once trained Lovelock, but Bannister soon became disgruntled with him. Thomas attended to Bannister on the track while wearing a bowler hat, suit and waistcoat. He barked instructions at the miler on how to hold his arms or how many laps to run during training. When the young miler asked for the reasoning behind the lessons, Thomas simply replied, ‘Well, you do this because I’m the coach and I tell you.’ When Bannister ran a trial and enquired about his time, Thomas said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ Soon Bannister dropped him, preferring to discover for himself how to improve his performances.
The next year he became Oxford Athletic Club secretary, then quickly its president. He won the Oxford versus Cambridge meet for the second year; he competed in the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) championships in the summer, learning the ropes of first-class competition. Increasingly the newspapers headlined his name. He even saved the day at the opening ceremony for the Olympics when it was discovered that the British team hadn’t been given a flag with which to march into the stadium. Bannister found the back-up flag, smashing the window of the commandant’s car with a brick to retrieve it.
Four years later, he intended to save the British team’s honour again.
Roger Bannister’s preparations for the Helsinki Games began in the autumn of 1950. He had spent the two previous years studying medicine, soaking up university life, hitch-hiking from Paris to Italy, and going on running tours to America, Greece, and Finland. His body filled out. He won some races and lost others but, importantly, he turned himself from an inexperienced, weedy kid into a young man who clearly understood that Oxford and running had opened up worlds to him that otherwise would have remained closed. He was ready to make his Olympic bid, and afterwards to put away his racing spikes for a life devoted to medicine.
Bannister’s plan was to spend one year competing against the best international middle-distance runners in the world, learning their strengths and weaknesses and acclimatising to different environments. Then, in the year before the Games, he would focus exclusively on training to his peak, running in only a few races so as not to take off his edge. The plan was entirely his own. Having spoken to Lovelock about his preparations for the 1936 Olympics, Bannister felt he needed no other guidance.
First he flew to New Zealand over Christmas for the Centennial Games, where he beat the European 1,500m champion Willi Slijkhuis and the Australian mile champion Don Macmillan, both of whom he was likely to face in Helsinki. His mile time was down to 4:09.9, a reduction of more than forty seconds from his first Oxford race three years earlier. While in New Zealand he visited the small village school Lovelock had attended, noticing that the sapling given to the Olympic gold medal winner had now grown into an oak tree. The symbolism wasn’t lost on him. Back in England Bannister continued his fellowship in medicine through the spring of 1951 at Oxford, where he investigated the limits of human endurance and chatted with such distinguished lecturers as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. He then flew to Philadelphia to compete in the Benjamin Franklin Mile, the premier American event in middle-distance running. The press fawned over this foil to the American athlete, commenting on his travelling alone to the event: ‘No manager, no trainer, no masseur, no friends! He’s nuts – or he’s good.’ In front of forty thousand American fans, Bannister crushed the country’s two best milers in a time of 4:08.3. The New York Herald Tribune described him as the ‘worthy successor to Jack Lovelock’. The New York Times quoted one track official as saying, ‘He’s young, strong and fast. There’s no telling what he can do.’
The race brought Bannister acclaim back home. To beat the Americans on their own turf earned one the status of a national hero. When he followed with summer victories at the British Games and the AAA championships, it seemed track officials and the press were ready to award him the Olympic gold medal right then and there. They praised his training as ‘exceptional’, an ‘object lesson’. Of his long, fluid stride, the British press gushed that it was ‘immaculate’ and ‘amazing’. He left rivals standing; he was a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ on the track. After a race that left the crowd laughing at how effortlessly Bannister had won, a British official predicted, ‘Anyone who beats him in the Olympics at Helsinki will have to fly.’
Then the positive press turned quickly to the negative. Following his own plan, Bannister stopped running mile races at summer’s end. Tired from competition, he felt he had learned all he needed during the year and should now dedicate himself to training. When he chose to run the half-mile in an international meet, the papers attacked: ‘Go Back to Your Own Distance, Roger’. This was only the beginning of the criticism, but Bannister remained focused on his goal.
To escape the attention, he journeyed to Scotland to hike and sleep under the stars for two weeks. One late afternoon, after swimming in a lake, he began to jog around to ease his chill. Soon enough he found himself running for the sheer exhilaration of it, across the moor and towards the coast. The sky was filled with crimson clouds, and as he ran, a light rain started to fall. With the sun still warming his back, a rainbow appeared in front of him, and he seemed to run towards it. Along the coast the rhythm of the water breaking against the rocks eased him, and he circled back to where he had begun. Cool, wet air filled his lungs. Running into the sun now, he had trouble seeing the ground underneath his feet, but still he rushed forward, alive with the movement. Finally spent as the sun disappeared from the horizon, he tumbled down a slight hill and rested on his back, his feet bleeding but feeling rejuvenated. He had needed to reconnect to the joy of running, away from the tyranny of the track.
Throughout the winter of 1951–2, Bannister immersed himself into his first year of medical school at St Mary’s Hospital in London, learning the basics of taking a patient history and working the wards. He was, by the way, also training for the Olympics. By the spring he had developed his stamina and began speed work on the track. When he announced that he wouldn’t defend his British mile championship, the athletics community objected. It was unthinkable. He had obligations to amateur sport; he had to prove he deserved his Olympic spot; he must take a coach now; he couldn’t duck his British rivals. Bannister made no big press announcements defending his reasons, he simply stuck to his plan, trusting it. As isolating as this plan was, so far it had taken him exactly where he wanted – so far. Meanwhile, most other athletes trained under the guidance and direction of the British amateur athletics officials.
On 28 May 1952, Bannister clocked a 1:53 half-mile at Motspur Park with his ‘space-eating stride’. Ten days later he entered the mile at the Inter-Hospitals Meet and won by 150 yards. Maybe he knew what he was doing. The press turned to writing that he would silence his critics at Helsinki and that his training was ‘well-advanced’. Compared to those of the top international 1,500m men, his times were sufficient. His ‘pulverizing last lap’ would likely win the day. Even L. A. Montague, the Manchester Guardian’s esteemed athletics correspondent, trotted out to explain that Bannister was the ‘more sensitive, often more intelligent, runner who burns himself up in giving of his best in a great race’. Bannister was Britain’s best chance at the gold medal, and Montague wondered, ‘Do [critics] really think that they suddenly know more about him than he knows himself?’
Although he lost an 800m race at White City stadium in early July, the headlines exclaimed, ‘Don’t worry about Bannister’s defeat – he knows what he is doing!’ Ably assisted by the press, Bannister had painted himself into a corner. He was favoured to bring back gold by everyone from the head of the AAA to revered newspaper columnists – and, by association, by his countrymen as well. Of course, there weren’t going to be any scapegoats if he failed. ‘No alibis,’ as Bannister said himself. ‘Victory at Helsinki was the only way out.’ A part of him suspected that he had manoeuvred himself into this tight position on purpose. Come the Olympic final, he would have an expectant crowd, the rush of competition, two years of dedicated training, the expectation that it was his last race before retirement, and nobody to blame but himself if he lost. This was motivation.
By 17 July most of the British Olympic team had left for Finland, team manager Jack Crump declaring upon arrival in Helsinki, ‘We will not let Britain down.’ But, though he would have to join the team soon, Bannister was still in London. Like a few other athletes, he wanted to avoid the media frenzy in the prelude to the Games, and the inevitable waiting around, worrying about upcoming events. His friend Chris Chataway, the 5,000m hopeful, had also delayed his departure. The two scoured London for dark goggles to curtain the twenty-one hours of Scandinavian daylight. Given that one rarely saw the sun in London, it proved a difficult search. Bannister also sought out a morning newspaper.
It didn’t take him long to find a story headline – ‘Semi-Finals for the Olympic 1,500 Metres’ – that confirmed what Norris McWhirter had told him the day before about the added heat. ‘I could hardly believe it,’ Bannister later explained. ‘In just the length of time it took to read those few words the bottom had fallen out of my hopes.’ Worse, he had drawn a tough eliminating heat in the first round.
As he went about his day in the smog-choked London streets, the crisp air and fast tracks he expected to enjoy in Helsinki seemed threateningly close at hand. One could hardly have blamed him had he not wanted to go at all.
2 (#ulink_a9b8dedb-1d01-5c4b-b44b-c51486fe5dab)
The essential thing in life is not so much conquering as fighting well.
Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games
In the narrow concrete tunnel, Wes Santee stuck to his position in the seven-man line, waiting to move forward as the first of the American team marched into Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium through the Marathon Gate. The applause from the stands reverberated in the tunnel, sounding as if the whole of mankind had come to watch the opening ceremony parade. Santee, his feet more accustomed to cowboy boots or track spikes, stepped ahead in white patent leather shoes. His outfit was a departure from his typical attire of Western shirts and jeans. Like the rest of his team-mates, he wore a dark flannel jacket with silver buttons, grey flannel slacks, and a poplin hat whose brim he had folded to make it look more like a cowboy hat.
The 20-year-old University of Kansas sophomore towered over most of those around him. At six foot one inch, with much of that height in his legs, he looked the clean-cut American athlete, buzz cut included. His shoulders were wide, and he bristled with energy. His face easily lit with a smile, and he almost always said what he thought, with a Midwestern twang. One had the sense that he wore his emotions out in the open, but that this vulnerability had a limit buttressed with steel.
That afternoon of 19 July 1952, he was nothing but a bundle of nervous anticipation as he moved towards the tunnel’s mouth. Rain streaked across the opening. He peered past it into the stadium, where hundreds of athletes circled the track. They were dressed in a kaleidoscope of colours and styles: pink turbans, flower-patterned shirts, green and gold blazers, black raincoats, orange hats. It was impossible to tell where each team was from because all the flag inscriptions were in Finnish. Santee could not even pronounce the translation for the United States: Yhdysvaltain. The Soviets were already settled on the infield, wearing their cream suits and maroon ties, lined up as neatly as an army regiment. It was their first Olympics since 1912, and they had made no secret of the fact that they were out to beat the Americans.
Finally Santee cleared the tunnel and moved in file towards the track, his head swivelling about to take in the three-tiered stadium and its seventy thousand spectators. It was an awesome sight, like nothing he had ever witnessed. So many people from so many places, charged with excitement and speaking so many different languages. And they had all come this afternoon simply to watch them march around the track, not even to see them compete. On an electric signboard, the likes of which Santee had seen only a few times, were the words Citius, Altius, Fortius – Faster, Higher, Stronger. He had made it. He was an Olympic athlete representing his country.
After marching around the mud-soaked track, he followed the row of athletes to his spot on the infield for the ceremony’s beginning. He felt as if his eyes weren’t wide enough to take in everything happening around him. This was a long way from Ashland, the farming town deep in the south-western part of Kansas where he was raised. The size of the Helsinki stadium alone was enough to marvel at. He remembered arriving at the University of Kansas for the first time and going to the big auditorium for freshman orientation. He’d been with his team-mate Lloyd Koby, who also came from the kind of small town where electricity was just on its way in and a rooster’s crow was the only wake-up call one knew. Koby had looked across the numerous tiers of seats, gauged the height of the rafters, turned to Santee, and said, ‘Boy, this building would hold a lot of hay.’ It was not so much a joke as the only context they knew. But that auditorium was nothing compared to this place, its steep concrete stands seeming to reach the sky.
At a rostrum on the track in front of Santee, the chairman of the organising committee began to speak, first in Finnish, then in Swedish, French, and English, about the Herculean efforts that had gone into these Games. His countrymen had cleared forests, put up hundreds of new buildings of stucco, granite, and steel, enlisted thousands of volunteers, and opened their homes to strangers from around the globe. The stadium in which the opening ceremony was taking place had been the chief target of Russian bombers at the start of the Second World War because of its symbolic value. Now it was once again alive with people, anxious for the competition to commence.
The chairman finished his speech by introducing Finland’s president, who stood at the microphone and announced, ‘I declare the Fifteenth Olympic Games open!’ To the sound of trumpets, the Olympic flag with its five interlocking circles was raised on the stadium flagpole. Then a twenty-one-gun salute boomed. As its echo dissipated, 2,500 quaking pigeons were released from their boxes to swoop and pivot in the air. Santee looked skyward as the birds escaped one by one, carrying the message that the Olympics had begun.
Before the last of them soared away, the scoreboard went blank, and then appeared the words: ‘The Olympic Torch is being brought into the Stadium by … P-A-A-V-O N-U-R-M-I.’ Pandemonium ensued. Santee had passed the bronze statue of Nurmi at the stadium entrance and had seen his classic figure on posters wallpapered throughout Helsinki, but few had expected to see the man himself. Peerless Paavo, the Phantom Finn, the Ace of Abo. Nurmi was a national hero in Finland, the godfather of modern athletics. At one time he owned every record from 10,000m down to 1,500m. At the 1924 Paris Olympics he claimed three gold medals in less than two days. Put simply, he was the greatest. Now bald-headed, slight of stature, and 55 years old, Nurmi ran into the stadium in a blue singlet with the torch in his right hand, his stride as graceful and effortless as ever. Photographers manoeuvred into position. The athletes, Santee included, broke ranks, storming to the track side to catch a glimpse of the unconquerable man.
The fire leaping from the birch torch Nurmi held had been lit in Olympia, Greece, on 25 June and had since weathered a five-thousand-mile journey across land and water. When Nurmi finished his run around the track, as athletes and spectators alike jostled one another to get a better look, he passed the flame to a quartet of athletes at the base of the 220-foot-tall white tower at the stadium’s south end. While they ascended the tower, at the top of which another Finnish champion, Hannes Kolehmainen, waited, a whiterobed choir stood to sing. The stadium was reverently silent. Kolehmainen took the torch and tilted it to light the Olympic flame, which would burn until the Games ended.
Santee and the other athletes returned to their places in the field. From a distance each team looked uniform, its athletes dressed in matching outfits and standing side by side. On closer inspection, they were an odd assembly of men and women: stocky wrestlers, tall sprinters, wide-shouldered shot-putters, cauliflower-eared boxers, miniature gymnasts, crooked-legged horsemen, and weather-beaten yachtsmen – all with their own ambitions for victory in the days ahead. As Santee stood in the middle of this medley of people, looking at the Olympic flame and hearing the jumble of voices all around him, the strangeness of the scene overwhelmed him. He had been overseas only one other time. Except for travelling to athletics meets, he had never left the state of Kansas. Now he was in this enormous amphitheatre in a country where night lasted only a few hours. He didn’t have his coach with him. He had few friends among the athletes. He had rarely faced international competition. He was scheduled to run in the 5,000m even though the 1,500m was his best distance. Filled with these thoughts, Santee gulped. The tightness in his throat felt like a stone. Indeed, he was a long way from Kansas now.
Had his father had his way, in the summer of 1952 Wes would still have been pitching hay, fixing fence posts, and ploughing fields back in Ashland. Most fathers want their sons to have a better life, but Wes Santee didn’t have such a dad.
David Santee was born in Ohio in the late 1800s. He lived a helter-skelter childhood, never advancing past the second grade (for 7- to 8-year-olds). He was a keen braggart and adept at the harmonica, but his only employable skill was hard labour. Over six feet tall and weighing 2201b, he had the size for it. His cousin married a ranch owner named Molyneux in western Kansas, and David Santee went out to work the eight thousand acres as a hired hand. He met Ethel Benton, a tall, gentle woman who had studied to be a teacher, on a blind date. They were soon married, and shortly afterwards expecting the first of three children. On 25 March 1932, the town doctor was called to the ranch to deliver Wes Santee. He came into the world kicking.
Santee was raised on the Molyneux cattle and wheat ranch five miles outside Ashland. It was practically a pioneer’s existence, with an outhouse, no running water, no electricity. If you wanted to listen to the radio, you had to hook it up to the car battery. Farm life was vulnerable to the often cruel hand of nature. The Santees lived through the drought of the Dust Bowl years, when sand squeezed through every crack in the house and made the sky so dark that the chickens went to roost in mid-afternoon. They survived tornados and storms of grasshoppers that ate everything they could chew, including the handle of a pitchfork left out against a fence post. In good times and bad, Mr Molyneux ruled the ranch. He liked the Santee boy’s spirit and was more a father to Wes than his own ever was. Molyneux was a successful rancher and businessman; he owned Ashland’s dry goods store and enjoyed taking the boy into town to buy him a double-dip ice cream cone at the drugstore. But Molyneux died when Wes was in the fourth grade, and by the age of 10 his happy childhood had ended abruptly. From that point on he was his father’s property, suffering his bad temper while working a man’s day on the ranch. His only freedom was running.
For Santee, running was play. He ran everywhere. ‘I just don’t like to fiddle around,’ he said. ‘If I was told to get the hoe, I’d run to get it. If I had to go to the barn, I’d run.’ The only bus in town was a flat-bed truck, so instead of riding, Santee ran the five miles to school. When he returned in the early afternoon, he ran from his house into the fields to help with the ploughing or to corral one of the four hundred head of cattle. At dusk, when his father called it a day, an exhausted Santee didn’t walk home for supper, he ran – fast, wearing his cowboy boots. As the distance from his father lengthened, a weight lifted from his shoulders, and by the time he had washed up and changed clothes he was as fresh as if he hadn’t worked at all.
Later, when a remark, a look, or seemingly nothing at all set off his father’s rage, this freshness was torn from Wes. He took the brunt of his father’s anger, saving his younger brother Henry, who suffered from rickets as a child, and his younger sister Ina May from the worst of it. David Santee dispensed his cruelty with forearm, fist, rawhide buggy whip, or whatever else was at hand. Once it was a hammer. Wes considered himself lucky that his old man didn’t drink or the situation could have been really bad. Some sons of abusive fathers want to become big enough to fight back; Santee wanted to become fast enough to get away.
Very early on he recognised that he had a gift for running. He was never very good in the sprint, but if the game was to run around the block twice, he always won. In eighth grade, when Wes was in his early teens, the high-school coach came down to evaluate which kids were good at which sports. That was how a small town developed its athletes. The coach threw out a football to see who threw or kicked it the furthest, threw out a basketball to see who made a couple of jump shots. Then he told Santee and the other twenty kids in his class to run to the grain elevator. Within a few hundred yards Santee was all alone and knew he had the others whipped. This was ‘duck soup’ he said to himself as he ran to the grain elevator and back and took a shower before the others had returned. Most walked half the distance.
When a new kid named Jack Brown, who was rumoured to be quite a runner, arrived in town, the townspeople urged Santee to race him. The first day of his freshman year, Santee joined Brown at the starting line of the half-mile track used for horse races and almost lapped him by the finish. It felt good to be better than everybody else at something. What had started as a combination of fun – running to chase mice or the tractor – and a means to escape his father’s clutches had now become a way to excel. Each race he won bolstered his pride.
J. Allen Murray was there to help him on this path. Murray was Ashland’s high-school track and field coach (as well as history teacher and basketball/football coach). He believed Santee could be the next Glenn Cunningham, the most famous United States middle-distance runner and a Kansas native. The problem was that Santee barely had enough time for classes, let alone running, because his father wanted him home to work. Murray told Wes that if he didn’t have time to train, he should just continue to run everywhere he went. That was fine with Santee.
Finally the time came for his first track meet. Scheduled for a Saturday, the meet was delayed until Monday because of a thunderstorm. Unfortunately, Santee worked on Mondays, and he knew his father would object to losing an afternoon of his free labour. Murray told him he would take care of it. The next evening he walked up the steps to the Santees’ house. He had invited himself to dinner. Wes’s father normally greeted visitors with a .22-calibre pistol and an offer of five minutes to get off his property. This time David Santee at least pushed open the door, but his hospitality ended there. Through dinner and dessert, Coach Murray explained to Wes’s parents why they should allow their son to attend the meet – how it was good for the boy to be challenged in competition. David Santee didn’t utter a word the entire evening: not a yes, not a no. Murray left without an answer, and Wes disappeared into the fields afterwards. Alone in the dark, he clawed at the dirt and grass, wondering how he would ever get out of this place. If he hadn’t learned to hate his father before this night, he did so now.
The next day Coach Murray told him to get up early on Monday to do his chores; he would pick him up at seven o’clock. Santee rose at four, hauled feed, milked the cows, and did everything required of him before his coach arrived. David Santee was working in the fields and thought his son had simply left for school. It was the first time Wes had left the county, and although he was the youngest in the mile race, unaware of competition tactics and scared after having disobeyed his father, he placed third. He was awarded a red ribbon and could barely stand still with the excitement. But then he had to go home. When he entered the house, his father was sitting at the table. From the grim look on his face he obviously knew that Wes had gone to the meet.
‘I won third place,’ Wes said with sheepish excitement.
‘If you have time to miss school and do all this’ – his father bit off each word – ‘then you have time to get all the rest of the ploughing done.’
For some eighteen hours, Wes Santee sat on the tractor, ploughing miles of fields without a break for lunch, and certainly not for school. His throat burned from thirst, his spine ached from the jarring movements of the tractor on uneven terrain, and his hands were rubbed raw from gripping the wheel. Working from dawn until ten o’clock at night, Wes finished two days of ploughing in one. As a man who spent most of his youth labouring on the farm, he would remember that day as the hardest he had ever endured. When he finally returned to school, Murray asked if he was all right. Santee nodded. Murray then asked him if he wanted to go to the next meet in Mead, Kansas. Santee said yes.
After Wes left, Murray called the ranch to say one thing to Santee’s father: ‘I want you to bring your truck in and haul some kids to Mead.’ David Santee didn’t reply, but the tone in Coach Murray’s voice made him understand that he didn’t have a choice in the matter. Like most bullies, David Santee folded when someone finally stood up to him. The next week he showed up on time with his truck, and though it angered him that his son was wasting time that would be better spent on the ranch, he never got in the way of Wes’s running again.
Over the next four years, Wes Santee scorched around tracks throughout Kansas. He won two state mile championships, broke Glenn Cunningham’s state high-school record, became the favourite son of Ashland, and was targeted by college track recruiters from coast to coast. He had found his way out, and now there was nothing that could stand in his way. He trained as much as possible, studied hard to keep his grades up, and decided not to let things get too far with his high-school girlfriend because recruiters were not interested in athletes with wives or children. Shutting himself down with her was not easy, but he had to get out of Ashland.
When Bill Easton, the University of Kansas track and field coach, offered him a scholarship in 1949, Santee accepted. Over the previous two years Easton had won his confidence, probably because he was everything Santee’s father was not: he wore a coat and tie, spoke intelligently, won friends easily, and backed up his words with action. Under Easton’s guidance and encouragement, the KU track team had become one of the country’s best.
The summer before he left for college, Wes had his last confrontation with his father. While he dug yet another six-foot-deep hole in the hard ground for the soon-to-arrive electricity poles, his father started pounding on his back with his fists because he was digging too slowly. That was it. The 17-year-old, his shirt soaked with sweat and hands blistered from the work, stormed back to the house, informed his mother he was leaving, and said goodbye to Henry and Ina May. In the stable, he saddled Bess, the horse his father had given him, and put a halter on a second mare, which Wes had yet to name (a local farmer had given her to Wes in exchange for breaking some horses). He then led his two horses towards the front gate, a cloud of dust from their hooves trailing behind them.
Suddenly, his father appeared from behind the barn and blocked his way. ‘You’re not taking that horse anywhere,’ he said, gesturing towards Bess.
Sensing the coiled violence in the rigid way his father stood in front of him, Wes grimly said ‘Okay’ and unstrapped his saddle from Bess. He then threw it over the other horse, which had never been ridden before, and led her through the gate, leaving his father without a goodbye. When he was two hundred yards away, Santee carefully hoisted himself up on the horse and rode into town. He stayed with a friend who owned the local ice plant and had once told him that he could stay with him if things ever got too bad at the ranch. Santee lived there until college began.
In Lawrence, Santee fell under the protection of Bill Easton. The coach invited the youth, who had almost nothing with him but the clothes on his back, to stay at his house until his dormitory was ready. Santee might have been bold-talking and powerful, but he needed someone to care for him. The first morning, over a breakfast of bacon and eggs, Easton told Santee that he needed to set a good example and help lead the team. Easton spoke to him like an equal, and Santee listened.
Coach Murray had given him the opportunity to run; Coach Easton showed Santee how to turn his raw talent as a runner into greatness. It had little to do with changing his short, clipped stride, which had become ingrained in his youth while running along plough furrows and through pastures where a long stride would have been dangerous on the uneven terrain. Santee did not bring his arms back in a normal long arc, nor drive to the extreme with his kicking foot like most distance runners. Instead he had the quick arm swing and knee action of a sprinter. But with his native speed, coordination, long legs, strong shoulders, and ability to relax, he was able to sustain this sprinter style over long distances. Easton was convinced that reshaping his stride into a more classical motion would do more harm than good, so he taught Santee to harness his power through training, pace judgement, and focus. Soon enough, seniors on his team were struggling to keep up with him in practice and competition.
Led by Santee, the freshman squad won the Big Seven cross-country and indoor championships – the league that comprised the biggest and best colleges in sport in the Midwest, namely Kansas State, Iowa State, University of Missouri, University of Colorado, University of Nebraska and University of Oklahoma alongside University of Kansas. Santee set the national collegiate two-mile record in 9:21.6 and began to win headlines as the ‘long-legged loper’ who would ‘play havoc’ with most, if not all, of Glenn Cunningham’s records by the time he was finished. In the spring of 1951, at the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championships, he took seventeen seconds off the 5,000m record in the junior division, and the next day he placed second in the senior division. By the end of his freshman year, his mile time hovered in the four-minute teens (4:15, 4:16, 4:17). That summer he earned a spot on an AAU-sponsored tour to Japan and found himself running in Osaka, Sapporo, and Tokyo. There he met the American half-miler Mai Whitfield who had won two gold medals at the 1948 Olympic Games. While some athletes were hesitant to share a hotel room with the black track star, Santee gladly jumped at the opportunity. Whitfield taught the young miler to make sure to keep his toes pointed straight ahead when striding, so as not to lose even a quarter inch of distance with each stride. He also explained to Wes that a miler had the time and physical reserves to make only one offensive and one defensive move in the course of a race. When Santee returned to Kansas in August, he felt certain he was ready for more international competition. He announced to local reporters, ‘I want to make the Olympic team and go to Helsinki, Finland.’
In his second, or sophomore, year this ‘sinewy-legged human jet’, as one reporter described Santee, proved that he was on his way. Some began to compare him to Emil Zatopek, the Czech star who ran everything from the mile to the marathon at world-class levels. This was the level of enthusiasm Santee generated on and off the track. He loved racing in front of large crowds and never tired. His talent just barely outmeasured his confidence. On a flight to one meet, a Kansas Jayhawks team-mate held out a newspaper article to show Wes. ‘Look what it says here … [Santee’s college competitor] Billy [Herd] hasn’t been beaten in any kind of a race for almost two years. That includes relay carries … He’s gobbled up some pretty good boys too, Wes.’
Santee stretched his boots out into the aisle. ‘Yeah, he’s a good boy. But he hasn’t tried to digest me yet.’
In two-mile races during his sophomore year, Santee lapped his competitors. In cross-country meets he was slipping into his sweats before other runners had finished. During the indoor season he set record after record in the mile, leading his team to a host of dual meet victories. It was almost too easy. On campus he ran from class to class, and professors set their watches by the precise time at which he started his training sessions.
In April 1952 at the Drake University Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, one of the year’s most important outdoor track meets, Santee anchored the four-mile relay for his team. When the baton was passed to him, Georgetown’s Joe LaPierre was some sixty yards ahead. Santee blazed three 62-second quarter-miles, yet had trouble gaining ground because LaPierre was running brilliantly himself. As Santee sped into the first turn of the last lap, Easton yelled out, ‘He’s wilting in the sun!’ Santee was finally gaining. Stride after stride he closed the gap. When he burst through the tape yards ahead of LaPierre, setting a national collegiate mile record in 4:06.8, Wes Santee had officially arrived. ‘Santee’s not human,’ said the Georgetown coach. The Des Moines Register quipped, ‘Santee stuck out above every other athlete like the Aleutian Islands into the Bering Sea.’ The national papers picked up the best quote, from the Drake coach: ‘Santee is the greatest prospect for the four-minute mile America has yet produced. He not only has the physical qualifications, but the mental and spiritual as well.’
But first Santee turned his sights to the Olympics. As holder of national titles in the 1,500m and the 5,000m, he by right qualified for the American trial in each. In mid-June he went to California with Easton to spend a week training. They decided together that he should participate in both trials. ‘I just want to make the Olympic team,’ he told his coach. ‘Time or race isn’t important.’ On 27 June, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Santee placed second in the 5,000m trial, guaranteeing a trip to Helsinki. That night he dined on his customary steak and potato dinner and enjoyed quiet conversation with Easton back at the hotel. The next day, braving one of the coldest June days in Los Angeles history, he readied himself for the 1,500m trial in front of forty-two thousand spectators. Santee looked around for Easton, but couldn’t find him. A whistle was blown, the race called, and Santee approached the starting line alongside milers Bob McMillen and Warren Druetzler, both of whom he was sure he could beat. In the programme listing the qualifiers for the 3.40 p.m. race, Santee was predicted to ‘win as he pleases – he has all year’. He was revved to go.
Suddenly, two AAU officials grabbed his arm and shuffled him off the track before he could protest. ‘Wes, they’re not going to let you run,’ one official said.
‘What do you mean?’ Santee asked, shrugging off their hold on him. ‘What’s going on?’
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Easton running across the field. Though wearing a jacket, tie, and dress shoes, he was moving fast.
The race starter called, ‘Runners to your mark!’ and then the gun fired. Santee watched helplessly as the trial started without him.
Easton finally made it to his side. ‘Wes, I’m sorry. We’ve been in a meeting for over an hour and they’re saying you’re not good enough to run both races, and they won’t let you drop out of the 5,000 to run the 1,500.’
This wasn’t right. Only the previous week he had run the third fastest 1,500m time in AAU history: 3:49.3. It was the fastest time by an American in years. Santee welled with anger, and with balled fists looked ready to act out his frustration.
Easton pulled him to one side. The coach had the stocky build of a wrestler, and even then, in his late forties with a fleshy, oval face, he looked capable of stopping this tall athlete if necessary. His voice was calm. ‘They told me you were only 19 [sic] – not good enough to run the 5,000 against Zatopek followed up with the 1,500.I told them we don’t particularly want to run the 5,000; we want to run the 1,500. Their only response was, “You qualified for that, and you have to stay with it.”’
There was nothing to be done. Easton knew that no Olympic rule forbade an athlete from participating in two events. If he qualified, he qualified. Those were the rules, but the AAU ran the show, and if a rule interfered with what the AAU wanted, its leader either ignored the rule or changed it. This was the first time, yet unfortunately not the last, that the AAU would stand in Santee’s way. Yes, he was off to Helsinki to race in the 5,000m, but his best chance of coming home with a medal was in the 1,500m.
The three weeks between the trial and the opening ceremony in Helsinki was a whirlwind. Santee nearly died on a flight from Los Angeles to St Louis when the plane carrying America’s Olympic athletes went into a tailspin and passengers were thrown from their seats. When the plane finally righted itself, the preacher and polevaulter Bob Richards walked down the aisle asking for confessions. After a long layover in St Louis, they arrived in New York. Santee participated in the national TV show Blind Date, hosted by Arlene Francis, as well as the first Olympic telethon with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. He ran in an exhibition three-quarter-mile race on Randall’s Island and set a new American record of 2:58.3, not to mention leaving the Olympic 1,500m qualifiers far behind. The effort was born of frustration: to show the AAU officials his speed and prove their decision wrong. After a flurry of press interviews, he flew from New York to Newfoundland, then to London and, finally, to Helsinki. By the time Santee arrived in Finland he was a jumble of excitement, jet lag, hope, aggravation, patriotism, fear, and confusion – a very different cocktail of emotions from what he needed to perform at his best.
But there he was at the opening ceremony, right in the middle of it all and wanting to prove he deserved to stand side by side with the best runners in the world. When the ceremony ended, the 5,870 athletes from sixty-seven nations filed out of the stadium, soaked and cold. Santee had only a few more days to pull himself together for his qualifying round. His legs had never failed him before, and no matter the obstacle or his state of mind, he expected them to see him through once again.
3 (#ulink_46dced30-dc4a-593d-8aa3-0ddcd97e383d)
To be great, one does not have to be mad, but definitely it helps.
Percy Cerutty, Australian athletics coach
All was quiet in Kapyla, the Olympic village in a forest of pine trees twenty miles outside Helsinki. John Landy and three of his four room-mates – Les Perry, Don Macmillan, and Bob Prentice – lay in their iron-framed beds. The Arctic twilight crept in around the edges of the window, the sheets were as coarse as burlap, and the piles of track clothes and shoes reeked, but the Australians were resting easily, exhausted from being thousands of miles from home and trying to prepare for the most important athletics competition of their lives. In the days before an Olympian’s event, he felt as if he were looking over the edge of a cliff; the nerves, upset stomach, and general unease took a lot out of an athlete. The anticipation was almost as trying as the event itself. Sleep was the only relief on offer, if one could finally fall asleep.
‘Wake up! Wake up! You don’t need all this sleep!’ Percy Cerutty yelled as he burst into the room, swinging the door wide open and switching on the lights.
‘Bloody hell, Percy!’ groaned one of his athletes. ‘Thanks for waking us.’
‘You blokes don’t need all this sleep,’ their coach shouted back. At 57, Cerutty was a whirling dervish, a short, fit man with a flowing white mane of hair, goatee, toffee-coloured face, blue eyes, and the kind of voice that could wake the dead when raised. It was often raised.
‘All what sleep?’ his athletes retorted.
‘Ah, you’re hiding in here. You’re avoiding reality!’ Cerutty bounced around the floor, kicking up little wakes of cement dust. ‘The world is gathered here just outside that doorway, and all you fellas can think of is sleep. Sleep won’t get you anywhere.’ He was really getting going now. When Cerutty started a rant, he went on for a while. They had to stop him.
It might have been a single voice, but it was their collective annoyance that finally said, ‘Look, shut the hell up, Percy. It’s all right for you to wander around grandstanding, but we’re the ones who have to run. You’ve been carrying on non-stop since we got here, when all we’re trying to do is prepare to race. You’re supposed to be here to help us.’ Les Perry had to face the mighty Emil Zatopek; Bob Prentice would run a marathon; and Macmillan and Landy would toe the line with the greatest field of middle-distance runners in Olympic history. Cerutty had chosen to crash with his protégés, whether they liked it or not. They had been patient with him, but now he would have to excuse them for finally taking a stand against his antics.
After the athletes had joined him in London on 20 June (as an unofficial, non-sponsored coach, Cerutty had had to pay his own way and could afford the journey from Australia only by slow boat) for a series of pre-Olympic races, Cerutty had provoked incident after incident. They knew he needed to attract attention to promote his coaching techniques, but at what cost? Prancing around Motspur Park wearing only a pair of white shorts, he’d heckled other runners. At White City he had walked up to Roger Bannister, close enough to feel his breath, and said, ‘So, you’re Bannister … We’ve come to do you.’ He had showboated to the journalists, too. ‘Others can run faster,’ he’d boasted, ‘but none can run harder than I.’ He was dragged off screaming from one meet because he wouldn’t leave the track. On arriving in Helsinki, Cerutty had made a beeline to visit Paavo Nurmi without an invitation, and he had stayed so late with Zatopek that the Czech runner was forced to offer his bed to the Australian coach and sleep in the woods himself. His athletes were used to him, but couldn’t he have left his eccentricities in Australia? This was the Olympics. Enough was enough.
While Cerutty scrambled about the room, Landy and the others shielded their eyes from the light. Earlier that evening, Landy had scaled the fence surrounding the Olympic training arena to get in some extra training, so he was particularly tired. Compared to Don Macmillan, the miler in the bed next to him, who had long legs and a powerful chest, Landy was small. His 150lb were stretched over a narrow five-foot-eleven-inch frame, and with his quiet voice, soft brown eyes, and shag of curly hair, he hardly stood out in a room. Yet he had a strong presence. In part it was because of his intelligence, which was lively, well rounded, and quick. He also possessed a deep and infectious laugh. But mostly it was an intangible quality that people noticed, a feeling that Landy possessed a reservoir of calm, uncompromising will. In conversation with him, one immediately had the sense that he would be a rock in a storm, and that a friendship with him would endure.
Although Landy had been last on the list to make the Australian team, an honour that earned him a chance to compete but not the funds to make the trip, he had done very well in the six weeks since leaving Melbourne. In London he had placed second in the British AAA championship mile race – a surprise to himself and everybody else in the White City stadium. He’d followed that race with meets in Belfast, Glasgow, Middlesbrough, and another in London. Back home in Australia the press began to pay attention, commenting on his ‘paralyzing burst’ and how many experts ‘had not seen a runner over the last fifteen years with such relaxation, smoothness, and style’. He had even set a new two-mile record with a time of 8:54, a feat that resulted in his inclusion in the 5,000m heats on top of the 1,500m. It also improved the odds posted on him to bring back a medal. Now he just needed some sleep.
Landy and his three friends knew they owed their presence in Helsinki mainly to Cerutty, this madcap little man with his strange ideas about pushing oneself to the limit. After all, they were Cerutty’s gang. Unfortunately, enlightenment came at a cost.
To develop four Australian distance runners to Olympic standards had taken more than a sleep-deprivation regime. Unlike Finland, Australia wasn’t a country known for investing either attention or dollars in athletics. The six state amateur athletic associations ran perpetually in the red. Training methods were years behind European and American advances. Some Australians even thought too much exercise was bad for one’s health. As an athlete from the 1950s put it, ‘Runners were oddities; long-distance runners were very peculiar people; and those who ran the marathon were crazy.’ The country had a long tradition in track and field, but it was marked by neglect, a focus on gambling in professional foot races, lackadaisical training, a dearth of talent, and very little international success. Spectators and athletes alike had to pay at the gate, yet the expense of running meets consistently fell short of revenues. In promoter’s jargon, the sport ‘didn’t sell’.
Facilities for training and events were lacking as well. Australia, nearly the size of the continental United States, had only two standard athletics fields. One of those was in Melbourne, Landy’s hometown, but as Joseph Galli, a cigar-chomping, omnipresent athletics reporter of the time, wrote, ‘Olympic Park [was] a depressing shambles – lank grass covers the earth banking, dressing rooms are dirty and primitive, and the burnt-out stand remains as mute testimony of the unwillingness of Government and civic leaders to give amateur athletes the small, permanent stadium they need for the future.’ The track itself was a disaster; runners would have posted better times circling a potholed city block through rush-hour traffic.
This is not to say that Australia cared little for sport in general: among sport-crazed nations, it reached the height of bedlam. Early in their history, Australians had imported the English love of sport, and over the years had taken it to an entirely different level. It has been noted that for every thirty words in the Australian language, one has to do with sport. In the early 1950s a Saturday Evening Post correspondent explained how the country’s sports heroes were accorded a respect greater than that given to ‘ministers of State or Gospel’, and their fans were among the world’s most avid. Total attendance in the minor rounds of Australian football matches typically reached over two million spectators. And when one of their great athletes died, he or she was accorded all the trappings of a state funeral. On the international stage Australians couldn’t claim military might, economic superiority, cultural influence, political power, or historical greatness, but they could make their country known in the sporting arena. Success there fostered pride that was wanting in a nation built by convicts and gold prospectors. In cricket and football, tennis and swimming, Australians were respected, but in athletics much less so. And in distance running, not at all.
Young men such as John Landy needed to be convinced to take up running seriously, for most it was just something one played at. Born on 12 April 1930, Landy showed early promise by winning the sprint race at Malvern Grammar School’s annual sports meeting. When his proud father Gordon, who had been a fine footballer in his day, turned to his wife Elva and said that one day John would be a ‘world champion’, she laughed. He was only 6.
Landy enjoyed a comfortable childhood. His family lived in a gracious, five-bedroom house in East Malvern, an upmarket suburb a few miles south-east of Melbourne, a city of one and a half million born during the Gold Rush. The Landy family dated back to the mid-nineteenth-century influx of immigrants from England and Ireland. Along with his two brothers and two sisters, John was loved and supported by his parents, who were neither too strict nor too lenient. His father, a disciplined man, well respected in the community, was a successful accountant and served on the Melbourne Cricket Club board. His mother had a great interest in history and literature. The children attended private schools and were urged to pursue their own interests. They holidayed in Dromana, a seaside town outside Melbourne. If one asked about the Landy family, the response was that they were ‘good people’.
The young John Landy was more interested in butterfly collecting than in running. When he was 10 years old, he met a local beetle specialist who introduced him to entomology. With three other local kids, Landy often rode his bike twenty miles into the bush to chase after butterflies with a net and a pair of fast legs. At home he would carefully secure his latest find on a mounting board and add the creature’s taxonomic classification for identification.
Only when Landy was 14 and entered Geelong Grammar, an elite boarding school outside the city where the ‘prefects whack[ed] the boys’, that he began to distinguish himself in sport. It was the height of the war in the Pacific, and his father was away from Melbourne handling logistics for the air force. John was part of a group called the Philistines, boys who, as he described it, weren’t regarded as ‘intellectual powerhouses’ but who knew their way around the playing fields. Like the others, Landy preferred Australian Rules football, and he excelled by being quick on his feet and a fierce competitor. In the off-season Landy proved pretty good at athletics events, too. In his final year at Geelong he won the school cross-country, 440-yard, 880-yard, and one-mile track titles – a clean sweep. He then claimed the All Public Schools mile championship in a time of 4:43.8. That was impressive, but two years earlier at the same championship Don Macmillan had posted a time better by seventeen seconds, so not much attention was paid to Landy’s future as a miler outside the small circle of devoted Australian running fans. Still, a handful of people were watching Landy’s efforts on the track.
When he enrolled at Melbourne University to take his degree in agricultural science, Landy continued to dabble in running, but he considered his prospects limited. He had a good head for numbers, was aware of the times of Australian and international stars, and given his progress to date he thought his best time in the mile would be 4:20. In whatever sport he pursued, he wanted to be the best, and running laps around the track didn’t appear to repay the effort involved, particularly as he began to lose more races than he won. During his second year in college, one spent 120 miles north-east of the city to learn the more practical side of agricultural science (mending fences, driving tractors, tending to sheep and cattle), Landy won the Hanlon ‘best and fairest’ footballer trophy, a distinguished prize. While there, he didn’t win any foot races. More than ever, playing half centre halfback looked to be the right choice for his undergraduate sporting activities. He liked being part of a team as well. Like many Australian athletes before him who had great potential, he was losing interest in running as a result of a lack of encouragement and insightful training.
But in late 1950, everything changed. Like many Geelong students, Landy had joined the school’s athletic club after graduation in order to participate in meets. The club captain, marathoner Gordon Hall, had advised him to alternate days of cross-country and sprint running. He took that advice. After a race at Olympic Park, however, Hall approached him and said, ‘You’re not fit.’ He suggested Landy speak to his own coach, Percy Cerutty, who was a fixture at Olympic Park; to find him, all one had to do was listen for his piercing voice. The two went to see Cerutty, and Hall introduced Landy, who, though not exceptionally tall, towered over the bantamweight 116lb coach.
Cerutty stroked his chin and finally said, ‘Never heard of you.’
The coach liked to press an athlete’s buttons in order to gauge his reaction and strength of will. Usually he invaded a young man’s space in the process, setting him further on edge. Landy fell for the bait, commenting that he was truly a footballer and only played at running. That attitude was anathema to Cerutty, who demanded 100 per cent commitment from his athletes. Before the conversation had barely begun, Cerutty was walking away. Nonetheless, he told Landy that if he was interested in learning how to run, seriously interested, then he should come by the house in South Yarra for another talk. They didn’t set a date.
Cerutty knew what he was doing; an athlete needed to choose to be taught. Only when Landy went to him could Cerutty show him what he would gain by listening to him. He had already recruited two of Australia’s brightest young stars and helped them to achieve astounding results.
The first was Les Perry, the ‘Mighty Atom’, as some called him, because of his short stature and indefatigable energy. Perry had first caught the Cerutty show at an annual professional foot race known as the Stawell Gift. On the infield, Cerutty was waving his arms about while explaining to a crowd how he had just run seventeen miles to the nearest mountain range and back. ‘Endurance? You’ve only got to get out there and do it. Face up to it: man was meant to run.’ A year later, upset at his progress in running, Perry answered an advertisement Cerutty had posted in the local Melbourne paper. He went to the house in South Yarra, and over the course of the afternoon Cerutty lifted weights and ran around the house ranting about prehistoric man and the survival of the fittest. But his ideas on fitness made sense. Perry enlisted his help, then urged his friend Don Macmillan to see him as well.
When Macmillan, one of the most naturally gifted milers to appear on the Australian scene for years, showed up at Cerutty’s door on a Sunday morning, he was in a terrible state. He was failing his exams, having trouble finding time to train, and worried about his direction in life. Cerutty sat him down to talk about books, to discuss the Bible, and to argue philosophy. Then he gave Macmillan an ultimatum: ‘If you want to come work with me, be part of my gang, I’ll tell you straight out, I’m not interested in failures. You have to pass all your exams. That bit’s up to you, but if you want, I’ll tell you how to do it.’ He gave Macmillan an hour-by-hour schedule, directing him when to get up, drink his tea, run, study, take a shower, eat, run again, read the paper, and go to bed. Within a few months, Macmillan had passed his exams and won the Australian mile title in record time. At that same championship Les Perry came in first in the three-mile race.
When John Landy decided to make his way to South Yarra, Cerutty’s reputation was well established. As he led Landy up the stairs to his study overlooking Melbourne’s botanical gardens, the coach paused and, with a befuddled look, asked, ‘What did you say your name was? Landy? Gordon Hall told me you won the Combined Public Schools mile last year, and I always study the results … What was the time you ran?’
‘About 4:44 …’
‘I have never heard the name,’ Cerutty said, looking him straight in the eye. He sensed that Landy would resist taking direction. ‘It seems to me, young man, it is time you put the name of Landy on the world map.’
In a study measuring seven feet by seven feet and crowded with books, cherry red velvet couches, dumbbells, a decanter of port, a typewriter, and a hodgepodge of papers and magazines, Landy sat in silence as Cerutty dispelled the notion that Landy would burn out or, worse, harm himself if he trained too much. The ‘human organism’ was built to handle stress, he said; the body actually welcomed it. Through continuous effort, superior fitness was guaranteed. Look at the rigorous training of Emil Zatopek or the Finnish runners Arne Andersson and Gundar Haegg, he told Landy. Look at Percy Cerutty.
Landy was fired by his ideas. Nobody had ever spoken to him in this way. He told Cerutty that he would train with him. When Landy left, Cerutty simply noted on a card the young man’s date of birth and the mile time of 4:43.8 he had run in the 1948 Victorian Public Schools Championship. He filed it away in his athletics card catalogue, unaware that it was John Landy who would launch him into the international arena as a coach.
It took three weeks of hard training and a few lessons on running style for Landy to realise results. On 20 January 1951, he dropped his mile time by six seconds. Cerutty then gave Landy a training outline and sent him out on his own, never enquiring as to whether or not the young runner was following his guidance. And Landy did not feel the need to offer the information himself. The proof was in his performances. Two months later, after upper body strengthening with dumbbells and hundreds of miles of conditioning work, his time was down another ten seconds. On 22 May he ran a 4:16 mile, an extraordinary improvement. It was the first time Landy thought he might have a shot at the Olympics, though the qualifying time was 4:10. This ‘Conditioner of Men’, as the brass plate outside Cerutty’s house read, had discovered his greatest athlete yet. Landy had natural coordination, very strong leg muscles, and most importantly, he could sustain punishing levels of training. In this last respect, coach and athlete were much alike.
Almost from the day he was born in 1895, Percy Cerutty was a sickly child. His father was an alcoholic and his mother barely kept her son from malnourishment. Cerutty was plagued by pneumonia; his lungs barely functioned. Much of his youth was spent reading. He was continually nursed to health by his mother and sisters. At 15, when he took a job as a telegraph messenger boy, he had to ride his bicycle many miles into the suburbs, and he found that he enjoyed this. At 18 he won his first foot race. By the age of 21 he was experiencing brutal headaches that blurred his vision and made him vomit, yet he still raced, posting his best mile time of 4:34, just behind the fastest middle-distance runner in Australia at that time.
After he married and took up a career as a telephone technician, however, he hung up his racing shoes for the serious business of adult life. But soon the dreariness of that life began to sap his strength; he took to smoking and inactivity. The migraines worsened, his health deteriorated, and depression overpowered him. One day, at the age of 39, he stumbled into an empty church with tears pouring from his eyes. He had reached rock bottom. He was thin and weak with no hope but an early death.
His doctor recommended a six-month leave from the telephone company and gave Cerutty one prescription: ‘I can’t heal you with medicines, Percy … You have to save yourself. If you want to do anything about yourself, you’ll get off that bed under your own will and spirit.’ Cerutty took that advice seriously. He restricted his diet to raw foods and quit smoking. Perhaps most importantly, he started reading. He devoured everything from poetry to religious texts, weightlifting advice, Eastern philosophy, scientific treatises, and long-distance training guides. He developed a new approach to life, one unencumbered by fear and defined by exerting himself fully – physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
Mostly, though, he exercised. He lifted weights. He joined a walking club and began to take longer and longer hikes through the bush. Within a year he had completed a seventy-mile hike, to his wife’s shock. The outdoors exhilarated him. It was not long until he started to run again, and he ran constantly. Soon his body was transformed into that of a much younger man. In 1942, at 47, he showed up at the Malvern Harriers locker room and announced, ‘I’ve come down to have a run with you. I used to be a member here.’ Gone were the migraines, rheumatism, and spells of depression. The road hadn’t been easy though. When Cerutty had first begun exercising, he would return home on the brink of total collapse, his heart racing. He could hardly push open the front door. He would lie down on the floor, eyes glued to the ceiling as his breathing and heart rate gradually returned to normal. But he learned to appreciate the torture his body endured because he always recovered and returned stronger the next day. ‘Thrust against pain. Pain is the purifier,’ he said.
Within a year of joining the Harriers, he was regularly clocking mid-four-minute miles. Then came the marathons, 100-mile races in twenty-four hours, 200 miles in forty-eight hours. Such feats by a man of his age brought attention, and Cerutty adored it. He also welcomed the chance to expound his theories. As he codified his philosophy of training and life in the late 1940s, athletes were beginning to pay heed. In 1946 Cerutty purchased three acres in Portsea, a town south of Melbourne on the easternmost point of Port Philip Bay. There he began to build a ten-by-fourteen-foot hut and a larger shack out of lumber dismantled from shipping boxes. He would be a teacher.
By Christmas 1951, when John Landy walked up to the gate for his first and only visit to the Portsea property, Cerutty’s buildings and philosophy were complete. He didn’t train athletes; he guided ‘Stotans’.
The gate to the property was shut. Unlike the rest of the athletes at the camp, Landy had come down to Portsea on his own for the ten-day training session. His parents were circumspect about Cerutty, particularly because of his outlandish antics, but their son’s improvement as an athlete was undeniable, so they didn’t object to the trip. Seeing no lights on, Landy realised it was too late to catch anybody awake. He had brought a sleeping bag and, not wanting to disturb anyone, he found a hollow to sleep in. Because of the chill in the air, he donned every item of spare clothing he had brought, including his football socks, before slipping into his bag. He was all right until rain began to pelt his bag. Then it turned into a downpour. Shaking, wet to the bone, he stuck it out. By first light the hollow had turned into a streambed, and Landy stumbled into the camp, half in shock from the cold. The Portsea training had begun.
In the year since Landy had first called on Cerutty, he had paid close attention to the coach’s direction. He had paid ten shillings for lessons on how to move his arms and how to run like a rooster, clawing at the air. He had strengthened his upper body by lifting dumbbells. He had participated in running sessions on a two-and-a-half-mile horse path named the Tan (after the four-inch layer of tree bark discarded from tanneries, which cushioned the dirt), and bounded up and down Anderson Street Hill with the others under Cerutty’s watchful eye. Their runs provoked gasps from the Melbourne residents nearby. They couldn’t understand what these young men, hounded by a shirtless older man, were doing. Running for exercise was odd in and of itself, but a group doing so through the botanical gardens carrying bamboo poles in each arm and shrieking like banshees as Cerutty called to them to run like ‘primitive man’ was pure scandal.
What Cerutty had in mind for the ten-day training camp in Portsea would definitely have been beyond the observers’ comprehension. Landy was sceptical as well, yet there he was. By following Cerutty’s gruelling regimen, Landy hoped to win a spot on the Olympic team.
Before breakfast the men ran the Hall Circuit, a course that threaded through tea trees, up hills, down steep slopes, and across sand dunes for one mile and 283 yards; the runners were timed and pitted against one another with handicaps and a three-pence bet apiece. The winner won the pot, and Cerutty didn’t hesitate to direct runners around the wrong bend so that he could claim the prize himself. Sometimes he clocked their runs and badgered them to go faster, questioning their manhood or dedication, often both. He ridiculed and taunted them mercilessly, particularly Landy, whom he thought needed toughening up. ‘Move your bloody arms!’ he would shout. ‘Too slow! Too slow! … Come on, you lazy bastards! You’re hopeless bloody dogs! Children could run faster than that!’
Other training sessions were held on nearby golf courses, where Cerutty had his charges accelerate up hills to achieve the kind of energy explosion they needed in a race. They ran up sand dunes for the same effect, an exercise Landy particularly disliked. He preferred the rhythmic flow of running on flat ground. For resistance training they sprinted along the beach in knee-deep surf. When not running, they swam, surfed or hiked along the coast. They were always in a state of movement until Cerutty stopped to give a lecture on the grass beside the 300-metre Portsea Oval. There he taught his Stotan – part Stoic, part Spartan – philosophy. Cerutty had coined the term and its requirements:
1 Realization that, as Wordsworth the poet says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ which denotes there is no time for wasteful ideas and pursuits.
2 In place of wasteful hobbies there commences a period of supervised and systematic physical training, together with instruction in the art of living fully. This replaces previously undirected life.
3 Swimming will be done all the year round … This especially strengthens the will and builds resistance to quitting the task ahead.
4 The cessation of late hours. Amusements both social and entertaining should be reduced to a minimum, and then only in the nature of relaxation from strenuous work.
Cerutty delivered this philosophy along with quotes from Plato, Buddha, Jesus, Freud, Einstein, and St Francis of Assisi, among others. He stressed the importance of yoga, non-conformity, a diet of oats, the study of nature and animals, and running barefoot to connect with the Earth. There were also the impromptu lessons after meals, like the time when Cerutty lectured them on warming up. A cat was sitting on a ledge outside one of the huts when their coach snuck over and emptied a bucket of water over it. The cat leapt away and disappeared in a flash. Cerutty then expounded, ‘There. Did the cat do stretches? Did the cat jog around? Did the cat do knee bends? Did the cat have a tracksuit on before racing? No, the cat just got up and went. No more warming up. Forget it.’
For Landy, the son of an accountant and the product of private schools, this was wild stuff. He laughed off most of it, but there was wisdom in what Cerutty said about training hard. The body had amazing limits that most people never tested; Cerutty drove Landy to try. He had helped bring out a discipline and focus the young runner never suspected he had. This ability had been dormant, but now it revealed itself. The other athletes at Portsea were impressed by Landy’s discipline. During hard runs that seemed to last for ever, they also began to realise they could never match it.
There was no sense of jealousy, however. In fact Landy took away from this time with Cerutty more than important lessons. He had won a tightly knit group of friends at Portsea, among them Perry and Macmillan as well as three-milers Geoff Warren and Trevor Robbins. The hard training and rustic setting combined to create a sort of boot camp, one that drew the athletes together. Landy, Robbins, Warren and two others bunked in the ‘ski hut’, which was a modified wooden container originally used to import Volkswagen cars. The first night Landy stayed there he had a bad dream about trying to get out of a hole. The nightmare was so vivid that he literally clawed his way out of his top bunk and crashed to the floor. The next night he agreed to be roped into his bed. Meanwhile, Perry and Macmillan, the two more established Stotans, were staying with Cerutty in an old cabin nicknamed after the luxury hotel, ‘Menzies’, because of its superior accommodation. One morning after a particularly cold night, Landy approached Macmillan and explained, ‘It’s pretty tough out here. Nobody will get up and get the breakfast. If you do and get everything out and ready, the second you turn your back, suddenly all these vultures’ – and Landy then jokingly mimicked a vulture poised to strike with its claws – ‘and little monkeys come down and eat it all up and go back up to their bunks, and yours is gone.’ By the end of the story, he had Macmillan in hysterics. With each such episode at Portsea, the others liked Landy more and more.
By the tenth day of camp, the gang of runners had bonded. They were both exhausted and inspired. Cerutty came away with a better understanding of what made his runners tick. Of Landy he wrote, ‘He undervalues himself, his achievements, and his possibilities, merely because he measures himself not against mediocrity but against the highest levels … Courage and desire to excel without undue display of effort, much less suffering, causes him to run well within himself … What his highest potential level is I can only guess at.’ Though Cerutty thought it unlikely that Landy would ever become a true Stotan, they both knew who had set him on the path to athletic greatness.
On 12 January 1952, in Melbourne, Landy set out to break 4:10 in the mile, the time established by the Australian Olympic organisers to qualify for Helsinki. Without ‘Big Mac’ Macmillan to push him, Landy led from the start, pushing harder than ever before, but he crossed the finish line a second short. ‘It is bad luck,’ he said after the race. ‘I don’t suppose there will be enough finance to send us both [Macmillan and Landy] to the Olympics.’ He swallowed his disappointment, and only a few hours later ran a 3,000m race in 8:53, breaking the Australian open record. The training at Portsea had increased his endurance, but not his speed over shorter distances. Two weeks later in Sydney he beat Macmillan by inches, but again the time was too slow to qualify.
By the cut-off date for selection, Macmillan and Landy had both run the qualifying time in the 1,500m, but only Macmillan had run the requisite speed for the mile. When the list of sponsored Olympic team members was published in March, Landy’s name was missing. There was a loophole, however. If Landy and a few others could come up with $A750 each, they could join the team. It was a lot of money, a year’s wages for some, and the Geelong Guild Athletic Club rallied to raise it for Landy. They held Saturday night dances and ‘chook’ raffles, which awarded the winner a dressed hen. With a lot of work and good intentions, the club members raised most of the money, but they were still $A250 short. Landy’s father made up the difference. His son was going to the Olympics. John heard the news while driving a tractor on his family farm on the South Gippsland coast, 130 miles south-east of Melbourne. He had only eight weeks to train.
Before Landy left for Europe, Joseph Galli published an article in a magazine by the name of Sports Novels whose title mirrored what many were thinking: ‘Victorian John Landy May Soon Become Our Greatest Middle-Distance Runner’. It was the reason so much effort had been made to send him. Landy was quoted thanking Cerutty for his guidance, and then the miler made a prediction, not of future success but rather of his untapped potential: ‘I don’t know just what my body can stand up to,’ he said – not yet.
At Kapyla Village in Helsinki, Cerutty finally quieted down. Landy lay in bed, uncertain as to how he would stack up against the world’s best. He had made great strides in his development and had run well in England, but still he was unsure. And he was very sensitive to the fact that he owed his Olympic ticket to the generosity of family and friends. He felt pressure to live up to the efforts they had made to get him there in the first place. Yet each day he spent on the track, observing the speed and fluid style of other athletes, his confidence in his ability to compete against them weakened. His coach might have believed he had the greatest insight into running and training, but Landy knew these Europeans and Americans had pretty good ideas of their own about what it took to be world class. He knew he would soon find out how good.
4 (#ulink_08cf8002-19c7-59b2-a557-ffcc182c9373)
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same …
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling, ‘If …’
The rain during the opening ceremony left the red brick-dust track a soupy mess. During the night, Finnish groundskeepers spread petrol over it and lit hundreds of small fires to burn off the water. Smoke billowed into the sky over the stadium and its acrid scent permeated the surrounding streets. By dawn on Sunday, 20 July, the track had dried, and it was levelled and smoothed out by concrete rollers before the first athletes arrived.
Wes Santee woke up in his room unsure of what to do. Throughout the morning, tens of thousands of people descended on the stadium. Scores of athletes, many of whom represented countries that had been at war a few years earlier, milled about the Olympic Village, passing the time between training sessions, meals, and their competitions. Santee dared not step outside Kapyla, certain he would get lost or run into trouble. He was one of the youngest members of the USA track and field team. It was his first Olympics, and for the life of him he could not find out what he needed to know. When was he competing? Against whom? And when could he train? Remarkably, this fundamental information proved elusive. Everyone had their own races to worry about, and for an Olympics that was being built up as a contest for national pride, particularly between the Americans and the Soviets, Santee was beginning to realise that this did not necessarily mean team leadership and cooperation were priorities.
He was left to fend for himself, a situation that was utterly foreign to him. At the University of Kansas, he was used to being surrounded by team-mates who looked after one another. He was also used to having his coach tell him when to arrive for practice, who he was competing against the next weekend, how to run the race, what to eat beforehand, when to arrive at the stadium, and where he was allowed to warm up. This management of the details allowed him to concentrate on the one thing he had supreme confidence in: his running. As a member of the United States Olympic team, however, directions to the dining hall and bedroom were about the most useful bits of information he had been given. He felt alone and, as the Games commenced, increasingly panicked. The pit in his stomach came less from thoughts of his upcoming race than from how he was going to find out when it was scheduled to take place.
After a day spent scrambling about trying to track down team officials, he cornered a few older American athletes who had a schedule of events and listings about who was competing in which heats. Santee was scheduled to run in the 5,000m qualifying round on 22 July at five o’clock, and yes, there would be an announcer calling out the lap times so that he knew the pace he was running. As far as what kind of competitors he was going to face and whether it would be a slow or fast race, they had no idea. It was quite certain, however, that as part of the American team, which had won half of all the track and field gold medals presented in 1948, Santee was expected to win. Late that afternoon when he went to work out on the training track, he was the only American to neglect to wear his ‘U.S.A.–Helsinki–1952’ jersey, instead choosing to appear in his orange-red pants and blue University of Kansas jersey. He wanted to win for his country as much as anyone, but at that moment he felt a lot more comfortable in his KU colours.
On the first day of the Olympics, Czech star Emil Zatopek stormed to victory in the 10,000m, beating British hopeful Gordon Pirie to win the first of what many assumed would be two gold medals. The United States captured its first track and field gold thanks to high-jumper Walter Davis, the six-foot-eight-inch Texan who set a new Olympic record in the process. The Soviets countered by sweeping the women’s discus. The second day of events saw an American stranglehold on the track and in the field; the Soviets ruled gymnastics. By the third day, newspapers around the world headlined the points table: the US was in first position, the USSR second, and Czechoslovakia third. Great Britain ranked fourth, and had yet to capture a gold. As promised, the fifteenth Olympiad was shaping into a battle between the United States and the Soviets.
National pride had always played a role in the Olympics, but never as much as it did in the 1952 Games. In the four years leading up to Helsinki, the Soviets had ‘mobilized to win the Olympic War’, as Life magazine put it. They had combed the countryside for athletes, hired hundreds of coaches, and poured billions of roubles into training programmes and stadia construction. No effort was spared. In Helsinki, Russia (along with Eastern bloc countries Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia) demanded separate ‘Reds Only’ housing and training quarters, and they afforded their athletes every luxury including platters of caviar and smoked salmon. In their camp in Otaniemi, they hung a huge portrait of Stalin over the entrance and erected a wooden scoreboard to post their points totals. The Cold War, which was developing on the Korean peninsula and through the atomic arms race, had entered the sporting arena with a decided chill.
The United States was equally focused on winning. And when it came to preparations they were hardly lacking. After all, the team was primarily composed of scholarship-funded college athletes who had devoted endless hours to training under the guidance of full-time coaches. One needed only to look at the jugs of vitamins available for ‘Americans Only’ in the Kapyla dining halls to appreciate the special treatment they enjoyed. Many complained that countries such as Britain, who had invented the idea of the amateur athlete, didn’t stand a chance in the face of what amounted to a ‘professional’ approach to sport. Rightly or wrongly, sport was changing, and Helsinki marked a symbolic shifting point. The only remaining question was who would win this particular match-up, and by what margin.
Santee had a front seat to this battle, particularly since one of the greatest rivalries between the two countries was in basketball. Half of the American team comprised University of Kansas players, and Wes was privy to the stories of seven-foot Russian stars and how long they had trained together. But Santee had his own concerns about winning for his country, particularly since the track and field squad was considered one of the big point scorers for the American team.
By Tuesday, 22 July, the day of his qualifying round, Santee had learned little about his race and he desperately wished Bill Easton was there with him. Santee discovered that he could not warm up on the track before the race, which was part of his normal routine, so he jogged around outside the stadium before returning to the locker-room to be called out for his heat. All around him athletes were speaking in unrecognisable languages, and he had no idea who among them he was competing against or what times they usually ran. His biggest fear was falling too far behind the leaders. There was no one to speak to about strategy. And he could not help thinking that he should not even have been in this race. The 1,500m was his best distance; he certainly had much more experience running it. Seldom did a runner, even one as naturally talented as Wes Santee, have the speed and stamina to compete at a world-class level in the 1,500m and the 5,000m. With each minute that passed, his apprehension grew.
When he saw Fred Wilt, the Indiana University alumnus who had competed extensively overseas, Santee hurried across the locker-room to speak to him. Wilt would know what Santee should do.
‘I really don’t know much,’ Wilt said after Santee had told him the names of those in the heat against him. ‘Except that Schade guy. He’ll probably run a steady, even race. Follow him.’
And with this information, Santee was called to the track for his heat by an Olympic official. He jogged into the stadium, feeling only slightly comforted by this one piece of advice. With Easton, he would have gone over the race on the blackboard in his office at KU, his coach indicating lap times to shoot for, how the other runners traditionally ran, and when to move with the pack or ahead of it. His race was literally drawn out for him in chalk. Only when Santee approached the starting line did he notice the German ace Herbert Schade. Except for the Canadian runner Ferguson, the rest of the field was a mystery. What if the German started out too fast or too slow? What was the best time he was capable of running? There were tens of questions he needed answered and only seconds before the race started. By the time the athletes were called to their marks, Santee felt overwhelmed. This was the Olympics. He was representing his country, and, perhaps more importantly, Kansas. He had to do well, yet he felt displaced, as if he had been blindfolded, led out into a dark field, and left alone to find his way out.
Soon enough the starting gun fired, and Santee was running. Into the first turn, he was in a good position behind Schade, right where he wanted to be. The first lap went well; Schade led, Santee kept back by several runners, but stayed close enough. By the third lap, Santee and the German were alone. The others had fallen back on the pace. Halfway through the race, Santee sensed his legs tiring, but he held on to second position. At the 3,000-metre mark he heard Schade’s time called – 8:23 – and then his own, two seconds slower. It was too fast. The best he had run this distance was 8:44, and he was 150 yards ahead of that pace. Santee began to lose confidence. He couldn’t maintain this kind of speed. What he should have known before this point in the race was that the German was using this heat to show how fast he was to Czechoslovakia’s Zatopek and France’s Mimoun, both of whom were in separate heats and would likely prove his stiffest competition in the final. An Olympic record would be broken if Schade continued at this pace, and he meant to continue.
Half a lap later, Santee lost momentum. His arms and legs leadened; his chest couldn’t bring in enough breath. His pace slackened. By 4,000 metres he hardly felt like he was moving, the sensation more like running through water than over a track. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. He couldn’t drive his legs. Runner after runner passed him and there was nothing he could do, even had he been suddenly infused with all the will power in the world. His body had given out. He finished at a dismally slow pace, thirteenth overall, in a time of 15:10.4 – the worst showing at this distance of his career.
As he put on his sweatsuit, Santee was exhausted physically, but the fear and dread before the race had taken an even greater toll. Emotionally he was a wasteland. He didn’t want to speak to anybody. He was embarrassed when he left the stadium, wanting to hole up in his room until they flew out of Helsinki. As he later said, ‘Not only did I lose, I wasn’t even in the race.’ For an athlete who had seldom known defeat, particularly on this scale, this was agony. It was like the loss of a first love. His heart literally ached.
Sitting in the stands at the Olympic Stadium on 24 July, Landy did not like his chances in the 1,500m set to take place in less than hour. He was in the fourth, and probably most difficult, heat in the qualifying round. Only the top four finishers in his race moved forward to the semi-final, and his eight-man heat included French and Yugoslav champions El Mabrouk and Otenhajmer, as well as America’s Bob McMillen and England’s Roger Bannister, the latter of whom Landy had met briefly while competing in London. Landy knew that his best time in the distance (3:52.8) was several seconds slower than his competitors, plus he was much more accustomed to running a mile than 1,500m.
Although only 120 yards shorter than the mile, the 1,500m was an awkward race. Standard European tracks, Helsinki included, were 400 metres in length, meaning that runners competed over three and three-quarter laps. Landy disliked the race, as he later explained: ‘There’s nothing graceful about it. You don’t start where you finish, it’s ugly.’ The split times were difficult to understand, and given the incomplete first lap, he found it hard to get into his rhythm.
At that moment, however, Landy was more interested in watching the 5,000m final, which was about to start. He had failed to qualify for the longer event, finishing over thirty seconds behind the winner of his heat, Alain Mimoun, in tenth position overall. It was a poor showing, but his personal best, achieved in early February, had been only two seconds faster. He had to settle for watching his friend and countryman Les Perry try to take home a medal in an event featuring the ‘human locomotive’ Emil Zatopek, former gold medal winner Gaston Reiff, new Olympic record holder Herbert Schade, and English up-and-comer Chris Chataway, as well as the fearsome French-Algerian Mimoun. It promised to be a must-see battle.
When the gun went off, the red-headed Chataway moved into an early lead, at the head of the pack for the first lap, with Schade behind him and Perry in the middle of the pack. The Australian team cheered on the ‘Mighty Atom’, but by the end of the third lap, with the first four runners averaging sixty-seven seconds per lap, Perry looked like a minor player on a great stage. Soon enough, Zatopek was setting the pace. The very sight of the 30-year-old Czech army major was frightening. His bony five-foot-eight-inch frame sped down the track in an unrhythmic mess of arms and legs. His head rolled back and forth as he ran; his tongue protruded from his mouth; his face contorted as if, one sportswriter noted, he was experiencing an ‘apoplectic fit’. Yet the runners knew he was fitter than they were, and Zatopek did not hesitate to inform them of the matter, mid-race. While his competitors gasped for air, the Czech considered it a good time for a conversation. During his 10,000m final, in which he’d broken his own world record, Zatopek had run alongside the Russian Anoufriev, who had set a rapid early pace, and admonished him on the dangers of going out too fast. As Zatopek blazed into the lead in the 5,000m final, he yelled back at Schade in German, ‘Herbert, do two laps with me!’
Two thousand metres from the finish, the tactical race began. Schade, answering Zatopek’s taunt, burst into the lead, with Chataway and Reiff staying close behind. Zatopek faded. Then Pirie picked up his tempo, shifting easily past the Czech and the rest of the field. Schade quickly regained first position, pushing Pirie aside, then Mimoun started to make his move. With just over a lap to go it was Schade, Chataway, Mimoun, Zatopek and Pirie. At the bell, Zatopek kicked. From the stands the spectators could almost feel the excruciating effort required of him to make the move. But it was to no advantage. Chataway cruised past him a hundred metres down the track with Schade and Mimoun breathing down his neck. Zatopek trailed in fourth position, looking altogether finished. Schade then regained the lead, only to have Chataway steal it right back at the final turn.
‘ZAT-O-PEK! ZAT-O-PEK! ZAT-O-PEK!’ The cry erupted from the stands. The crowd was on its feet. Face twisted, mouth gaping, arms flailing, eyes open wide, Zatopek found another spurt. Suddenly Chataway caught the track’s edge with his foot and went crashing onto the red brick surface, churning up a cloud of dust behind him. Mimoun and Schade attempted to hold off Zatopek as he drove around the turn, but there was nothing they could do to keep him from victory. The crowd boomed again when the Czech sprinted down the straight. Every step looked like it would be his last, yet somehow he found a way to continue forward. He snapped the tape with a new Olympic record time, with Mimoun second, Schade third, Reiff fourth, Chataway fifth (after picking himself up off the track), and Perry in an exhausted sixth place.
Announcers, journalists, spectators, and athletes alike understood that they had just witnessed greatness in the form of Emil Zatopek. He had now claimed his second gold medal, and with his participation in the marathon a few days later, a race he had never run, Zatopek was proving he deserved the acclaim of being the finest distance runner since Nurmi. Although Perry had not medalled, he had run his best time, and Landy had to believe that his friend was proud simply to have competed in the same race as his hero Zatopek. Landy himself was impressed by the Czech’s tactical skill, but more than that, he had never seen someone with such overpowering physical fitness.
Everyone in the stadium was still revelling in Zatopek’s victory when the 1,500m qualifying rounds began. While Landy warmed up with a light jog on the infield, his countryman Don Macmillan placed fourth in his heat, qualifying for the semi-final the next day. Of the runners in the three heats before Landy’s who advanced to the next round, all had run better than his fastest 1,500m time. He had his work cut out for him.
Landy stepped up to the line. Three minutes and fifty-seven seconds later, his Olympic hopes were dashed. El Mabrouk came from behind to finish first with a time of 3:55.8, an unexceptional pace. McMillen, Bannister, and the Hungarian Tolgyesi followed him in, with Landy one second behind in fifth position. As Landy later described it, the last hundred metres of the race was a ‘mad scramble’, but he was too tired in the final straight to overtake Tolgyesi.
The Australian miler was disappointed in himself, regardless of his doubts before the race. He had travelled all this way and failed to make even the semi-finals. He knew the reason, too: since his good runs in England, he had come off his peak, a consequence of incomplete training. Cerutty took his athlete’s loss as a personal affront, and after the race he was not exactly comforting to Landy. The exact form of his vitriol is probably best left forgotten, but his coach’s general attitude towards Landy, rightly or wrongly, was that he lacked a ‘killer instinct’. And worse, throughout the Australian team, which was not performing well except for sprinters Shirley Strickland and Marjorie Jackson, there were grumblings that many athletes had not deserved to make the Olympics in the first place. In fact, the team manager issued a report after returning to Australia that bluntly stated, ‘No man or woman should be selected for future Australian teams who is not prepared to undergo a Spartan-like period of self-denial and rigorous training as practiced in other countries.’
Unfair as this attitude was, it stung Landy, who had been one of the last athletes to make the team. However, he refused to wallow in his failure to qualify for the 1,500m or 5,000m finals. He thought there was a lot he could learn while in Helsinki, especially from the athletes who had so far dominated the Games. The chance to observe Zatopek, for one, tempered the disappointment Landy felt.
Long before his 5,000m win and subsequent marathon victory, Zatopek was of interest to Landy. Cerutty often talked of him, and Les Perry idolised him because of his infamously hard training schedule and unrivalled record in distance running. When Perry first arrived in Helsinki, he had put on his tracksuit and run the three miles across to Otaniemi where the Iron Curtain countries were housed. Once past the guards at the gate, he’d found Zatopek down on the track and ran alongside him until he’d mustered the nerve to say, ‘I’m Les Perry from Australia.’ Zatopek had put his arm around the bespectacled fan and said in English, ‘You come from the other village to see me? You honour me! Join me. We will run together.’ After working out, they’d had a shower, dinner, and tea, then Zatopek had invited Perry to watch the Bolshoi Ballet performing in the camp. When Perry finally returned to Kapyla, he regaled his room-mates with the experience.
After his 1,500m loss, Landy made it his job to study other athletes at the old track near the stadium where they trained. He spent hours there, mentally noting how they ran and learning about their training methods. Zatopek, to whom Landy later referred as the ‘Piped [sic] Piper of Hamelin’, fascinated him the most. With a pack of other devotees at the track, Landy followed the Czech as he jogged forward and backward, speaking about running. There was much to take in and a lot to jot down afterwards because Zatopek talked almost as fast as he ran. He happily shared his love for the sport and spoke about how he had achieved so much since taking up running at the age of 19. ‘When I was in the 1950 European Championships …’ he began one story, talking about the race and the athletes he had competed against; ‘last year I was doing twenty by 400m in training …’ he revealed, or ‘I ran in the snow in my army boots …’ The Czech’s training methods were clearly based on making running a way of life. He believed in training one’s will power in small steps, every day. Discipline was the key. As for style, which he was accused of lacking, he was plainspoken: ‘I shall learn to have a better style once they start judging races according to their beauty. So long as it’s a question of speed, my attention will be directed to seeing how fast I can cover the ground.’
His three gold medals proved to Landy that Zatopek was on the right track. He wasn’t about antics, Eastern philosophy, recriminations, or wild theories – unlike Cerutty, who had Don Macmillan preparing for the 1,500m final by jogging around the track wearing two tracksuits and a towel wrapped around his head. Zatopek had devised schedules and methods of maintaining the balance between speed and endurance throughout the year. Landy liked this analytical approach. Cerutty disliked schedules: he felt they confined the soul. The two men were opposites, and Landy had the intelligence and independence to understand that all he owed his coach were his achievements to date. While in Helsinki, Landy plotted his future.
Roger Bannister was too exhausted to sleep. No amount of tossing, turning, shuffling, or kicking his feet against the sheets would allow him to drop off. Every second and minute brought the 1,500m final closer; every hour a new wave of anxiety swept over him. At 4.30 p.m. the next day he would line up against eleven of the best middle-distance runners in the world. His confidence was torn by having already run two races instead of the one he had expected to run to qualify for the final. He feared he was already beaten.
The past week had brought only restless days and nights. He and his room-mates – sprinter Nicholas Stacey, quarter-miler Alan Dick, and three-miler Chris Chataway – had tried to relieve the constant churning of their thoughts about victory or defeat, and about what would make the difference between the two. Resting on their unkempt beds, they spoke of politics and history, read books, or joked around with one another. One evening, Stacey mounted a wooden box, as if it was an Olympic podium, to accept his imaginary gold medal and offer a congratulatory speech. At other times they discussed their competitors, particularly Zatopek, whom they thought inhuman in ability. ‘While he goes for a twenty-mile training run on his only free day,’ Chataway said, ‘we lie here panting with exhaustion, moaning that the gods are unkind to us, and that we’re too intelligent to train hard. It’s all nonsense.’ Inevitably, the four thought again and again about that second when the starting gun would fire, and whether or not they would prove good enough. Regardless of what happened, they promised one another that once the Olympics had ended they would never put themselves through this torture again.
By the morning of Saturday, 26 July, Bannister was the only one of his room-mates still tense, though he tried not to show it, as far as possible keeping to himself his doubts about being able to win the race. The others had finished their events, nobody in triumph, and Chataway most disastrously, of course, by falling on the final lap of the 5,000m final. Bannister had watched the race, and its conclusion impressed on him how important his finishing kick would be.
Absence of victory was the same story for the entire British team. Just two days of competition remained on the track and in the field and they had won only a handful of medals, not one of them gold. Nor had any British athlete won gold in any of the other events. The British reporter who had said before the Games ‘I will eat a pair of spiked shoes if our team doesn’t win twelve gold medals’ was dangerously close to having a mouthful of leather. Headlines cried out ‘Don’t Worry, We Are Still in the Fight’, yet column after column reported failure and missed chances.
There was one hope left, though: Roger Bannister. Now, more than ever, his countrymen rallied around him. A few days before, the Daily Mirror columnist Tom Phillips had compared Bannister to a great racehorse trainer who ‘rarely bothered about picking minor honours here and there. If he wished to win a classic race, he got his horse perfectly fit for that day and nearly every time his horse was first past the post.’ Phillips concluded, ‘I believe Bannister will win and teach some of our other athletes, and the officials and coaches, a lesson in strategy and tactics.’
If confidence could be drawn from the number of column inches guaranteeing his victory, Bannister was a sure thing. Most sportswriters considered him their favourite. But his legs hurt. He hadn’t slept soundly in days. He was plagued by worries, both real and otherwise. His qualifying round and semi-final in the previous two days had been brutal. To avoid the jostling and elbowing of a crowded field he’d run both races in the second and third lanes, adding at least twenty yards to each and exhausting himself even more. The semi-final had been especially taxing because there was a fight to the finish that placed him a narrow four-tenths of a second ahead of Jungwirth from Czechoslovakia, who had failed to qualify. Usually Bannister required three or four days of recovery after such a race because of his limited training regime, but now he had been given only twenty-four hours.
In his room, waiting as the minutes ticked past, Bannister knew the 1,500m final would draw the world’s attention. He knew the stands would be jammed to capacity. He knew his competitors had also trained for thousands of hours for this day, and that they would strive with every muscle and ounce of will to claim victory. It was impossible not to rehearse the coming race over and over again in his head. How quickly should he start? Should he stay on the inside lane or move to the outside? Where must he be by the third lap? How close to the finish could he start his burst?
When Bannister made his way down the tunnel underneath the stadium that afternoon, he was no less tortured. His face was blanched, his step uncertain. Australian miler Don Macmillan walked alongside him. He was in bad shape as well, dehydrated and soaked with perspiration after the voodoo warm-up imposed by his coach, yet he noticed that Bannister, against whom he had run in New Zealand in 1950, was pale and nervous.
‘Good luck, Don,’ Bannister said, heading up into the stadium.
‘Thanks, Roger,’ Macmillan choked out.
The time had come. When the Duke of Edinburgh arrived in the stands, the crowd cheered. The sun even broke through the clouds to honour this signature Olympic race. While the other athletes stretched and jogged around the infield to warm up, Bannister rested on the bench. Chris Brasher, the British steeplechaser and former president of the Cambridge University Athletic Club, watched from the stands and later described his friend’s appearance: ‘There was a peculiar loneliness about Roger. He stood apart from the others, looking drawn and white, as if he were about to go into a torture chamber.’ Chris Chataway was also in the stands. He had written to his mother the day before to tell her how concerned he was about Bannister’s state in the days before his race. As Chataway waited for the race to begin, he worried that his room-mate had already defeated himself in his mind. However, though tense and sapped of energy from two heats, Bannister still felt that he had a chance. Every race was imperfect, and he had always come through in the past.
Once Finnish middle-distance runner Denis Johansson had completed a presumptuous pre-race victory lap, the starter called the race. With the eleven others, Bannister came to the line. The crowd hushed for the gun. He had prepared his whole athletics career for this moment. Suddenly, they were off.
The German Lamers carried the field through the first lap in 57.8 seconds, looking as though he might be pacing for his countryman and the favourite to win, Werner Lueg. Throughout this first lap, Bannister stayed to the inside; he did not have the energy to battle in the middle of the pack. Lamers soon faded, and Lueg took the lead, finishing the second lap at a slower pace in 2:01.4. By this time Bannister had managed to come up through the field and was running in fifth place. At the bell, Lueg was still leading. He finished the third lap in 3:03, still on the slow side given the field’s talent. Only three-quarters of a lap to go.
In the radio broadcast booth, BBC announcer Harold Abrahams was worried for Bannister, despite the fact that he was in the right position – third – for making his break. ‘He is not running as well as one would hope,’ Abrahams said. ‘He is looking rather tired.’
In the back straight of the last lap, the race heated up. Two hundred metres from the finish and the whole field was nearly sprinting. Down the straight, Aberg of Sweden and then El Mabrouk of France tried to surge to the head of the pack. Bannister was next, deciding to strike at the same time Lovelock had in the 1936 Olympics final to win the gold.
‘Bannister is in third position with 180 metres to go. Bannister fighting magnificently. Bannister now trying to get into the lead.’
This was it, Bannister thought. Although he had suffered nothing but dread since learning of the added semi-final, he was now in the ideal spot to win the gold. He had managed the jostling field, kept with the pace, and avoiding tripping. As he moved into the final turn, now in second place, he called on the full effect of his finishing kick – his most potent weapon. He gave the order to his legs to go, but for the first time in his life his kick wasn’t there. When he should have leapt ahead, he stalled. His legs just didn’t have the energy. It was a shock. Little Josey Barthel from Luxembourg swept by him, unbelievably, impossibly. Then the American, McMillen, passed him as well. Bannister felt drained and helpless, knowing he had lost.
‘Bannister is fading!’ Abrahams called into the microphone.
Lueg held strong, stretching his lead by three yards at the end of the turn. Barthel then struck, delivering the finish Bannister wanted for his own. The Luxemburger cruised past Lueg in the final fifty metres with McMillen also coming up fast.
‘And it’s Barthel wins. Second, the American. Third, Lueg. Fourth, Bannister. Time, 3:45.2.’
It was a new Olympic record, and the surprise upset of the Games. Bannister was so exhausted by the end of the race that he had to hold on to the back of Lueg’s singlet to keep from pitching to the track. He hadn’t even claimed a bronze. The British team was distraught. Columnists began to sharpen their pencils. This was a betrayal of trust.
Barthel was handed roses, and then he rested on a bench to take off his shoes. The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling observed, ‘He had had no trainer and no compatriot with him when he came into the stadium, and he was still alone. It must have been a great solace to him on the night before the race, knowing he had nobody to disappoint.’ How different it was for Bannister who, full of emotion, later watched Barthel mount the victory dais and weep tears of joy while Luxembourg’s anthem played throughout the stadium. For Bannister, the Helsinki final was a disaster. He told his friend Brasher years later, ‘A disaster is something which is shared between you and the public which expects something of you and which you cannot or have not fulfilled.’
As he headed back to the Olympic Village later that afternoon, fending off the press who were preparing to excoriate him for his insufficient preparations, Bannister needed to find a way to overcome what had happened. He couldn’t go out a loser. His answer would be to attempt a challenge that had been in the making for a very long time: the four-minute mile. And he would not be alone in the effort.
5 (#ulink_d390484e-0f55-5375-b037-7d29140c4218)
The man who has made the mile record is W. G. George … His time was 4 minutes 12.75 seconds, and the probability is that this record will never be beaten.
Harry Andrews, 1903
To the furthest limit he searches out.
Job 28:3
Before stopwatches, cinder tracks, and perfect records, man ran for the purest of reasons: to survive. The saying goes that ‘Every morning in Africa, an antelope wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or an antelope – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.’ There are few instincts more natural than the body in full motion as it races across a field or through the trees. From the beginning, we were all made to run. In days past, when ‘survival of the fittest’ meant exactly that, the only measure of the race was whether the hunted reached safety before being overtaken. Seconds and tenths of seconds had no meaning.
Sport evolved from this competition to survive. In ancient Egypt, newly chosen kings went on a ceremonial run, as historian Edward Sears wrote, that ‘symbolized laying claim to his domain and proved that he was fit enough for the demands of his position’. Thirty years after the king’s coronation, and every three years thereafter, he was challenged to run the same long distance he had as a young man. If he failed, he lost his power to rule. Other early societies proved status through skills such as hitting targets with a bow and arrow, lifting heavy rocks, or jumping across streams; but the ability to run faster and further than others remained a dominant standard.
It was fitting that the first event in civilisation’s earliest and greatest celebration of sport, the Olympic Games in 776 BC, was a foot race. A Greek citizen named Coroebus sprinted 200 yards across a meadow alongside the river Alpheus and was crowned winner with a garland made from the leaves and twigs of an olive tree. Sporting ability was integral to Greek life, and its people were the first to promote what would later be phrased mens sana in corpore sano – the sound mind in a sound body. Ancient Olympic champions were treated like gods, worthy of worship and great odes. The athletes ran their races naked and barefoot, and as the years passed they instituted ten-month training regimes and began to specialise in certain distances. Longer races involved running from one end of the stadium to the other and back, the distances varying from stadium to stadium. Success was recorded by how many victories an athlete had claimed over his fellows, not by their times (crudely measured, in those days, by sundial or water clock).
The Romans favoured gladiator contests over athletics, but they made two important contributions to the story of the four-minute mile: first, they were devoted to statistics and detailed the results of their sporting heroes (namely chariot racers); second, they were the first to come up with the distance of the mile. Roman soldiers calculated their long marches in mille passus (mille, one thousand; passus, a two-step stride). Given that each stride was roughly two feet and five inches – shorter than average because the soldiers carried over fifty pounds of provisions and weapons – the earliest mile translated to roughly 1,611 yards.
In sixteenth-century England, footmen, who travelled long distances by the sides of heavy coaches, steering their masters away from dangerous spots in the road, were the first to race, often at the bidding of their masters. They used the mile-posts, first installed by the ruling Romans, as starting and finishing lines. This tradition developed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into village festival ‘freak runs’, where the competitors ran on stilts or while carrying a load of fish. Endurance contests, whether walking or running, were also popular.
By the nineteenth century, ‘pedestrians’, as the English runners were known, were running on the roads for cash. Events were often organised by local pubs in order to draw a crowd. Since the mile race was a favourite, it paid to specialise in that distance. The idea of competing for a mile record instead of simply against one’s opponent in a particular race evolved gradually from the standardisation of the mile at 1,760 yards, advances in timekeeping, and an early industrial society’s passion for quantifying everything in sight. It so happened that a grass track divided into quarter-miles fitted nicely on to a cricket ground or football field, and it was much safer racing there than on increasingly busy roads. Technology, progress, and coincidence had played its part. Now all the mile race needed was a few fast souls.
Running a mile in less than five minutes was considered the breaking point until Scottish landowner Captain Robert Barclay came along. Famous for his cheerful disposition, predilection for lifting heavy objects, and for walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours, Barclay won 500 guineas by posting a 4:50 mile in 1804. Then, in 1825, James Metcalf, ‘a tailor by trade, but a pedestrian by profession’ who trained by chasing hounds, beat Barclay’s time by a margin of twenty seconds. Over the next sixty years, various milers chipped away at the record, second by painful second, the best runners earning championship belts for their efforts. Over time, the stakes wagered rose into the thousands of pounds.
For most of the nineteenth century, the ‘gentleman amateur’ was absent from this scene. This British public school ideal, favoured by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, was indeed a noble thought, but the runners guided by subscribing to its strict rules were no match for the best of the professionals. That was until chemistry apprentice Walter George began training seriously and reduced his mile time to 4:18.8 in 1884. As this was just two seconds shy of the record held for the previous eight years by the professional William Cummings, a showdown between the two was inevitable.
To test himself against Cummings, George was forced to forfeit his amateur status, despite having offered his earnings from the races to a hospital charity. After a series of preliminary races where both had a share of the victories, on 23 August 1886 Cummings and George faced off for the ‘Mile of the Century’. Twenty-five thousand spectators crowded around a bicycle track to watch George run so fast that he left Cummings unconscious behind him on the last lap. His record of 4:12.8 lasted for three decades and set the stage for Paavo Nurmi to introduce the four-minute mile to the world, establishing an irresistible challenge to athletes that would guarantee their place in history.
It is impossible to know who first uttered the challenge of running the mile in less than four minutes. Reports date back to 1770 of an English runner who made the distance from Charter House Wall to Shoreditch Church in the City of London in this time, but even nineteenth-century historians raised a sceptical eye to the account. In 1915, when American Norman Taber broke George’s record by less than two-tenths of a second, the athletics world was not set on fire. It was too slim a difference to warrant much more than a passing remark in the record books. Then, on 23 August 1923, 26-year-old farm engineer Paavo Nurmi from Turku in Finland was drawn into a faster first lap than he would have liked by Swedish miler Edvin Wide. Nurmi, who always ran with a large stopwatch in his hand and preferred an even-paced race, kept up with Wide’s fast start. By the third lap Wide had faded, but Nurmi continued the pace. He broke Taber’s record by two seconds with a 4:10.4. It was a giant step forward, given how long it had taken Taber to reduce Walter George’s mark by just a fraction of a second. Suddenly the mile record was in play again, and when, at the 1924 Paris Olympics, Nurmi won gold medals in the 1,500m and 5,000m in the space of forty-two minutes, he looked capable of anything. Joseph Binks, a noted journalist and former British miler, suggested to Nurmi that the mile barrier was within grasp. Nurmi replied, ‘No. Four minutes four seconds, maybe!’ Self-deprecation or not, the Finnish miler had put the possibility of a four-minute mile on the table.
Inspired by Nurmi, a new wave of talented milers appeared in the 1930s, and their races packed stadiums around the world. Races at Madison Square Garden rivalled modern-day prize fights. The air was dense with smoke, the crowds rowdy and devoted to their favourite runners, and the stands so close to the track that fans felt the rush of air when the field surged past. The first miler to run four minutes and single digits was Frenchman Jules Ladoumegue. An orphan who first ran in village-to-village races, Ladoumegue competed on pure emotion. Before races he was so agitated that he had to be pulled to the starting line. If a door closed suddenly behind him, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Once running, though, he loved the heat of battle and became a national treasure for his efforts. On 4 October 1931 he took advantage of a windless, sunny Parisian afternoon and the pacemaking of half-miler Rene Morel to reduce the mile record to 4:09.2.
Jack Lovelock, the New Zealand-born but British-adopted miler with a compact frame and keen idea of his abilities and limitations, was the next to lower the record. In his youth he had developed his smooth running style by striding alongside a stone wall while a friend on the opposite side chastised him whenever he saw his head moving up or down. On 15 July 1933 in Princeton, New Jersey, he ran a 4:07.6 while representing Oxford University against the Americans. After the race, the New York Herald Tribune praised, ‘It was all so easily accomplished, with so little outward evidence of stress and strain, as to make a four-minute mile seem just around the corner.’ Lovelock never reduced this time, but his Olympic gold medal in the 1,500m, his epic races against Glenn Cunningham and Sydney Wooderson, and his insight about training and tactics added to his legacy.
With a time of 4:06.8, Lovelock’s rival, the American Glenn Cunningham, seized the mile record only eleven months after the New Zealander had claimed it. The ‘Kansas Powerhouse’ was legend long before he ran the fastest mile in the world. At the age of 7, he and his brother tried to stoke the fire in their small schoolhouse’s stove by dousing the coals with kerosene. His brother died as a result of the accident, and Glenn burned his legs almost beyond repair. During recovery he found walking more painful than running, and an athlete was born. Cunningham learned to work around his disability, and at his first inter-varsity mile at the University of Kansas, he exploded on the last lap to beat the field. His running inspired a generation of Kansas farm boys and gave Americans the hope that the four-minute mile could be theirs.
Sydney Wooderson brought the mile record back to England in 1937. Walter George, now 79 years old, was there to see it. At five feet six inches and 126lb, Wooderson was an atypical miler. When he stepped on to the track in his thick glasses and with the meek demeanour of a solicitor’s clerk, he looked the underdog. Once running, however, he was an indomitable force. He dealt with his loss to Lovelock at the 1936 Olympics by staging an attempt to beat Cunningham’s mile time. On 28 August 1937 at Motspur Park, he arranged for pacemakers from his athletic club to lead him around the first three laps. Using his famed kick, he handled the last lap alone and registered a time of 4:06.4.
Slowly, by investing more and more time and energy in training, milers approached the goal of four laps of the track in four minutes. But six and a half seconds was a long time off, and the small reductions made by the best runners to the record were just that, small reductions. The possibility of seeing ‘the other side’ of the numerical barrier was looking increasingly uncertain.
When Swedish runners Gundar Haegg and Arne Andersson finished their epic battles by the end of the Second World War, the four-minute mile appeared unattainable. Of the two, Haegg had a more natural, flowing stride, but Andersson trained harder. A year apart in age, they reached their peak at the same time. Separately, they were the finest milers, in terms of fitness and form, possibly ever to have graced the track; racing against each other, they looked to be the best that ever would. Over the course of three and a half years, Haegg and Andersson passed the mile record back and forth to each other:
Their duels inspired great performances, yet the barrier still stood untouched. Journalists and statisticians tried to convince the athletics world that the record would inevitably be run. They calculated that the average world-class miler could sustain a 7.33-yard-per-second speed (or 15mph). This meant that the difference between Haegg’s best time and the four-minute mile was a short twelve yards – less than 1 per cent of the race’s total distance. Nothing. But others disagreed, quite publicly as well. Coach Brutus Hamilton, one of the most revered figures in athletics, published ‘The Ultimate of Human Effort’, listing the perfect records for the javelin, shot-put, 100m, 400m, mile, 5,000m, and 10,000m beyond which man could never go. Hamilton backed up his analysis with detailed statistics, but many would have considered his word final had he simply jotted these ‘perfect records’ down on a cocktail napkin. Of the question ‘Can the mile be run in four minutes flat?’ Hamilton wrote, ‘Not quite.’ The fastest time that would ever be possible, he stated, was 4:01.6. Although Hamilton, who wrote the article in 1935, had by 1945 been disproved by two-tenths of a second, he still found the idea of anyone running faster difficult to imagine.
Many wanted the bogey to go away, including the 1912 Olympic 1,500m champion Colonel Strode-Jackson, who wrote at the height of the Haegg–Andersson struggle, ‘When we stop this nonsense of running like a metronome and with the watch always in mind, we will get back to real racing, the triumph of one runner over another. That is what racing was meant to be and what it will be when we get the four-minute myth out of the way.’
Myth or not, twelve yards or many more, the barrier remained, and with each passing year, as runners attempted to break through its walls and failed, the mile barrier grew in notoriety. By 1952, as Frank Deford, one of the finest writers to report on the challenge, pointed out, ‘The Poles had been reached, the mouth of the Nile found, the deepest oceans marked, and the wildest jungles trekked, but the distance of the ground that measured a mile continued to resist all efforts to traverse it, on foot, in less than four minutes.’
The 1952 Olympic flame had barely been snuffed out in the Helsinki stadium when the editorials and reviews of the Games began to spin off the presses. Two points were indisputable: the Finns had proved to be fine hosts of the competition, and more records were broken in these Games than in any other Olympics in history.
Fewer than forty-eight hours after the closing ceremony in Helsinki, another competition was held, this time in London’s White City stadium, pitting a British Empire team against the United States. The stadium had staged an Olympic Games itself in 1908 and was infamous for setting the official marathon distance at 26 miles, 385 yards (instead of simply 26 miles) so that the race would finish in front of Queen Alexandra’s royal box. The stadium was now used for greyhound racing and an assortment of other events, including athletics. The Americans beat the British Empire team, as they had beaten the world a few short days before.
In the four-mile relay, where four runners from each team ran a mile, Roger Bannister earned the Empire team an early lead. But the second member of his team lost this advantage. Running third leg for the Americans, Wes Santee threatened to stretch out a lead for his team too great to overcome, but John Landy, running in the same leg for the Empire team, managed to close on Santee in the final 440. The anchors for each team traded leads, but in the end the Americans won. It was the first time Bannister, Santee, and Landy had competed in the same race. None of the three remembered much of the other, not a conversation, nor an impression of one another’s abilities. Yet as these three milers went their separate ways – Bannister back to life at St Mary’s Hospital, a short distance away by Tube, and Landy and Santee on long flights to their respective countries – each charted a course in the days ahead that would bring them back together again. It would be a struggle they and tens of millions would never forget.
Santee flew back with an American team flush with victory. Although the Soviets had fought well in their events and had, for a few days, looked like they might actually win the most medals, they hadn’t been able to match the strength of the United States track and field team, which won fourteen gold and thirteen silver and bronze. Among his team-mates, Santee was in the minority of those who did not medal. Watching the 1,500m final, knowing he had beaten the second-place finisher Bob McMillen ‘every time we had stepped on a track’, left him feeling empty and as helpless as a puppet. He was certain he could have won the race had he been given the chance the amateur officials had stolen from him in Los Angeles.
Before heading back to the University of Kansas, Santee went to visit his parents in Ashland for the first time since he had ridden away on that unnamed horse. If he was waiting for his father to say how proud he was of his son, Wes left empty-handed. Either his father simply didn’t understand what he had accomplished through his running, or the man just couldn’t express any feeling other than bitterness. Either way his silence stung. Over the past two years he had tried to convince his mother to leave his father, but she told Wes that since he had left his father had mended his ‘negative ways and stopped being so mean’. Regardless, Wes wanted nothing to do with the man.
Back in Lawrence, Santee sat down with Coach Easton, who did express his pride in Wes. Easton suggested he could learn a great deal from his Olympic experience, but Santee was less philosophical. It was not in his nature to suffer defeat. In his high school senior year he had lost the mile race in the state finals to Bill Tidwell. Although expected to win, particularly since he had in his sophomore and junior years, Santee had refused to be crestfallen. His close friend Don Humphreys had been surprised at his indifference. ‘I couldn’t understand how you could be up after losing the mile by a stride or two,’ he’d remarked to Wes. ‘I know Tidwell was a good distance runner, but it never occurred to me that he could beat you.’ Santee had explained in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘Oh, Tidwell, he’s not a miler.’ It took a while for Humphrey to understand this response. Then he thought of a football player who gets knocked down in a game and gets right back up and sets out to return the favour. Santee had that killer instinct. As Humphreys later said, ‘Guys like that never get whipped in their minds. Even when they get beat, they’re not beat.’
In Helsinki, Santee felt he had learned how to fend for himself and compete against the best. He wanted to prove what a big mistake it had been to prevent him from running in the 1,500m; more importantly, he also wanted to show how good he really was. He set his sights on a goal that had always been on the horizon for him: the four-minute mile. In the list of high-school prophecies published when he graduated was the following: ‘Wesley Santee has recently broke the world mile record in a time of 3 min., 58.3 sec. And it should stand for many years to come.’ Since his win at the Drake Relays the previous spring, the prediction by sportswriters that he was a sure bet for the world mile record had brought the goal closer in sight. His blistering three-quarter-mile run in New York before leaving for the Olympics had made him realise just how close. Only days after returning to campus, Santee marched into the office of the University of Kansas newspaper. He had an announcement to make: Wes Santee was going to be the first to run the four-minute mile. For years he had known he was capable. Now his intention was a matter of public record.
John Landy had a different announcement to make when he landed in Melbourne, but one just as telling. Directly after the British Empire versus United States match, he had boarded a flight to Australia. He had declined to join Macmillan and Perry, who, accompanied by Cerutty, were running in a series of competitions in Scandinavia. Landy needed to get back to his agricultural science studies, which had fallen by the wayside as a result of his efforts to make the Olympic team. And he wanted to start training again. Landy was determined to show that his trip to Helsinki had been worth the time and money it had taken to get him there. This desire to redress his failure to qualify in either of his events, a failure that had been met with what he believed was unwarranted criticism, was also woven into his excitement about the prospect of becoming a faster and stronger runner. He felt he had been given the lessons now – in terms of improving his stride and training methods – to reach this new level. Zatopek and other European middle-distance runners had shown him how.
For his stride, he would be helped by a pair of European track shoes he had bought. Landy wanted nothing more to do with the kangaroo-hide track shoes made in Melbourne, which were designed primarily for sprinting on grass tracks. Therefore, the spikes were built up in the front, so much so that it was awkward to lower the heel of the foot to the ground. They required him to run on his toes. In Helsinki, Landy noticed that the European middle-distancers ran in spikes with flat soles and a heel, and they had a smoother, more relaxed stride. But shoes alone would not change his running style; he would also have to practise the arm and leg action of the Europeans until it became habit.
But, as Zatopek had shown, style was not what separated the Czech from every other distance runner in the world. It was his demanding training, and Landy felt that if achieving fast mile times was mostly a question of working hard, he was willing to make the sacrifice. On the flight back to Australia, he spent many hours rehashing in his notebook the type of training sessions Zatopek had discussed with him and other runners, concocting a plan to achieve for himself the kind of fitness Zatopek had revealed in Helsinki. By doing so, he hoped to beat Don Macmillan’s national record in the mile – 4:08.9 – and win the Australian championship in early 1953.
When Landy arrived at Melbourne’s airport, journalists herded around the athletes asking for their comments on the Olympics and on the future. Some complained of having travelled too far with too little rest; others denied that they were ready to retire; many defended their achievements or lack thereof. Landy spoke of Emil Zatopek. He explained how the Czech had proved his superiority, earning three gold medals. ‘He thoroughly deserved his success because he is the hardest trained athlete in the world,’ Landy said. It was obvious to those who knew the young Australian miler that he meant to claim this distinction for himself. Though his goals had nothing yet to do with a four-minute barrier, unwittingly they had set him on its path, and he would soon show that nothing was safe from his determination.
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Neal Bascomb
This edition does not include illustrations.The inspirational story of three international runners attempting to achieve what no one had managed – to break the four-minute mile barrier. It was the ultimate test of endurance, and the human drama that unfolded is told here for the first time.In sport, running the four-minute mile was the elusive Holy Grail, considered by most to be beyond the limits of human endeavour.Then in late 1952, shortly after the Helsinki Olympics, three men set out to challenge the record books: Roger Bannister, the Oxford medical student, the great British hero who epitomised the ideal of the amateur athlete; John Landy, the tireless Australian, the romantic who trained night and day in search of perfection; and the American Wes Santee, son of a Kansas ranch hand, a natural runner and the quickest of the three ('I was just born to run fast').Three men, each of contrasting character, competing thousands of miles apart, but all with the same valedictory goal. The Perfect Mile is the stirring account of their quest for sporting martyrdom, charting their journey through triumph and failure, culminating in the moment when Bannister broke the record in a monumental run at the Iffley Road cinder track in Oxford in May 1954. It was a feat that became one of the most celebrated in the history of British sport.Far from bringing an end to the rivalry, this watershed moment turned out to be merely the prelude to a final climactic battle three months later – the ultimate head-to-head between Bannister and Landy in what was dubbed ‘the mile of the century’ at the Vancouver Empire Games.Bascomb provides a fascinating account of what happened and an invaluable insight into the motivations and characters of three amazing achievers.
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_bf7f4ec2-5a5f-5534-a70c-f0e589e31116)
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First published in Great Britain in 2004.
This edition first published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2005
Copyright © Neal Bascomb 2004
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Neal Bascomb asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007173723
Ebook Edition © MAY 2017 ISBN: 9780007382989
Version: 2017-05-11
DEDICATION (#ulink_dc6d6bc8-2395-5d04-adb8-a7b1e81e1f6d)
To Diane
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_e1da14e1-fe79-50e5-8e52-4c0870a3d54a)
When an author sets out to investigate a legend, and there are few stories as legendary in sport as the pursuit of the four-minute mile, it is initially difficult to see the heroes around whom events unfolded as true flesh-and-blood individuals. Myth tends to wrap its arms around fact, and memory finds a comfortable groove and stays the course. What makes these individuals so interesting – their doubts, vulnerabilities, and failures – is often airbrushed out, and their victories characterised as faits accomplis. But true heroes are never as unalloyed as they first appear (thank goodness). We should admire them all the more for this fact.
Getting past the panegyrics that populate this history has been the real pleasure behind my research. No doubt there have been some very fine articles written about this story, but only by interviewing the principals – Roger Bannister, John Landy, and Wes Santee – and their close friends at the time does one do justice to the depth of this story. Their generosity in this regard has been without measure. These interviews, coupled with contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles as well as memoir accounts by several individuals involved in the events, serve as the basis of The Perfect Mile. With this material, the story almost wrote itself.
I have included collective references for those interested in knowing the sources behind particular conversations and scenes. No dialogue in this book was manufactured; it is either a direct quote from a secondary resource or from an interview. That said, half a century has passed since this story occurred. On some occasions, dialogue is represented as the best recollection of what was in all probability said. Furthermore, memory has its faults, and in those situations where interview subjects contradicted one another I almost always went with what the principal recollected. In those instances when contemporaneous sources (mainly newspaper articles) did not correspond with memory, I primarily went with the former, particularly when there were several sources indicating the same facts. Having inhabited this world for the past eighteen months, aswim in paper and interview tapes, I feel I have been a fairly accurate judge of the events as they happened. I hope that I have served the history of these heroes well.
CONTENTS
Cover (#u07f6861e-bb91-5576-81a5-3bf2f0030ca0)
Title Page (#u0381d3b4-2786-5c8a-b88f-28325bea5527)
Copyright (#ulink_5f9055c3-4e4a-54e3-b5cc-061ce512d212)
Dedication (#ulink_9ff080da-0f89-57c5-af81-f3b779a499f5)
Author’s Note (#ulink_a51a20ac-4617-597c-b723-4d0afbb136b3)
Prologue (#ulink_09806cfb-2d3f-51ad-abb5-619807002ef6)
PART I (#ulink_b29d09f4-12c7-52d6-a5a3-3e5e4bc6a1da)
A Reason to Run (#ulink_b29d09f4-12c7-52d6-a5a3-3e5e4bc6a1da)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_dfd39348-c130-5778-a80d-68be6f816957)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_e00248d1-d801-550f-90a7-b1132b7bb4eb)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_9607c189-a9bb-5e17-8c0c-a754b7f43e83)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_d1d0f072-b19a-5fb8-8f27-1fa6aa9bc029)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_7f335eaa-1dd0-5acc-8aa1-dc1c9e4a5b5d)
PART II (#litres_trial_promo)
The Barrier (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
PART III (#litres_trial_promo)
The Perfect Mile (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
References (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_7d366724-b62e-58dd-8907-c9ac482d1565)
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
Rudyard Kipling, ‘If …’
‘How did he know he would not die?’ a Frenchman asked of the first runner to break the four-minute mile. Half a century ago the ambition to achieve that goal equalled scaling Everest or sailing alone around the world. Most people considered running four laps of the track in four minutes to be beyond the limits of human speed. It was foolhardy and possibly dangerous to attempt. Some thought that rather than a lifetime of glory, honour, and fortune, a hearse would be waiting for the first man to accomplish the feat.
The four-minute mile: this was the barrier, both physical and psychological, that begged to be broken. The number had a certain mathematical elegance. As one writer explained, the figure ‘seemed so perfectly round – four laps, four quarter miles, four-point-oh-oh minutes – that it seemed God himself had established it as man’s limit’. Under four minutes: the place had the mysterious and heroic resonance of reaching sport’s Valhalla. For decades the world’s best middle-distance runners tried and failed. They came to within a second or so, but that was as close as they were able to get. Attempt after spirited attempt proved futile. Each effort was like a stone added to a wall that looked increasingly impossible to breach.
The four-minute mile had a fascination beyond its mathematical roundness and assumed impossibility. Running the mile was an art form in itself. The distance, unlike the 100-yard sprint or marathon, required a balance of speed and stamina. The person to break that barrier would have to be fast, diligently trained, and supremely aware of his body, so that he would cross the finish line just at the point of complete exhaustion. Further, the four-minute mile had to be won alone. There could be no team-mates to blame, no coach during half-time to inspire a comeback. One might hide behind the excuses of cold weather, an unkind wind, a slow track, or jostling competition, but ultimately, these obstacles had to be defied. Winning a foot race, particularly one waged against the clock, was a battle with oneself, over oneself.
In August 1952 the battle commenced. Three young men in their early twenties set out to be the first to break the barrier. One of them was Wes Santee, the ‘Dizzy Dean of the Cinders’. Santee was a natural athlete, the son of a Kansas ranch hand, born to run fast. He amazed crowds with his running feats, basked in the publicity, and was the first to announce his intention of running the mile in four minutes. ‘He just flat believed he was better than anybody else,’ said one sportswriter. Few knew that running was his escape from a brutal childhood.
Then there was John Landy, the Australian who trained harder than anyone else and had the weight of a nation’s expectations on his shoulders. The mile for Landy was more aesthetic achievement than foot race. He said, ‘I’d rather lose a 3:58 mile than win one in 4:10.’ Landy ran night and day, across fields, through woods, up sand dunes, along the beach in knee-deep surf. Running revealed to him a self-discipline he never knew he possessed.
And finally there was Roger Bannister, the English medical student who epitomised the ideal of the amateur athlete in a world being overrun by professionals and the commercialisation of sport. For Bannister the four-minute mile was ‘a challenge of the human spirit’, but one to be realised with a calculated plan. It required scientific experiments, the wisdom of a man who knew great suffering, and a magnificent finishing kick.
All three runners endured thousands of hours of training to shape their bodies and minds. They ran more miles in a year than many of us walk in a lifetime. They spent a large part of their youths struggling for breath. They trained week after week to the point of collapse, all to shave off a second, maybe two, during a mile race – the time it takes to snap one’s fingers and register the sound. There were sleepless nights, training sessions in rain, sleet, snow, and scorching heat. There were times when they wanted to go out for a beer or a date yet knew they couldn’t. They understood that life was somehow different for them, that idle happiness would elude them. If they weren’t training or racing or gathering the will required for these, they were trying not to think about training and racing at all.
In 1953 and 1954, as Santee, Landy, and Bannister attacked the four-minute barrier, getting closer with every passing month, their stories were splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world, alongside headlines of the Korean War, the atomic arms race, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, and Edmund Hillary’s climb towards the world’s rooftop. Their performances outdrew golf majors, Ashes Tests, horse derbies, football and rugby matches, and baseball pennant races. Stanley Matthews, Ben Hogan, Rocky Marciano, Mike Hawthorn and Surrey County Cricket Club were often in the shadows of the three runners, whose achievements attracted media attention to athletics that has never been equalled. For weeks in advance of every race the headlines heralded an impending break in the barrier: ‘Landy Likely to Achieve Impossible!’; ‘Bannister Gets Chance of 4-Minute Mile!’; ‘Santee Admits Getting Closer to Phantom Mile’. Articles dissected track conditions and the latest weather forecasts. Millions around the world followed every attempt. Whenever any of the runners failed – and there were many failures – he was criticised for coming up short, for not having what it took. Each such episode only motivated the others to try harder.
They fought on, reluctant heroes whose ambition was fuelled by a desire to achieve the goal and to be the best. They had fame, undeniably, but of the three men only Santee enjoyed the publicity, and that proved to be more of a burden than an advantage. As for riches, financial reward was hardly a factor. They were all amateurs. They had to scrape around for pocket change, relying on their hosts at races for decent room and board. The prize for winning a meet was usually a watch or a small trophy. At that time, the dawn of television, when amateur sport was losing its innocence to the new spirit of win-at-any-cost, these three strove only for the sake of the attempt. The reward was in the effort.
After four soul-crushing laps around the track, one of the three finally breasted the tape in 3:59.4, but the race did not end there. The barrier was broken, and a media maelstrom descended on the victor, yet the ultimate question remained: who would be the best when they toed the starting line together?
The answer came in the perfect mile, a race no longer fought against the clock, rather against one another. It was won with a terrific burst around the final bend in front of an audience that spanned the globe.
If sport, as a chronicler of this battle once said, is a ‘tapestry of alternating triumph and tragedy’, then the first thread of this story begins with tragedy. It occurred in a race 120 yards short of a mile, at the Olympic 1,500m final in Helsinki, Finland, almost two years to the day before the greatest of triumphs.
I (#ulink_f6c8016b-4e92-5c89-97db-46e3ac82adfd)
A REASON TO RUN (#ulink_f6c8016b-4e92-5c89-97db-46e3ac82adfd)
1 (#ulink_8f274829-0b36-5658-b313-b28f65adf2b8)
I have now learned better than to have my races dictated by the public and the press, so I did not throw away a certain championship merely to amuse the crowd and be spectacular.
Jack Lovelock, 1,500m gold medallist, 1936 Olympics
On 16 July 1952 at Motspur Park, south London, two men were running around a black cinder track in singlets and shorts. The stands were empty, and only a scattering of people watched former Cambridge miler Ronnie Williams as he tried to stay even with Roger Bannister, who was tearing down the straight. It was inadequate to describe Bannister as simply ‘running’: eating up yards at a rate of seven per second, he was moving too fast to call it running. His pacesetter for the first half of the time trial, Chris Chataway, had been exhausted, and the only reason Williams hadn’t folded was that all he needed to do was maintain the pace for a lap and a half. What most distinguished Bannister was his stride. Daily Mail journalist Terry O’Connor tried to describe it: ‘Bannister had terrific grace, a terrific long stride, he seemed to ooze power. It was as if the Greeks had come back and brought to show you what the true Olympic runner was like.’
Bannister was tall – six foot one – and slender of limb. He had a chest like an engine block and long arms that moved like pistons. He flowed over the track, the very picture of economy of motion. Some said he could have walked a tightrope as easily, so balanced and even was his foot placement. There was no jarring shift of gears when he accelerated, as he did in the last stage of the three-quarter-mile time trial, only a quiet, even increase in tempo. Bannister loved that moment of acceleration at the end of a race, when he drew upon the strength of leg, lung, and will to surge ahead. Yes, Bannister ran, but it was so much more than that.
As he sped to the finish with Williams at his heels, Bannister’s friend Norris McWhirter prepared to take the time on the sidelines. He held his thumb firmly on the stopwatch button, knowing that because of the thumb’s fleshiness, having it poised only lightly added a tenth of a second at least. Bannister shot across the finish; McWhirter punched the button. When he read the time, he gasped.
Norris and his twin brother Ross had been close to Bannister since their days at Oxford University. They were three years older than the miler, having served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, but they had been Blues together in the university’s athletic club. Norris had always known there was something special about Roger. Once, during an Italian tour with the Achilles Club (the combined Oxford and Cambridge athletic club), which Bannister had dominated, McWhirter had looked over with amazement at his friend sleeping on the floor of a train heading to Florence and thought, ‘There lies the body that perhaps one day will prove itself to possess a known physical ability beyond that of any of the one billion other men on earth.’ Sure enough, as McWhirter stared down at his stopwatch that July afternoon, he could hardly believe the time: Bannister had run three-quarters of a mile in 2:52.9, four seconds faster than the world record held by the great Swedish miler Arne Andersson.
After gathering his breath, Bannister walked over to see what the stopwatch read. Cinders clung to his running spikes. At the time, athletics shoes were simply a couple of pieces of thin leather that moulded themselves so tightly to the feet when the laces were drawn that one could see the ridges of the toes. The soles were embedded with six or more half-inch-long steel spikes for traction. Running surfaces, too, had advanced very little over the years. They were mostly oval dirt strips layered on top with ash cinders that were taken from boilers at coal-fired electricity plants. Track quality depended on how well the cinders were maintained, since in the sun they became loose and tended to blow away, and when it rained the track turned to muck. Motspur Park’s track benefited from the country’s best groundskeeper, and it was one of the fastest, which was why Bannister had chosen it for this time trial.
He always ran a three-quarter-mile trial before a race to fix in his mind his fitness level and pace judgement. This trial was particularly important because in ten days’ time, given that he qualified in the heats, he would run the race he had dedicated the past two years to winning: the Olympic 1,500m final. A good time this afternoon was crucial for his confidence.
‘Two fifty-two nine,’ McWhirter said.
Bannister was taken aback. Williams and Chataway were just as incredulous. The time had to be wrong.
‘At least, Norris, you could have brought a watch we could rely on,’ Bannister said.
McWhirter was cross at such a suggestion. But he knew one way to make sure his stopwatch was accurate. He dashed to the telephone booth near the concrete stadium stands, put in a penny coin, and dialled the letters T-I-M. The phone rang dully before a disembodied voice came on to the line, tonelessly saying, ‘And on the third stroke, the time will be two thirty-two and ten seconds – bip–bip–bip – and on the third stroke, the time will be two thirty-two and twenty seconds – bip–bip–bip …’ Norris checked his stopwatch: it was accurate.
After McWhirter returned and confirmed the result to the others, they agreed that Bannister was certain of a very good show in Helsinki. They dared not predict a gold medal, but they knew that Bannister considered a three-minute three-quarter mile the measure of top racing shape. He was now seven seconds under this benchmark. All of his training for the last two years had been focused on reaching his peak at exactly this moment – and what a peak it was. He was in a class by himself. The critics – coaches and newspaper columnists – who had condemned him for following his own training schedule and not running in enough pre-Olympic races would soon be silenced.
There was, however, a complication, which McWhirter had yet to tell Bannister. As a journalist for the Star, McWhirter kept his ear to the ground for any breaking news, and he had recently heard something very troubling from British Olympic official Harold Abrahams. Because of the increased number of entrants, a semi-final had been added to the 1,500m contest. In Helsinki, Bannister would have to run not only a first-round heat, but also a semi-final before reaching the final.
The four men bundled into McWhirter’s black Humber and headed back to the city for the afternoon.
When Bannister was not racing around the track, where he looked invincible, the 23-year-old appeared slighter. In trousers and a shirt, his long corded muscles were no longer visible, and it was his face one noticed. His long cheekbones, fair complexion, and haphazard flop of straw-coloured hair across the forehead gave him an earnest expression that turned boyish when he smiled. However, there was quiet aggression in his eyes. They looked at you as if he was sizing you up.
As Norris McWhirter turned out of the park, he finally said, ‘Roger … they put in a semi-final.’
They all knew what he meant: three races in three days. Bannister had trained for two races, not three. Three required a significantly higher level of stamina; Bannister had concentrated on speed work. With two prior races, the nervous energy he relied on would be exhausted by the final – if he made the final. It was as if he were a marksman who had precisely calibrated the distance to his target, then found that his target had been moved out of range. Now it was too late to readjust the sights.
Bannister looked out the window, saying nothing. Away from Motspur Park with its trees and long stretches of open green fields, the roads were choked with exhaust fumes and bordered by drab houses and abandoned lots overgrown with weeds. The closer they got to London, the more they could see of the war’s destruction, the craters and bombed-out walls that had yet to be bulldozed and rebuilt. A fine layer of soot clouded the windows and greyed the rooftops.
The young miler didn’t complain to his friends, although they knew he was burdened by the fact that he was Britain’s great hope for the 1952 Olympics. He was to be the hero of a country in desperate need of a hero.
To pin the hopes of a nation on the singlet of one athlete seemed to invite disaster, but Britain at that time was desperate to win at something. So much had gone wrong for so long that many questioned their country’s standing in the world. Their very way of life had come to seem precarious. ‘It is gone,’ wrote James Morris of his country in the 1950s. ‘Empire, forelock, channel and all … the world has overtaken [us]. We are getting out of date, like incipient dodos. We have reached, none too soon, one of those immense shifts in the rhythm of a nation’s history which occur when the momentum of old success is running out at last.’ The First World War had put an end to Britain’s economic and military might. The depression of the 1930s slowly drained the country’s reserves, and its grasp on India started to slip. Britain moved reluctantly into the Second World War, knowing it couldn’t stand alone against Hitler’s armies. Once the British joined the fight, they had to throw everything into the effort to keep the Nazis from overrunning them. When the war was over they discovered, like the Blitz survivors who emerged onto the street after the sirens had died away, that they were alive, but that they had grim days ahead of them.
Grim days they were. Britain owed £3 billion, principally to the United States, and the sum was growing. Exports had dried up, in large part because half of the country’s merchant fleet had been sunk. Returning soldiers found rubble where their homes had once stood. Finding work was hard, finding a place to live harder. Shop windows remained boarded up. Smog from coal fires deadened the air. Trash littered the alleys. There were queues for even the most basic staples, and when one got to the front of the line, a ration card was required for bread (three and a half pounds per person per week), eggs (one per week), and everything else (which wasn’t much). Children needed ration books to buy their sweets. Trains were overcrowded, hours off schedule, and good luck finding a taxi. If this was victory, asked a journalist, why was it ‘we still bathed in water that wouldn’t come over your knees unless you flattened them?’
And the blows kept falling. The winter of 1946–7, the century’s worst, brought the country to a standstill. Blizzards and power outages ushered in what the Chancellor of the Exchequer called the ‘Annus Horrendus’. It was so cold that the hands of Big Ben iced up, as if time itself had stopped. Spring brought severe flooding, and summer witnessed extremely high temperatures. To add to the misery, there was a polio scare.
Throughout the next five years, ‘austerity’ remained the reality, despite numerous attempts to put the country back in order. Key industries were nationalised, and thousands of dreary prefabricated houses were built for the homeless. In 1951 the Festival of Britain was staged to brighten what critic Cyril Connolly deemed ‘the largest, saddest and dirtiest of the great cities, with its miles of unpainted half-inhabited houses, its chopless chop-houses, its beerless beer pubs … its crowds mooning around the stained green wicker of the cafeterias in their shabby raincoats, under a sky permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover’. The festival, though a nice party, was an obvious attempt to gloss over people’s exhaustion after years of hardship. Those who were particularly bitter said that the festival’s soaring Skylon was ‘just like Britain’, standing there without support. To cap it all, on 6 February 1952 London newspapers rolled off the presses with black-bordered pages: the king was dead. Crowds wearing black armbands waited in lines miles long to see George VI lying in state in Westminster Abbey. As they entered the hall, only the sounds of footsteps and weeping were heard. A great age had passed.
The ideals of that bygone age – esprit de corps, self-control, dignity, tireless effort, fair play, and discipline – were often credited to the country’s long sporting tradition. It was said that throughout the empire’s history, ‘England has owed her sovereignty to her sports.’ Yet even in sport she had recently faltered. The 1948 Olympic Games in London had begun badly when the Olympic flame was accidentally snuffed out on reaching England from Greece. America (the ‘United, Euphoric, You-name-it-they-had-it States’ as writer Peter Lewis put it) dominated the games, winning thirty-eight gold medals to Britain’s three. After that the country had to learn the sour lesson of being a ‘good loser’ in everything from football and cricket to rugby, boxing, tennis, golf, athletics, even swimming the Channel. It looked as though the quintessential English amateur – one who played his sport solely for the enjoyment of the effort and never at the cost of a complete life – simply couldn’t handle the competition. He now looked outdated, inadequate, and tired. For a country that considered its sporting prowess symbolic of its place in the world, this was a distressing situation.
Roger Bannister, born into the last generation of the age that ended with George VI’s death, typified the gentleman amateur. He didn’t come from a family with a long athletic tradition, nor one in which it was assumed he would go to Oxford, as he did, to study medicine and spend late afternoons at Vincent’s, the club whose hundred members represented the university’s elite.
His father, Ralph, was the youngest of eleven children raised in Lancashire, the heart of the English cotton industry and an area often hit by depression. Ralph left home at 15, took the British Civil Service exams, qualified as a low-level clerk, and moved to London. Over a decade later, after working earnestly within the government bureaucracy, he felt settled enough to marry. He met his wife Alice on a visit back to Lancashire, and on 23 March 1929 she gave birth to their first son and second child, Roger Gilbert. The family lived in a modest home in Harrow, north-west London. Forced to abandon their education before reaching university (his mother had worked in a cotton mill), Roger’s parents valued books and learning above everything else. All Roger knew of his father’s athletic interests was that he had once won his school mile and then fainted. Only later in life did he learn that his father carried the gold medal from that race on his watch chain.
Bannister discovered the joy of running on his own while playing on the beach. ‘I was startled and frightened,’ he later wrote of his sudden movement forward on the sand in bare feet. ‘I glanced round uneasily to see if anyone was watching. A few more steps – self-consciously … the earth seemed almost to move with me. I was running now, and a fresh rhythm entered my body.’ Apart from an early passion for moving quickly, nothing out of the ordinary marked his early childhood. He spent the years largely alone, building models, imagining heroic adventures, and dodging neighbourhood bullies, like many boys his age.
When he was 10 this world was broken; an air-raid siren sent him scrambling back to his house with a model boat secured under his arm. The Luftwaffe didn’t come that time, but soon they would. His family evacuated to Bath, but no place was safe. One night, when the sirens sounded and the family took refuge underneath the basement stairs of their new house, a thundering explosion shook the walls. The roof caved in around them, and the Bannister family had to escape to the woods for shelter.
Although the war continued to intrude on their daily lives, mostly in the form of ration books and blacked-out windows, Roger had other problems. As an awkward, serious-minded 12-year-old who was prone to nervous headaches, he had trouble fitting in among the many strangers at his new school in Bath. He won acceptance by winning the annual cross-country race. The year before, after he had finished eighteenth, his house captain had advised him to train, which Bannister had done by running the two-and-a-half-mile course at top speed a couple of times a week. The night before the race the following year he was restless, thinking about how he would chase the ‘third form giant’ who was the favourite. The next day Bannister eyed his rival, noting his cockiness and general state of unfitness. When the race started, he ran head down and came in first. His friends’ surprise would have been trophy enough, but somehow this race seemed to right the imbalance in his life as well. Soon he was able to pursue his studies, as well as interests in acting, music, and archaeology, without feeling at risk of being an outcast – as long as he kept winning races. Possessed of a passion for running, a surfeit of energy, and a preternatural ability to push himself, he won virtually all of them, usually wheezing for breath by the end.
Before he left Bath to attend the University College School in London, the headmaster warned, ‘You’ll be dead before you’re 21 if you go on at this rate.’ His new school had little regard for running, and Bannister struggled to find his place once again. He was miserable. He tried rugby but wasn’t stocky or quick enough; he tried rowing but was placed on the third eight. After a year he wanted out, so at 16 he sat for the Cambridge University entrance exam. At 17 he chose to take a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, since Cambridge had put him off for a year. He never had a problem knowing what he wanted.
Bannister intended to study to become a doctor, but he knew he needed a way not only to fit in but to excel among his fellow students, most of whom, in 1946, were eight years older than he, having deferred placement because of the war. A schoolboy among ex-majors and brigadiers, he realised that running was his best chance to distinguish himself. The year before, his father had taken him to see the gutsy, diminutive English miler Sydney Wooderson take on the six-foot giant Arne Andersson at the first international athletics competition since the war’s end. White City stadium, located in west London, was bedlam as Andersson narrowly beat Wooderson. ‘If there was a moment when things began, that was it for me,’ Bannister later said. In a foot race, unlike other sports, greatness could be won with sheer heart. He sensed he had plenty of that.
Before he even unpacked his bags at Oxford, Bannister sought out athletes at the track. He found no one there, but discovered a notice on a college bulletin board for the University Athletic Club. He promptly mailed a guinea to join but received no response. He decided to go running on the track anyway, even though one of the groundskeepers advised, ‘I’m afraid that you’ll never be any good. You just haven’t got the strength or the build for it.’ Apparently the groundskeeper thought everyone needed to look like Jack Lovelock, the famous Oxford miler: short, compact, with thick, powerful legs. The long-limbed, almost ungainly Bannister persisted nonetheless. Three weeks later, having finally received his membership card, he entered the Freshman’s Sport mile wearing an oil-spotted jersey from his rowing days. He thought it best to lead from the start – a strategy he would afterwards discard – and finished the race in second place with a time of 4:52. After the race, the secretary of the British Olympic Association advised him, ‘Stop bouncing, and you’ll knock twenty seconds off.’ Bannister had never before worn running spikes, and their grip on the track had made him, as he later described, ‘over-stride in a series of kangaroo-like bounds’.
The cruel winter of 1946–7, with its ten-foot snowdrifts, meant that someone had to shovel out a path on the track so the athletes could train; Bannister took to the yeoman’s task, and for his effort won a third-string spot in the Oxford versus Cambridge mile race on 22 March 1947. On that dreary spring day, on the very track at White City where he had watched Wooderson compete, Bannister discovered his true gift for running. He stepped up to the mark feeling the pressure to run well against his university’s arch rival. From the start Bannister held back, letting the others set the pace. The track was wet, and the front of his singlet was spotted black with cinder ash kicked up by the runners ahead of him. After the bell for the final lap, Bannister was exhausted but still close enough to the leaders to finish respectably. All of a sudden, though, he was overwhelmed by a feeling that he just had to win. It was instinct, a ‘crazy desire to overtake the whole field’, as he later explained. Through a cold, high wind on the back straight, he increased the tempo of his stride, and to everyone’s shock, team-mates and competitors alike, he surged past on the outside. In the effort inspired by the confluence of body and will, he felt more alive than ever before. He pushed through the tape twenty yards ahead of the others in 4:30.8. It wasn’t the time that mattered, rather the rush of passing the field with his long, devouring stride. This was ecstasy, and it was the first time Bannister knew for sure there was something remarkable in the way he ran – and something remarkable in the feeling that went with it.
After the race he met Jack Lovelock, the gold medallist in the 1,500m at the 1936 Olympics and the former world record holder in the mile. ‘You mean the Jack Lovelock,’ Bannister said on being introduced. Lovelock was a national hero, Exeter graduate, doctor, and blessed with tremendous speed. It didn’t take much insight on his part to see in Bannister the potential resurrection of British athletics.
Bannister didn’t disappoint. On 5 June he clocked a 4:24.6 mile, beating the time set by his hero Wooderson when he was the same age, 18. In the summer Bannister travelled with the English team on its first post-war international tour, putting in several good runs. In November he was selected as a ‘possible’ for the 1948 Olympics, then turned down the invitation. He wasn’t ready, he decided, to some criticism.
It was in his nature to listen to his own counsel, not that of others. He had taken a coach, Bill Thomas, who had once trained Lovelock, but Bannister soon became disgruntled with him. Thomas attended to Bannister on the track while wearing a bowler hat, suit and waistcoat. He barked instructions at the miler on how to hold his arms or how many laps to run during training. When the young miler asked for the reasoning behind the lessons, Thomas simply replied, ‘Well, you do this because I’m the coach and I tell you.’ When Bannister ran a trial and enquired about his time, Thomas said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ Soon Bannister dropped him, preferring to discover for himself how to improve his performances.
The next year he became Oxford Athletic Club secretary, then quickly its president. He won the Oxford versus Cambridge meet for the second year; he competed in the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) championships in the summer, learning the ropes of first-class competition. Increasingly the newspapers headlined his name. He even saved the day at the opening ceremony for the Olympics when it was discovered that the British team hadn’t been given a flag with which to march into the stadium. Bannister found the back-up flag, smashing the window of the commandant’s car with a brick to retrieve it.
Four years later, he intended to save the British team’s honour again.
Roger Bannister’s preparations for the Helsinki Games began in the autumn of 1950. He had spent the two previous years studying medicine, soaking up university life, hitch-hiking from Paris to Italy, and going on running tours to America, Greece, and Finland. His body filled out. He won some races and lost others but, importantly, he turned himself from an inexperienced, weedy kid into a young man who clearly understood that Oxford and running had opened up worlds to him that otherwise would have remained closed. He was ready to make his Olympic bid, and afterwards to put away his racing spikes for a life devoted to medicine.
Bannister’s plan was to spend one year competing against the best international middle-distance runners in the world, learning their strengths and weaknesses and acclimatising to different environments. Then, in the year before the Games, he would focus exclusively on training to his peak, running in only a few races so as not to take off his edge. The plan was entirely his own. Having spoken to Lovelock about his preparations for the 1936 Olympics, Bannister felt he needed no other guidance.
First he flew to New Zealand over Christmas for the Centennial Games, where he beat the European 1,500m champion Willi Slijkhuis and the Australian mile champion Don Macmillan, both of whom he was likely to face in Helsinki. His mile time was down to 4:09.9, a reduction of more than forty seconds from his first Oxford race three years earlier. While in New Zealand he visited the small village school Lovelock had attended, noticing that the sapling given to the Olympic gold medal winner had now grown into an oak tree. The symbolism wasn’t lost on him. Back in England Bannister continued his fellowship in medicine through the spring of 1951 at Oxford, where he investigated the limits of human endurance and chatted with such distinguished lecturers as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. He then flew to Philadelphia to compete in the Benjamin Franklin Mile, the premier American event in middle-distance running. The press fawned over this foil to the American athlete, commenting on his travelling alone to the event: ‘No manager, no trainer, no masseur, no friends! He’s nuts – or he’s good.’ In front of forty thousand American fans, Bannister crushed the country’s two best milers in a time of 4:08.3. The New York Herald Tribune described him as the ‘worthy successor to Jack Lovelock’. The New York Times quoted one track official as saying, ‘He’s young, strong and fast. There’s no telling what he can do.’
The race brought Bannister acclaim back home. To beat the Americans on their own turf earned one the status of a national hero. When he followed with summer victories at the British Games and the AAA championships, it seemed track officials and the press were ready to award him the Olympic gold medal right then and there. They praised his training as ‘exceptional’, an ‘object lesson’. Of his long, fluid stride, the British press gushed that it was ‘immaculate’ and ‘amazing’. He left rivals standing; he was a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ on the track. After a race that left the crowd laughing at how effortlessly Bannister had won, a British official predicted, ‘Anyone who beats him in the Olympics at Helsinki will have to fly.’
Then the positive press turned quickly to the negative. Following his own plan, Bannister stopped running mile races at summer’s end. Tired from competition, he felt he had learned all he needed during the year and should now dedicate himself to training. When he chose to run the half-mile in an international meet, the papers attacked: ‘Go Back to Your Own Distance, Roger’. This was only the beginning of the criticism, but Bannister remained focused on his goal.
To escape the attention, he journeyed to Scotland to hike and sleep under the stars for two weeks. One late afternoon, after swimming in a lake, he began to jog around to ease his chill. Soon enough he found himself running for the sheer exhilaration of it, across the moor and towards the coast. The sky was filled with crimson clouds, and as he ran, a light rain started to fall. With the sun still warming his back, a rainbow appeared in front of him, and he seemed to run towards it. Along the coast the rhythm of the water breaking against the rocks eased him, and he circled back to where he had begun. Cool, wet air filled his lungs. Running into the sun now, he had trouble seeing the ground underneath his feet, but still he rushed forward, alive with the movement. Finally spent as the sun disappeared from the horizon, he tumbled down a slight hill and rested on his back, his feet bleeding but feeling rejuvenated. He had needed to reconnect to the joy of running, away from the tyranny of the track.
Throughout the winter of 1951–2, Bannister immersed himself into his first year of medical school at St Mary’s Hospital in London, learning the basics of taking a patient history and working the wards. He was, by the way, also training for the Olympics. By the spring he had developed his stamina and began speed work on the track. When he announced that he wouldn’t defend his British mile championship, the athletics community objected. It was unthinkable. He had obligations to amateur sport; he had to prove he deserved his Olympic spot; he must take a coach now; he couldn’t duck his British rivals. Bannister made no big press announcements defending his reasons, he simply stuck to his plan, trusting it. As isolating as this plan was, so far it had taken him exactly where he wanted – so far. Meanwhile, most other athletes trained under the guidance and direction of the British amateur athletics officials.
On 28 May 1952, Bannister clocked a 1:53 half-mile at Motspur Park with his ‘space-eating stride’. Ten days later he entered the mile at the Inter-Hospitals Meet and won by 150 yards. Maybe he knew what he was doing. The press turned to writing that he would silence his critics at Helsinki and that his training was ‘well-advanced’. Compared to those of the top international 1,500m men, his times were sufficient. His ‘pulverizing last lap’ would likely win the day. Even L. A. Montague, the Manchester Guardian’s esteemed athletics correspondent, trotted out to explain that Bannister was the ‘more sensitive, often more intelligent, runner who burns himself up in giving of his best in a great race’. Bannister was Britain’s best chance at the gold medal, and Montague wondered, ‘Do [critics] really think that they suddenly know more about him than he knows himself?’
Although he lost an 800m race at White City stadium in early July, the headlines exclaimed, ‘Don’t worry about Bannister’s defeat – he knows what he is doing!’ Ably assisted by the press, Bannister had painted himself into a corner. He was favoured to bring back gold by everyone from the head of the AAA to revered newspaper columnists – and, by association, by his countrymen as well. Of course, there weren’t going to be any scapegoats if he failed. ‘No alibis,’ as Bannister said himself. ‘Victory at Helsinki was the only way out.’ A part of him suspected that he had manoeuvred himself into this tight position on purpose. Come the Olympic final, he would have an expectant crowd, the rush of competition, two years of dedicated training, the expectation that it was his last race before retirement, and nobody to blame but himself if he lost. This was motivation.
By 17 July most of the British Olympic team had left for Finland, team manager Jack Crump declaring upon arrival in Helsinki, ‘We will not let Britain down.’ But, though he would have to join the team soon, Bannister was still in London. Like a few other athletes, he wanted to avoid the media frenzy in the prelude to the Games, and the inevitable waiting around, worrying about upcoming events. His friend Chris Chataway, the 5,000m hopeful, had also delayed his departure. The two scoured London for dark goggles to curtain the twenty-one hours of Scandinavian daylight. Given that one rarely saw the sun in London, it proved a difficult search. Bannister also sought out a morning newspaper.
It didn’t take him long to find a story headline – ‘Semi-Finals for the Olympic 1,500 Metres’ – that confirmed what Norris McWhirter had told him the day before about the added heat. ‘I could hardly believe it,’ Bannister later explained. ‘In just the length of time it took to read those few words the bottom had fallen out of my hopes.’ Worse, he had drawn a tough eliminating heat in the first round.
As he went about his day in the smog-choked London streets, the crisp air and fast tracks he expected to enjoy in Helsinki seemed threateningly close at hand. One could hardly have blamed him had he not wanted to go at all.
2 (#ulink_a9b8dedb-1d01-5c4b-b44b-c51486fe5dab)
The essential thing in life is not so much conquering as fighting well.
Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games
In the narrow concrete tunnel, Wes Santee stuck to his position in the seven-man line, waiting to move forward as the first of the American team marched into Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium through the Marathon Gate. The applause from the stands reverberated in the tunnel, sounding as if the whole of mankind had come to watch the opening ceremony parade. Santee, his feet more accustomed to cowboy boots or track spikes, stepped ahead in white patent leather shoes. His outfit was a departure from his typical attire of Western shirts and jeans. Like the rest of his team-mates, he wore a dark flannel jacket with silver buttons, grey flannel slacks, and a poplin hat whose brim he had folded to make it look more like a cowboy hat.
The 20-year-old University of Kansas sophomore towered over most of those around him. At six foot one inch, with much of that height in his legs, he looked the clean-cut American athlete, buzz cut included. His shoulders were wide, and he bristled with energy. His face easily lit with a smile, and he almost always said what he thought, with a Midwestern twang. One had the sense that he wore his emotions out in the open, but that this vulnerability had a limit buttressed with steel.
That afternoon of 19 July 1952, he was nothing but a bundle of nervous anticipation as he moved towards the tunnel’s mouth. Rain streaked across the opening. He peered past it into the stadium, where hundreds of athletes circled the track. They were dressed in a kaleidoscope of colours and styles: pink turbans, flower-patterned shirts, green and gold blazers, black raincoats, orange hats. It was impossible to tell where each team was from because all the flag inscriptions were in Finnish. Santee could not even pronounce the translation for the United States: Yhdysvaltain. The Soviets were already settled on the infield, wearing their cream suits and maroon ties, lined up as neatly as an army regiment. It was their first Olympics since 1912, and they had made no secret of the fact that they were out to beat the Americans.
Finally Santee cleared the tunnel and moved in file towards the track, his head swivelling about to take in the three-tiered stadium and its seventy thousand spectators. It was an awesome sight, like nothing he had ever witnessed. So many people from so many places, charged with excitement and speaking so many different languages. And they had all come this afternoon simply to watch them march around the track, not even to see them compete. On an electric signboard, the likes of which Santee had seen only a few times, were the words Citius, Altius, Fortius – Faster, Higher, Stronger. He had made it. He was an Olympic athlete representing his country.
After marching around the mud-soaked track, he followed the row of athletes to his spot on the infield for the ceremony’s beginning. He felt as if his eyes weren’t wide enough to take in everything happening around him. This was a long way from Ashland, the farming town deep in the south-western part of Kansas where he was raised. The size of the Helsinki stadium alone was enough to marvel at. He remembered arriving at the University of Kansas for the first time and going to the big auditorium for freshman orientation. He’d been with his team-mate Lloyd Koby, who also came from the kind of small town where electricity was just on its way in and a rooster’s crow was the only wake-up call one knew. Koby had looked across the numerous tiers of seats, gauged the height of the rafters, turned to Santee, and said, ‘Boy, this building would hold a lot of hay.’ It was not so much a joke as the only context they knew. But that auditorium was nothing compared to this place, its steep concrete stands seeming to reach the sky.
At a rostrum on the track in front of Santee, the chairman of the organising committee began to speak, first in Finnish, then in Swedish, French, and English, about the Herculean efforts that had gone into these Games. His countrymen had cleared forests, put up hundreds of new buildings of stucco, granite, and steel, enlisted thousands of volunteers, and opened their homes to strangers from around the globe. The stadium in which the opening ceremony was taking place had been the chief target of Russian bombers at the start of the Second World War because of its symbolic value. Now it was once again alive with people, anxious for the competition to commence.
The chairman finished his speech by introducing Finland’s president, who stood at the microphone and announced, ‘I declare the Fifteenth Olympic Games open!’ To the sound of trumpets, the Olympic flag with its five interlocking circles was raised on the stadium flagpole. Then a twenty-one-gun salute boomed. As its echo dissipated, 2,500 quaking pigeons were released from their boxes to swoop and pivot in the air. Santee looked skyward as the birds escaped one by one, carrying the message that the Olympics had begun.
Before the last of them soared away, the scoreboard went blank, and then appeared the words: ‘The Olympic Torch is being brought into the Stadium by … P-A-A-V-O N-U-R-M-I.’ Pandemonium ensued. Santee had passed the bronze statue of Nurmi at the stadium entrance and had seen his classic figure on posters wallpapered throughout Helsinki, but few had expected to see the man himself. Peerless Paavo, the Phantom Finn, the Ace of Abo. Nurmi was a national hero in Finland, the godfather of modern athletics. At one time he owned every record from 10,000m down to 1,500m. At the 1924 Paris Olympics he claimed three gold medals in less than two days. Put simply, he was the greatest. Now bald-headed, slight of stature, and 55 years old, Nurmi ran into the stadium in a blue singlet with the torch in his right hand, his stride as graceful and effortless as ever. Photographers manoeuvred into position. The athletes, Santee included, broke ranks, storming to the track side to catch a glimpse of the unconquerable man.
The fire leaping from the birch torch Nurmi held had been lit in Olympia, Greece, on 25 June and had since weathered a five-thousand-mile journey across land and water. When Nurmi finished his run around the track, as athletes and spectators alike jostled one another to get a better look, he passed the flame to a quartet of athletes at the base of the 220-foot-tall white tower at the stadium’s south end. While they ascended the tower, at the top of which another Finnish champion, Hannes Kolehmainen, waited, a whiterobed choir stood to sing. The stadium was reverently silent. Kolehmainen took the torch and tilted it to light the Olympic flame, which would burn until the Games ended.
Santee and the other athletes returned to their places in the field. From a distance each team looked uniform, its athletes dressed in matching outfits and standing side by side. On closer inspection, they were an odd assembly of men and women: stocky wrestlers, tall sprinters, wide-shouldered shot-putters, cauliflower-eared boxers, miniature gymnasts, crooked-legged horsemen, and weather-beaten yachtsmen – all with their own ambitions for victory in the days ahead. As Santee stood in the middle of this medley of people, looking at the Olympic flame and hearing the jumble of voices all around him, the strangeness of the scene overwhelmed him. He had been overseas only one other time. Except for travelling to athletics meets, he had never left the state of Kansas. Now he was in this enormous amphitheatre in a country where night lasted only a few hours. He didn’t have his coach with him. He had few friends among the athletes. He had rarely faced international competition. He was scheduled to run in the 5,000m even though the 1,500m was his best distance. Filled with these thoughts, Santee gulped. The tightness in his throat felt like a stone. Indeed, he was a long way from Kansas now.
Had his father had his way, in the summer of 1952 Wes would still have been pitching hay, fixing fence posts, and ploughing fields back in Ashland. Most fathers want their sons to have a better life, but Wes Santee didn’t have such a dad.
David Santee was born in Ohio in the late 1800s. He lived a helter-skelter childhood, never advancing past the second grade (for 7- to 8-year-olds). He was a keen braggart and adept at the harmonica, but his only employable skill was hard labour. Over six feet tall and weighing 2201b, he had the size for it. His cousin married a ranch owner named Molyneux in western Kansas, and David Santee went out to work the eight thousand acres as a hired hand. He met Ethel Benton, a tall, gentle woman who had studied to be a teacher, on a blind date. They were soon married, and shortly afterwards expecting the first of three children. On 25 March 1932, the town doctor was called to the ranch to deliver Wes Santee. He came into the world kicking.
Santee was raised on the Molyneux cattle and wheat ranch five miles outside Ashland. It was practically a pioneer’s existence, with an outhouse, no running water, no electricity. If you wanted to listen to the radio, you had to hook it up to the car battery. Farm life was vulnerable to the often cruel hand of nature. The Santees lived through the drought of the Dust Bowl years, when sand squeezed through every crack in the house and made the sky so dark that the chickens went to roost in mid-afternoon. They survived tornados and storms of grasshoppers that ate everything they could chew, including the handle of a pitchfork left out against a fence post. In good times and bad, Mr Molyneux ruled the ranch. He liked the Santee boy’s spirit and was more a father to Wes than his own ever was. Molyneux was a successful rancher and businessman; he owned Ashland’s dry goods store and enjoyed taking the boy into town to buy him a double-dip ice cream cone at the drugstore. But Molyneux died when Wes was in the fourth grade, and by the age of 10 his happy childhood had ended abruptly. From that point on he was his father’s property, suffering his bad temper while working a man’s day on the ranch. His only freedom was running.
For Santee, running was play. He ran everywhere. ‘I just don’t like to fiddle around,’ he said. ‘If I was told to get the hoe, I’d run to get it. If I had to go to the barn, I’d run.’ The only bus in town was a flat-bed truck, so instead of riding, Santee ran the five miles to school. When he returned in the early afternoon, he ran from his house into the fields to help with the ploughing or to corral one of the four hundred head of cattle. At dusk, when his father called it a day, an exhausted Santee didn’t walk home for supper, he ran – fast, wearing his cowboy boots. As the distance from his father lengthened, a weight lifted from his shoulders, and by the time he had washed up and changed clothes he was as fresh as if he hadn’t worked at all.
Later, when a remark, a look, or seemingly nothing at all set off his father’s rage, this freshness was torn from Wes. He took the brunt of his father’s anger, saving his younger brother Henry, who suffered from rickets as a child, and his younger sister Ina May from the worst of it. David Santee dispensed his cruelty with forearm, fist, rawhide buggy whip, or whatever else was at hand. Once it was a hammer. Wes considered himself lucky that his old man didn’t drink or the situation could have been really bad. Some sons of abusive fathers want to become big enough to fight back; Santee wanted to become fast enough to get away.
Very early on he recognised that he had a gift for running. He was never very good in the sprint, but if the game was to run around the block twice, he always won. In eighth grade, when Wes was in his early teens, the high-school coach came down to evaluate which kids were good at which sports. That was how a small town developed its athletes. The coach threw out a football to see who threw or kicked it the furthest, threw out a basketball to see who made a couple of jump shots. Then he told Santee and the other twenty kids in his class to run to the grain elevator. Within a few hundred yards Santee was all alone and knew he had the others whipped. This was ‘duck soup’ he said to himself as he ran to the grain elevator and back and took a shower before the others had returned. Most walked half the distance.
When a new kid named Jack Brown, who was rumoured to be quite a runner, arrived in town, the townspeople urged Santee to race him. The first day of his freshman year, Santee joined Brown at the starting line of the half-mile track used for horse races and almost lapped him by the finish. It felt good to be better than everybody else at something. What had started as a combination of fun – running to chase mice or the tractor – and a means to escape his father’s clutches had now become a way to excel. Each race he won bolstered his pride.
J. Allen Murray was there to help him on this path. Murray was Ashland’s high-school track and field coach (as well as history teacher and basketball/football coach). He believed Santee could be the next Glenn Cunningham, the most famous United States middle-distance runner and a Kansas native. The problem was that Santee barely had enough time for classes, let alone running, because his father wanted him home to work. Murray told Wes that if he didn’t have time to train, he should just continue to run everywhere he went. That was fine with Santee.
Finally the time came for his first track meet. Scheduled for a Saturday, the meet was delayed until Monday because of a thunderstorm. Unfortunately, Santee worked on Mondays, and he knew his father would object to losing an afternoon of his free labour. Murray told him he would take care of it. The next evening he walked up the steps to the Santees’ house. He had invited himself to dinner. Wes’s father normally greeted visitors with a .22-calibre pistol and an offer of five minutes to get off his property. This time David Santee at least pushed open the door, but his hospitality ended there. Through dinner and dessert, Coach Murray explained to Wes’s parents why they should allow their son to attend the meet – how it was good for the boy to be challenged in competition. David Santee didn’t utter a word the entire evening: not a yes, not a no. Murray left without an answer, and Wes disappeared into the fields afterwards. Alone in the dark, he clawed at the dirt and grass, wondering how he would ever get out of this place. If he hadn’t learned to hate his father before this night, he did so now.
The next day Coach Murray told him to get up early on Monday to do his chores; he would pick him up at seven o’clock. Santee rose at four, hauled feed, milked the cows, and did everything required of him before his coach arrived. David Santee was working in the fields and thought his son had simply left for school. It was the first time Wes had left the county, and although he was the youngest in the mile race, unaware of competition tactics and scared after having disobeyed his father, he placed third. He was awarded a red ribbon and could barely stand still with the excitement. But then he had to go home. When he entered the house, his father was sitting at the table. From the grim look on his face he obviously knew that Wes had gone to the meet.
‘I won third place,’ Wes said with sheepish excitement.
‘If you have time to miss school and do all this’ – his father bit off each word – ‘then you have time to get all the rest of the ploughing done.’
For some eighteen hours, Wes Santee sat on the tractor, ploughing miles of fields without a break for lunch, and certainly not for school. His throat burned from thirst, his spine ached from the jarring movements of the tractor on uneven terrain, and his hands were rubbed raw from gripping the wheel. Working from dawn until ten o’clock at night, Wes finished two days of ploughing in one. As a man who spent most of his youth labouring on the farm, he would remember that day as the hardest he had ever endured. When he finally returned to school, Murray asked if he was all right. Santee nodded. Murray then asked him if he wanted to go to the next meet in Mead, Kansas. Santee said yes.
After Wes left, Murray called the ranch to say one thing to Santee’s father: ‘I want you to bring your truck in and haul some kids to Mead.’ David Santee didn’t reply, but the tone in Coach Murray’s voice made him understand that he didn’t have a choice in the matter. Like most bullies, David Santee folded when someone finally stood up to him. The next week he showed up on time with his truck, and though it angered him that his son was wasting time that would be better spent on the ranch, he never got in the way of Wes’s running again.
Over the next four years, Wes Santee scorched around tracks throughout Kansas. He won two state mile championships, broke Glenn Cunningham’s state high-school record, became the favourite son of Ashland, and was targeted by college track recruiters from coast to coast. He had found his way out, and now there was nothing that could stand in his way. He trained as much as possible, studied hard to keep his grades up, and decided not to let things get too far with his high-school girlfriend because recruiters were not interested in athletes with wives or children. Shutting himself down with her was not easy, but he had to get out of Ashland.
When Bill Easton, the University of Kansas track and field coach, offered him a scholarship in 1949, Santee accepted. Over the previous two years Easton had won his confidence, probably because he was everything Santee’s father was not: he wore a coat and tie, spoke intelligently, won friends easily, and backed up his words with action. Under Easton’s guidance and encouragement, the KU track team had become one of the country’s best.
The summer before he left for college, Wes had his last confrontation with his father. While he dug yet another six-foot-deep hole in the hard ground for the soon-to-arrive electricity poles, his father started pounding on his back with his fists because he was digging too slowly. That was it. The 17-year-old, his shirt soaked with sweat and hands blistered from the work, stormed back to the house, informed his mother he was leaving, and said goodbye to Henry and Ina May. In the stable, he saddled Bess, the horse his father had given him, and put a halter on a second mare, which Wes had yet to name (a local farmer had given her to Wes in exchange for breaking some horses). He then led his two horses towards the front gate, a cloud of dust from their hooves trailing behind them.
Suddenly, his father appeared from behind the barn and blocked his way. ‘You’re not taking that horse anywhere,’ he said, gesturing towards Bess.
Sensing the coiled violence in the rigid way his father stood in front of him, Wes grimly said ‘Okay’ and unstrapped his saddle from Bess. He then threw it over the other horse, which had never been ridden before, and led her through the gate, leaving his father without a goodbye. When he was two hundred yards away, Santee carefully hoisted himself up on the horse and rode into town. He stayed with a friend who owned the local ice plant and had once told him that he could stay with him if things ever got too bad at the ranch. Santee lived there until college began.
In Lawrence, Santee fell under the protection of Bill Easton. The coach invited the youth, who had almost nothing with him but the clothes on his back, to stay at his house until his dormitory was ready. Santee might have been bold-talking and powerful, but he needed someone to care for him. The first morning, over a breakfast of bacon and eggs, Easton told Santee that he needed to set a good example and help lead the team. Easton spoke to him like an equal, and Santee listened.
Coach Murray had given him the opportunity to run; Coach Easton showed Santee how to turn his raw talent as a runner into greatness. It had little to do with changing his short, clipped stride, which had become ingrained in his youth while running along plough furrows and through pastures where a long stride would have been dangerous on the uneven terrain. Santee did not bring his arms back in a normal long arc, nor drive to the extreme with his kicking foot like most distance runners. Instead he had the quick arm swing and knee action of a sprinter. But with his native speed, coordination, long legs, strong shoulders, and ability to relax, he was able to sustain this sprinter style over long distances. Easton was convinced that reshaping his stride into a more classical motion would do more harm than good, so he taught Santee to harness his power through training, pace judgement, and focus. Soon enough, seniors on his team were struggling to keep up with him in practice and competition.
Led by Santee, the freshman squad won the Big Seven cross-country and indoor championships – the league that comprised the biggest and best colleges in sport in the Midwest, namely Kansas State, Iowa State, University of Missouri, University of Colorado, University of Nebraska and University of Oklahoma alongside University of Kansas. Santee set the national collegiate two-mile record in 9:21.6 and began to win headlines as the ‘long-legged loper’ who would ‘play havoc’ with most, if not all, of Glenn Cunningham’s records by the time he was finished. In the spring of 1951, at the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championships, he took seventeen seconds off the 5,000m record in the junior division, and the next day he placed second in the senior division. By the end of his freshman year, his mile time hovered in the four-minute teens (4:15, 4:16, 4:17). That summer he earned a spot on an AAU-sponsored tour to Japan and found himself running in Osaka, Sapporo, and Tokyo. There he met the American half-miler Mai Whitfield who had won two gold medals at the 1948 Olympic Games. While some athletes were hesitant to share a hotel room with the black track star, Santee gladly jumped at the opportunity. Whitfield taught the young miler to make sure to keep his toes pointed straight ahead when striding, so as not to lose even a quarter inch of distance with each stride. He also explained to Wes that a miler had the time and physical reserves to make only one offensive and one defensive move in the course of a race. When Santee returned to Kansas in August, he felt certain he was ready for more international competition. He announced to local reporters, ‘I want to make the Olympic team and go to Helsinki, Finland.’
In his second, or sophomore, year this ‘sinewy-legged human jet’, as one reporter described Santee, proved that he was on his way. Some began to compare him to Emil Zatopek, the Czech star who ran everything from the mile to the marathon at world-class levels. This was the level of enthusiasm Santee generated on and off the track. He loved racing in front of large crowds and never tired. His talent just barely outmeasured his confidence. On a flight to one meet, a Kansas Jayhawks team-mate held out a newspaper article to show Wes. ‘Look what it says here … [Santee’s college competitor] Billy [Herd] hasn’t been beaten in any kind of a race for almost two years. That includes relay carries … He’s gobbled up some pretty good boys too, Wes.’
Santee stretched his boots out into the aisle. ‘Yeah, he’s a good boy. But he hasn’t tried to digest me yet.’
In two-mile races during his sophomore year, Santee lapped his competitors. In cross-country meets he was slipping into his sweats before other runners had finished. During the indoor season he set record after record in the mile, leading his team to a host of dual meet victories. It was almost too easy. On campus he ran from class to class, and professors set their watches by the precise time at which he started his training sessions.
In April 1952 at the Drake University Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, one of the year’s most important outdoor track meets, Santee anchored the four-mile relay for his team. When the baton was passed to him, Georgetown’s Joe LaPierre was some sixty yards ahead. Santee blazed three 62-second quarter-miles, yet had trouble gaining ground because LaPierre was running brilliantly himself. As Santee sped into the first turn of the last lap, Easton yelled out, ‘He’s wilting in the sun!’ Santee was finally gaining. Stride after stride he closed the gap. When he burst through the tape yards ahead of LaPierre, setting a national collegiate mile record in 4:06.8, Wes Santee had officially arrived. ‘Santee’s not human,’ said the Georgetown coach. The Des Moines Register quipped, ‘Santee stuck out above every other athlete like the Aleutian Islands into the Bering Sea.’ The national papers picked up the best quote, from the Drake coach: ‘Santee is the greatest prospect for the four-minute mile America has yet produced. He not only has the physical qualifications, but the mental and spiritual as well.’
But first Santee turned his sights to the Olympics. As holder of national titles in the 1,500m and the 5,000m, he by right qualified for the American trial in each. In mid-June he went to California with Easton to spend a week training. They decided together that he should participate in both trials. ‘I just want to make the Olympic team,’ he told his coach. ‘Time or race isn’t important.’ On 27 June, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Santee placed second in the 5,000m trial, guaranteeing a trip to Helsinki. That night he dined on his customary steak and potato dinner and enjoyed quiet conversation with Easton back at the hotel. The next day, braving one of the coldest June days in Los Angeles history, he readied himself for the 1,500m trial in front of forty-two thousand spectators. Santee looked around for Easton, but couldn’t find him. A whistle was blown, the race called, and Santee approached the starting line alongside milers Bob McMillen and Warren Druetzler, both of whom he was sure he could beat. In the programme listing the qualifiers for the 3.40 p.m. race, Santee was predicted to ‘win as he pleases – he has all year’. He was revved to go.
Suddenly, two AAU officials grabbed his arm and shuffled him off the track before he could protest. ‘Wes, they’re not going to let you run,’ one official said.
‘What do you mean?’ Santee asked, shrugging off their hold on him. ‘What’s going on?’
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Easton running across the field. Though wearing a jacket, tie, and dress shoes, he was moving fast.
The race starter called, ‘Runners to your mark!’ and then the gun fired. Santee watched helplessly as the trial started without him.
Easton finally made it to his side. ‘Wes, I’m sorry. We’ve been in a meeting for over an hour and they’re saying you’re not good enough to run both races, and they won’t let you drop out of the 5,000 to run the 1,500.’
This wasn’t right. Only the previous week he had run the third fastest 1,500m time in AAU history: 3:49.3. It was the fastest time by an American in years. Santee welled with anger, and with balled fists looked ready to act out his frustration.
Easton pulled him to one side. The coach had the stocky build of a wrestler, and even then, in his late forties with a fleshy, oval face, he looked capable of stopping this tall athlete if necessary. His voice was calm. ‘They told me you were only 19 [sic] – not good enough to run the 5,000 against Zatopek followed up with the 1,500.I told them we don’t particularly want to run the 5,000; we want to run the 1,500. Their only response was, “You qualified for that, and you have to stay with it.”’
There was nothing to be done. Easton knew that no Olympic rule forbade an athlete from participating in two events. If he qualified, he qualified. Those were the rules, but the AAU ran the show, and if a rule interfered with what the AAU wanted, its leader either ignored the rule or changed it. This was the first time, yet unfortunately not the last, that the AAU would stand in Santee’s way. Yes, he was off to Helsinki to race in the 5,000m, but his best chance of coming home with a medal was in the 1,500m.
The three weeks between the trial and the opening ceremony in Helsinki was a whirlwind. Santee nearly died on a flight from Los Angeles to St Louis when the plane carrying America’s Olympic athletes went into a tailspin and passengers were thrown from their seats. When the plane finally righted itself, the preacher and polevaulter Bob Richards walked down the aisle asking for confessions. After a long layover in St Louis, they arrived in New York. Santee participated in the national TV show Blind Date, hosted by Arlene Francis, as well as the first Olympic telethon with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. He ran in an exhibition three-quarter-mile race on Randall’s Island and set a new American record of 2:58.3, not to mention leaving the Olympic 1,500m qualifiers far behind. The effort was born of frustration: to show the AAU officials his speed and prove their decision wrong. After a flurry of press interviews, he flew from New York to Newfoundland, then to London and, finally, to Helsinki. By the time Santee arrived in Finland he was a jumble of excitement, jet lag, hope, aggravation, patriotism, fear, and confusion – a very different cocktail of emotions from what he needed to perform at his best.
But there he was at the opening ceremony, right in the middle of it all and wanting to prove he deserved to stand side by side with the best runners in the world. When the ceremony ended, the 5,870 athletes from sixty-seven nations filed out of the stadium, soaked and cold. Santee had only a few more days to pull himself together for his qualifying round. His legs had never failed him before, and no matter the obstacle or his state of mind, he expected them to see him through once again.
3 (#ulink_46dced30-dc4a-593d-8aa3-0ddcd97e383d)
To be great, one does not have to be mad, but definitely it helps.
Percy Cerutty, Australian athletics coach
All was quiet in Kapyla, the Olympic village in a forest of pine trees twenty miles outside Helsinki. John Landy and three of his four room-mates – Les Perry, Don Macmillan, and Bob Prentice – lay in their iron-framed beds. The Arctic twilight crept in around the edges of the window, the sheets were as coarse as burlap, and the piles of track clothes and shoes reeked, but the Australians were resting easily, exhausted from being thousands of miles from home and trying to prepare for the most important athletics competition of their lives. In the days before an Olympian’s event, he felt as if he were looking over the edge of a cliff; the nerves, upset stomach, and general unease took a lot out of an athlete. The anticipation was almost as trying as the event itself. Sleep was the only relief on offer, if one could finally fall asleep.
‘Wake up! Wake up! You don’t need all this sleep!’ Percy Cerutty yelled as he burst into the room, swinging the door wide open and switching on the lights.
‘Bloody hell, Percy!’ groaned one of his athletes. ‘Thanks for waking us.’
‘You blokes don’t need all this sleep,’ their coach shouted back. At 57, Cerutty was a whirling dervish, a short, fit man with a flowing white mane of hair, goatee, toffee-coloured face, blue eyes, and the kind of voice that could wake the dead when raised. It was often raised.
‘All what sleep?’ his athletes retorted.
‘Ah, you’re hiding in here. You’re avoiding reality!’ Cerutty bounced around the floor, kicking up little wakes of cement dust. ‘The world is gathered here just outside that doorway, and all you fellas can think of is sleep. Sleep won’t get you anywhere.’ He was really getting going now. When Cerutty started a rant, he went on for a while. They had to stop him.
It might have been a single voice, but it was their collective annoyance that finally said, ‘Look, shut the hell up, Percy. It’s all right for you to wander around grandstanding, but we’re the ones who have to run. You’ve been carrying on non-stop since we got here, when all we’re trying to do is prepare to race. You’re supposed to be here to help us.’ Les Perry had to face the mighty Emil Zatopek; Bob Prentice would run a marathon; and Macmillan and Landy would toe the line with the greatest field of middle-distance runners in Olympic history. Cerutty had chosen to crash with his protégés, whether they liked it or not. They had been patient with him, but now he would have to excuse them for finally taking a stand against his antics.
After the athletes had joined him in London on 20 June (as an unofficial, non-sponsored coach, Cerutty had had to pay his own way and could afford the journey from Australia only by slow boat) for a series of pre-Olympic races, Cerutty had provoked incident after incident. They knew he needed to attract attention to promote his coaching techniques, but at what cost? Prancing around Motspur Park wearing only a pair of white shorts, he’d heckled other runners. At White City he had walked up to Roger Bannister, close enough to feel his breath, and said, ‘So, you’re Bannister … We’ve come to do you.’ He had showboated to the journalists, too. ‘Others can run faster,’ he’d boasted, ‘but none can run harder than I.’ He was dragged off screaming from one meet because he wouldn’t leave the track. On arriving in Helsinki, Cerutty had made a beeline to visit Paavo Nurmi without an invitation, and he had stayed so late with Zatopek that the Czech runner was forced to offer his bed to the Australian coach and sleep in the woods himself. His athletes were used to him, but couldn’t he have left his eccentricities in Australia? This was the Olympics. Enough was enough.
While Cerutty scrambled about the room, Landy and the others shielded their eyes from the light. Earlier that evening, Landy had scaled the fence surrounding the Olympic training arena to get in some extra training, so he was particularly tired. Compared to Don Macmillan, the miler in the bed next to him, who had long legs and a powerful chest, Landy was small. His 150lb were stretched over a narrow five-foot-eleven-inch frame, and with his quiet voice, soft brown eyes, and shag of curly hair, he hardly stood out in a room. Yet he had a strong presence. In part it was because of his intelligence, which was lively, well rounded, and quick. He also possessed a deep and infectious laugh. But mostly it was an intangible quality that people noticed, a feeling that Landy possessed a reservoir of calm, uncompromising will. In conversation with him, one immediately had the sense that he would be a rock in a storm, and that a friendship with him would endure.
Although Landy had been last on the list to make the Australian team, an honour that earned him a chance to compete but not the funds to make the trip, he had done very well in the six weeks since leaving Melbourne. In London he had placed second in the British AAA championship mile race – a surprise to himself and everybody else in the White City stadium. He’d followed that race with meets in Belfast, Glasgow, Middlesbrough, and another in London. Back home in Australia the press began to pay attention, commenting on his ‘paralyzing burst’ and how many experts ‘had not seen a runner over the last fifteen years with such relaxation, smoothness, and style’. He had even set a new two-mile record with a time of 8:54, a feat that resulted in his inclusion in the 5,000m heats on top of the 1,500m. It also improved the odds posted on him to bring back a medal. Now he just needed some sleep.
Landy and his three friends knew they owed their presence in Helsinki mainly to Cerutty, this madcap little man with his strange ideas about pushing oneself to the limit. After all, they were Cerutty’s gang. Unfortunately, enlightenment came at a cost.
To develop four Australian distance runners to Olympic standards had taken more than a sleep-deprivation regime. Unlike Finland, Australia wasn’t a country known for investing either attention or dollars in athletics. The six state amateur athletic associations ran perpetually in the red. Training methods were years behind European and American advances. Some Australians even thought too much exercise was bad for one’s health. As an athlete from the 1950s put it, ‘Runners were oddities; long-distance runners were very peculiar people; and those who ran the marathon were crazy.’ The country had a long tradition in track and field, but it was marked by neglect, a focus on gambling in professional foot races, lackadaisical training, a dearth of talent, and very little international success. Spectators and athletes alike had to pay at the gate, yet the expense of running meets consistently fell short of revenues. In promoter’s jargon, the sport ‘didn’t sell’.
Facilities for training and events were lacking as well. Australia, nearly the size of the continental United States, had only two standard athletics fields. One of those was in Melbourne, Landy’s hometown, but as Joseph Galli, a cigar-chomping, omnipresent athletics reporter of the time, wrote, ‘Olympic Park [was] a depressing shambles – lank grass covers the earth banking, dressing rooms are dirty and primitive, and the burnt-out stand remains as mute testimony of the unwillingness of Government and civic leaders to give amateur athletes the small, permanent stadium they need for the future.’ The track itself was a disaster; runners would have posted better times circling a potholed city block through rush-hour traffic.
This is not to say that Australia cared little for sport in general: among sport-crazed nations, it reached the height of bedlam. Early in their history, Australians had imported the English love of sport, and over the years had taken it to an entirely different level. It has been noted that for every thirty words in the Australian language, one has to do with sport. In the early 1950s a Saturday Evening Post correspondent explained how the country’s sports heroes were accorded a respect greater than that given to ‘ministers of State or Gospel’, and their fans were among the world’s most avid. Total attendance in the minor rounds of Australian football matches typically reached over two million spectators. And when one of their great athletes died, he or she was accorded all the trappings of a state funeral. On the international stage Australians couldn’t claim military might, economic superiority, cultural influence, political power, or historical greatness, but they could make their country known in the sporting arena. Success there fostered pride that was wanting in a nation built by convicts and gold prospectors. In cricket and football, tennis and swimming, Australians were respected, but in athletics much less so. And in distance running, not at all.
Young men such as John Landy needed to be convinced to take up running seriously, for most it was just something one played at. Born on 12 April 1930, Landy showed early promise by winning the sprint race at Malvern Grammar School’s annual sports meeting. When his proud father Gordon, who had been a fine footballer in his day, turned to his wife Elva and said that one day John would be a ‘world champion’, she laughed. He was only 6.
Landy enjoyed a comfortable childhood. His family lived in a gracious, five-bedroom house in East Malvern, an upmarket suburb a few miles south-east of Melbourne, a city of one and a half million born during the Gold Rush. The Landy family dated back to the mid-nineteenth-century influx of immigrants from England and Ireland. Along with his two brothers and two sisters, John was loved and supported by his parents, who were neither too strict nor too lenient. His father, a disciplined man, well respected in the community, was a successful accountant and served on the Melbourne Cricket Club board. His mother had a great interest in history and literature. The children attended private schools and were urged to pursue their own interests. They holidayed in Dromana, a seaside town outside Melbourne. If one asked about the Landy family, the response was that they were ‘good people’.
The young John Landy was more interested in butterfly collecting than in running. When he was 10 years old, he met a local beetle specialist who introduced him to entomology. With three other local kids, Landy often rode his bike twenty miles into the bush to chase after butterflies with a net and a pair of fast legs. At home he would carefully secure his latest find on a mounting board and add the creature’s taxonomic classification for identification.
Only when Landy was 14 and entered Geelong Grammar, an elite boarding school outside the city where the ‘prefects whack[ed] the boys’, that he began to distinguish himself in sport. It was the height of the war in the Pacific, and his father was away from Melbourne handling logistics for the air force. John was part of a group called the Philistines, boys who, as he described it, weren’t regarded as ‘intellectual powerhouses’ but who knew their way around the playing fields. Like the others, Landy preferred Australian Rules football, and he excelled by being quick on his feet and a fierce competitor. In the off-season Landy proved pretty good at athletics events, too. In his final year at Geelong he won the school cross-country, 440-yard, 880-yard, and one-mile track titles – a clean sweep. He then claimed the All Public Schools mile championship in a time of 4:43.8. That was impressive, but two years earlier at the same championship Don Macmillan had posted a time better by seventeen seconds, so not much attention was paid to Landy’s future as a miler outside the small circle of devoted Australian running fans. Still, a handful of people were watching Landy’s efforts on the track.
When he enrolled at Melbourne University to take his degree in agricultural science, Landy continued to dabble in running, but he considered his prospects limited. He had a good head for numbers, was aware of the times of Australian and international stars, and given his progress to date he thought his best time in the mile would be 4:20. In whatever sport he pursued, he wanted to be the best, and running laps around the track didn’t appear to repay the effort involved, particularly as he began to lose more races than he won. During his second year in college, one spent 120 miles north-east of the city to learn the more practical side of agricultural science (mending fences, driving tractors, tending to sheep and cattle), Landy won the Hanlon ‘best and fairest’ footballer trophy, a distinguished prize. While there, he didn’t win any foot races. More than ever, playing half centre halfback looked to be the right choice for his undergraduate sporting activities. He liked being part of a team as well. Like many Australian athletes before him who had great potential, he was losing interest in running as a result of a lack of encouragement and insightful training.
But in late 1950, everything changed. Like many Geelong students, Landy had joined the school’s athletic club after graduation in order to participate in meets. The club captain, marathoner Gordon Hall, had advised him to alternate days of cross-country and sprint running. He took that advice. After a race at Olympic Park, however, Hall approached him and said, ‘You’re not fit.’ He suggested Landy speak to his own coach, Percy Cerutty, who was a fixture at Olympic Park; to find him, all one had to do was listen for his piercing voice. The two went to see Cerutty, and Hall introduced Landy, who, though not exceptionally tall, towered over the bantamweight 116lb coach.
Cerutty stroked his chin and finally said, ‘Never heard of you.’
The coach liked to press an athlete’s buttons in order to gauge his reaction and strength of will. Usually he invaded a young man’s space in the process, setting him further on edge. Landy fell for the bait, commenting that he was truly a footballer and only played at running. That attitude was anathema to Cerutty, who demanded 100 per cent commitment from his athletes. Before the conversation had barely begun, Cerutty was walking away. Nonetheless, he told Landy that if he was interested in learning how to run, seriously interested, then he should come by the house in South Yarra for another talk. They didn’t set a date.
Cerutty knew what he was doing; an athlete needed to choose to be taught. Only when Landy went to him could Cerutty show him what he would gain by listening to him. He had already recruited two of Australia’s brightest young stars and helped them to achieve astounding results.
The first was Les Perry, the ‘Mighty Atom’, as some called him, because of his short stature and indefatigable energy. Perry had first caught the Cerutty show at an annual professional foot race known as the Stawell Gift. On the infield, Cerutty was waving his arms about while explaining to a crowd how he had just run seventeen miles to the nearest mountain range and back. ‘Endurance? You’ve only got to get out there and do it. Face up to it: man was meant to run.’ A year later, upset at his progress in running, Perry answered an advertisement Cerutty had posted in the local Melbourne paper. He went to the house in South Yarra, and over the course of the afternoon Cerutty lifted weights and ran around the house ranting about prehistoric man and the survival of the fittest. But his ideas on fitness made sense. Perry enlisted his help, then urged his friend Don Macmillan to see him as well.
When Macmillan, one of the most naturally gifted milers to appear on the Australian scene for years, showed up at Cerutty’s door on a Sunday morning, he was in a terrible state. He was failing his exams, having trouble finding time to train, and worried about his direction in life. Cerutty sat him down to talk about books, to discuss the Bible, and to argue philosophy. Then he gave Macmillan an ultimatum: ‘If you want to come work with me, be part of my gang, I’ll tell you straight out, I’m not interested in failures. You have to pass all your exams. That bit’s up to you, but if you want, I’ll tell you how to do it.’ He gave Macmillan an hour-by-hour schedule, directing him when to get up, drink his tea, run, study, take a shower, eat, run again, read the paper, and go to bed. Within a few months, Macmillan had passed his exams and won the Australian mile title in record time. At that same championship Les Perry came in first in the three-mile race.
When John Landy decided to make his way to South Yarra, Cerutty’s reputation was well established. As he led Landy up the stairs to his study overlooking Melbourne’s botanical gardens, the coach paused and, with a befuddled look, asked, ‘What did you say your name was? Landy? Gordon Hall told me you won the Combined Public Schools mile last year, and I always study the results … What was the time you ran?’
‘About 4:44 …’
‘I have never heard the name,’ Cerutty said, looking him straight in the eye. He sensed that Landy would resist taking direction. ‘It seems to me, young man, it is time you put the name of Landy on the world map.’
In a study measuring seven feet by seven feet and crowded with books, cherry red velvet couches, dumbbells, a decanter of port, a typewriter, and a hodgepodge of papers and magazines, Landy sat in silence as Cerutty dispelled the notion that Landy would burn out or, worse, harm himself if he trained too much. The ‘human organism’ was built to handle stress, he said; the body actually welcomed it. Through continuous effort, superior fitness was guaranteed. Look at the rigorous training of Emil Zatopek or the Finnish runners Arne Andersson and Gundar Haegg, he told Landy. Look at Percy Cerutty.
Landy was fired by his ideas. Nobody had ever spoken to him in this way. He told Cerutty that he would train with him. When Landy left, Cerutty simply noted on a card the young man’s date of birth and the mile time of 4:43.8 he had run in the 1948 Victorian Public Schools Championship. He filed it away in his athletics card catalogue, unaware that it was John Landy who would launch him into the international arena as a coach.
It took three weeks of hard training and a few lessons on running style for Landy to realise results. On 20 January 1951, he dropped his mile time by six seconds. Cerutty then gave Landy a training outline and sent him out on his own, never enquiring as to whether or not the young runner was following his guidance. And Landy did not feel the need to offer the information himself. The proof was in his performances. Two months later, after upper body strengthening with dumbbells and hundreds of miles of conditioning work, his time was down another ten seconds. On 22 May he ran a 4:16 mile, an extraordinary improvement. It was the first time Landy thought he might have a shot at the Olympics, though the qualifying time was 4:10. This ‘Conditioner of Men’, as the brass plate outside Cerutty’s house read, had discovered his greatest athlete yet. Landy had natural coordination, very strong leg muscles, and most importantly, he could sustain punishing levels of training. In this last respect, coach and athlete were much alike.
Almost from the day he was born in 1895, Percy Cerutty was a sickly child. His father was an alcoholic and his mother barely kept her son from malnourishment. Cerutty was plagued by pneumonia; his lungs barely functioned. Much of his youth was spent reading. He was continually nursed to health by his mother and sisters. At 15, when he took a job as a telegraph messenger boy, he had to ride his bicycle many miles into the suburbs, and he found that he enjoyed this. At 18 he won his first foot race. By the age of 21 he was experiencing brutal headaches that blurred his vision and made him vomit, yet he still raced, posting his best mile time of 4:34, just behind the fastest middle-distance runner in Australia at that time.
After he married and took up a career as a telephone technician, however, he hung up his racing shoes for the serious business of adult life. But soon the dreariness of that life began to sap his strength; he took to smoking and inactivity. The migraines worsened, his health deteriorated, and depression overpowered him. One day, at the age of 39, he stumbled into an empty church with tears pouring from his eyes. He had reached rock bottom. He was thin and weak with no hope but an early death.
His doctor recommended a six-month leave from the telephone company and gave Cerutty one prescription: ‘I can’t heal you with medicines, Percy … You have to save yourself. If you want to do anything about yourself, you’ll get off that bed under your own will and spirit.’ Cerutty took that advice seriously. He restricted his diet to raw foods and quit smoking. Perhaps most importantly, he started reading. He devoured everything from poetry to religious texts, weightlifting advice, Eastern philosophy, scientific treatises, and long-distance training guides. He developed a new approach to life, one unencumbered by fear and defined by exerting himself fully – physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
Mostly, though, he exercised. He lifted weights. He joined a walking club and began to take longer and longer hikes through the bush. Within a year he had completed a seventy-mile hike, to his wife’s shock. The outdoors exhilarated him. It was not long until he started to run again, and he ran constantly. Soon his body was transformed into that of a much younger man. In 1942, at 47, he showed up at the Malvern Harriers locker room and announced, ‘I’ve come down to have a run with you. I used to be a member here.’ Gone were the migraines, rheumatism, and spells of depression. The road hadn’t been easy though. When Cerutty had first begun exercising, he would return home on the brink of total collapse, his heart racing. He could hardly push open the front door. He would lie down on the floor, eyes glued to the ceiling as his breathing and heart rate gradually returned to normal. But he learned to appreciate the torture his body endured because he always recovered and returned stronger the next day. ‘Thrust against pain. Pain is the purifier,’ he said.
Within a year of joining the Harriers, he was regularly clocking mid-four-minute miles. Then came the marathons, 100-mile races in twenty-four hours, 200 miles in forty-eight hours. Such feats by a man of his age brought attention, and Cerutty adored it. He also welcomed the chance to expound his theories. As he codified his philosophy of training and life in the late 1940s, athletes were beginning to pay heed. In 1946 Cerutty purchased three acres in Portsea, a town south of Melbourne on the easternmost point of Port Philip Bay. There he began to build a ten-by-fourteen-foot hut and a larger shack out of lumber dismantled from shipping boxes. He would be a teacher.
By Christmas 1951, when John Landy walked up to the gate for his first and only visit to the Portsea property, Cerutty’s buildings and philosophy were complete. He didn’t train athletes; he guided ‘Stotans’.
The gate to the property was shut. Unlike the rest of the athletes at the camp, Landy had come down to Portsea on his own for the ten-day training session. His parents were circumspect about Cerutty, particularly because of his outlandish antics, but their son’s improvement as an athlete was undeniable, so they didn’t object to the trip. Seeing no lights on, Landy realised it was too late to catch anybody awake. He had brought a sleeping bag and, not wanting to disturb anyone, he found a hollow to sleep in. Because of the chill in the air, he donned every item of spare clothing he had brought, including his football socks, before slipping into his bag. He was all right until rain began to pelt his bag. Then it turned into a downpour. Shaking, wet to the bone, he stuck it out. By first light the hollow had turned into a streambed, and Landy stumbled into the camp, half in shock from the cold. The Portsea training had begun.
In the year since Landy had first called on Cerutty, he had paid close attention to the coach’s direction. He had paid ten shillings for lessons on how to move his arms and how to run like a rooster, clawing at the air. He had strengthened his upper body by lifting dumbbells. He had participated in running sessions on a two-and-a-half-mile horse path named the Tan (after the four-inch layer of tree bark discarded from tanneries, which cushioned the dirt), and bounded up and down Anderson Street Hill with the others under Cerutty’s watchful eye. Their runs provoked gasps from the Melbourne residents nearby. They couldn’t understand what these young men, hounded by a shirtless older man, were doing. Running for exercise was odd in and of itself, but a group doing so through the botanical gardens carrying bamboo poles in each arm and shrieking like banshees as Cerutty called to them to run like ‘primitive man’ was pure scandal.
What Cerutty had in mind for the ten-day training camp in Portsea would definitely have been beyond the observers’ comprehension. Landy was sceptical as well, yet there he was. By following Cerutty’s gruelling regimen, Landy hoped to win a spot on the Olympic team.
Before breakfast the men ran the Hall Circuit, a course that threaded through tea trees, up hills, down steep slopes, and across sand dunes for one mile and 283 yards; the runners were timed and pitted against one another with handicaps and a three-pence bet apiece. The winner won the pot, and Cerutty didn’t hesitate to direct runners around the wrong bend so that he could claim the prize himself. Sometimes he clocked their runs and badgered them to go faster, questioning their manhood or dedication, often both. He ridiculed and taunted them mercilessly, particularly Landy, whom he thought needed toughening up. ‘Move your bloody arms!’ he would shout. ‘Too slow! Too slow! … Come on, you lazy bastards! You’re hopeless bloody dogs! Children could run faster than that!’
Other training sessions were held on nearby golf courses, where Cerutty had his charges accelerate up hills to achieve the kind of energy explosion they needed in a race. They ran up sand dunes for the same effect, an exercise Landy particularly disliked. He preferred the rhythmic flow of running on flat ground. For resistance training they sprinted along the beach in knee-deep surf. When not running, they swam, surfed or hiked along the coast. They were always in a state of movement until Cerutty stopped to give a lecture on the grass beside the 300-metre Portsea Oval. There he taught his Stotan – part Stoic, part Spartan – philosophy. Cerutty had coined the term and its requirements:
1 Realization that, as Wordsworth the poet says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ which denotes there is no time for wasteful ideas and pursuits.
2 In place of wasteful hobbies there commences a period of supervised and systematic physical training, together with instruction in the art of living fully. This replaces previously undirected life.
3 Swimming will be done all the year round … This especially strengthens the will and builds resistance to quitting the task ahead.
4 The cessation of late hours. Amusements both social and entertaining should be reduced to a minimum, and then only in the nature of relaxation from strenuous work.
Cerutty delivered this philosophy along with quotes from Plato, Buddha, Jesus, Freud, Einstein, and St Francis of Assisi, among others. He stressed the importance of yoga, non-conformity, a diet of oats, the study of nature and animals, and running barefoot to connect with the Earth. There were also the impromptu lessons after meals, like the time when Cerutty lectured them on warming up. A cat was sitting on a ledge outside one of the huts when their coach snuck over and emptied a bucket of water over it. The cat leapt away and disappeared in a flash. Cerutty then expounded, ‘There. Did the cat do stretches? Did the cat jog around? Did the cat do knee bends? Did the cat have a tracksuit on before racing? No, the cat just got up and went. No more warming up. Forget it.’
For Landy, the son of an accountant and the product of private schools, this was wild stuff. He laughed off most of it, but there was wisdom in what Cerutty said about training hard. The body had amazing limits that most people never tested; Cerutty drove Landy to try. He had helped bring out a discipline and focus the young runner never suspected he had. This ability had been dormant, but now it revealed itself. The other athletes at Portsea were impressed by Landy’s discipline. During hard runs that seemed to last for ever, they also began to realise they could never match it.
There was no sense of jealousy, however. In fact Landy took away from this time with Cerutty more than important lessons. He had won a tightly knit group of friends at Portsea, among them Perry and Macmillan as well as three-milers Geoff Warren and Trevor Robbins. The hard training and rustic setting combined to create a sort of boot camp, one that drew the athletes together. Landy, Robbins, Warren and two others bunked in the ‘ski hut’, which was a modified wooden container originally used to import Volkswagen cars. The first night Landy stayed there he had a bad dream about trying to get out of a hole. The nightmare was so vivid that he literally clawed his way out of his top bunk and crashed to the floor. The next night he agreed to be roped into his bed. Meanwhile, Perry and Macmillan, the two more established Stotans, were staying with Cerutty in an old cabin nicknamed after the luxury hotel, ‘Menzies’, because of its superior accommodation. One morning after a particularly cold night, Landy approached Macmillan and explained, ‘It’s pretty tough out here. Nobody will get up and get the breakfast. If you do and get everything out and ready, the second you turn your back, suddenly all these vultures’ – and Landy then jokingly mimicked a vulture poised to strike with its claws – ‘and little monkeys come down and eat it all up and go back up to their bunks, and yours is gone.’ By the end of the story, he had Macmillan in hysterics. With each such episode at Portsea, the others liked Landy more and more.
By the tenth day of camp, the gang of runners had bonded. They were both exhausted and inspired. Cerutty came away with a better understanding of what made his runners tick. Of Landy he wrote, ‘He undervalues himself, his achievements, and his possibilities, merely because he measures himself not against mediocrity but against the highest levels … Courage and desire to excel without undue display of effort, much less suffering, causes him to run well within himself … What his highest potential level is I can only guess at.’ Though Cerutty thought it unlikely that Landy would ever become a true Stotan, they both knew who had set him on the path to athletic greatness.
On 12 January 1952, in Melbourne, Landy set out to break 4:10 in the mile, the time established by the Australian Olympic organisers to qualify for Helsinki. Without ‘Big Mac’ Macmillan to push him, Landy led from the start, pushing harder than ever before, but he crossed the finish line a second short. ‘It is bad luck,’ he said after the race. ‘I don’t suppose there will be enough finance to send us both [Macmillan and Landy] to the Olympics.’ He swallowed his disappointment, and only a few hours later ran a 3,000m race in 8:53, breaking the Australian open record. The training at Portsea had increased his endurance, but not his speed over shorter distances. Two weeks later in Sydney he beat Macmillan by inches, but again the time was too slow to qualify.
By the cut-off date for selection, Macmillan and Landy had both run the qualifying time in the 1,500m, but only Macmillan had run the requisite speed for the mile. When the list of sponsored Olympic team members was published in March, Landy’s name was missing. There was a loophole, however. If Landy and a few others could come up with $A750 each, they could join the team. It was a lot of money, a year’s wages for some, and the Geelong Guild Athletic Club rallied to raise it for Landy. They held Saturday night dances and ‘chook’ raffles, which awarded the winner a dressed hen. With a lot of work and good intentions, the club members raised most of the money, but they were still $A250 short. Landy’s father made up the difference. His son was going to the Olympics. John heard the news while driving a tractor on his family farm on the South Gippsland coast, 130 miles south-east of Melbourne. He had only eight weeks to train.
Before Landy left for Europe, Joseph Galli published an article in a magazine by the name of Sports Novels whose title mirrored what many were thinking: ‘Victorian John Landy May Soon Become Our Greatest Middle-Distance Runner’. It was the reason so much effort had been made to send him. Landy was quoted thanking Cerutty for his guidance, and then the miler made a prediction, not of future success but rather of his untapped potential: ‘I don’t know just what my body can stand up to,’ he said – not yet.
At Kapyla Village in Helsinki, Cerutty finally quieted down. Landy lay in bed, uncertain as to how he would stack up against the world’s best. He had made great strides in his development and had run well in England, but still he was unsure. And he was very sensitive to the fact that he owed his Olympic ticket to the generosity of family and friends. He felt pressure to live up to the efforts they had made to get him there in the first place. Yet each day he spent on the track, observing the speed and fluid style of other athletes, his confidence in his ability to compete against them weakened. His coach might have believed he had the greatest insight into running and training, but Landy knew these Europeans and Americans had pretty good ideas of their own about what it took to be world class. He knew he would soon find out how good.
4 (#ulink_08cf8002-19c7-59b2-a557-ffcc182c9373)
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same …
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling, ‘If …’
The rain during the opening ceremony left the red brick-dust track a soupy mess. During the night, Finnish groundskeepers spread petrol over it and lit hundreds of small fires to burn off the water. Smoke billowed into the sky over the stadium and its acrid scent permeated the surrounding streets. By dawn on Sunday, 20 July, the track had dried, and it was levelled and smoothed out by concrete rollers before the first athletes arrived.
Wes Santee woke up in his room unsure of what to do. Throughout the morning, tens of thousands of people descended on the stadium. Scores of athletes, many of whom represented countries that had been at war a few years earlier, milled about the Olympic Village, passing the time between training sessions, meals, and their competitions. Santee dared not step outside Kapyla, certain he would get lost or run into trouble. He was one of the youngest members of the USA track and field team. It was his first Olympics, and for the life of him he could not find out what he needed to know. When was he competing? Against whom? And when could he train? Remarkably, this fundamental information proved elusive. Everyone had their own races to worry about, and for an Olympics that was being built up as a contest for national pride, particularly between the Americans and the Soviets, Santee was beginning to realise that this did not necessarily mean team leadership and cooperation were priorities.
He was left to fend for himself, a situation that was utterly foreign to him. At the University of Kansas, he was used to being surrounded by team-mates who looked after one another. He was also used to having his coach tell him when to arrive for practice, who he was competing against the next weekend, how to run the race, what to eat beforehand, when to arrive at the stadium, and where he was allowed to warm up. This management of the details allowed him to concentrate on the one thing he had supreme confidence in: his running. As a member of the United States Olympic team, however, directions to the dining hall and bedroom were about the most useful bits of information he had been given. He felt alone and, as the Games commenced, increasingly panicked. The pit in his stomach came less from thoughts of his upcoming race than from how he was going to find out when it was scheduled to take place.
After a day spent scrambling about trying to track down team officials, he cornered a few older American athletes who had a schedule of events and listings about who was competing in which heats. Santee was scheduled to run in the 5,000m qualifying round on 22 July at five o’clock, and yes, there would be an announcer calling out the lap times so that he knew the pace he was running. As far as what kind of competitors he was going to face and whether it would be a slow or fast race, they had no idea. It was quite certain, however, that as part of the American team, which had won half of all the track and field gold medals presented in 1948, Santee was expected to win. Late that afternoon when he went to work out on the training track, he was the only American to neglect to wear his ‘U.S.A.–Helsinki–1952’ jersey, instead choosing to appear in his orange-red pants and blue University of Kansas jersey. He wanted to win for his country as much as anyone, but at that moment he felt a lot more comfortable in his KU colours.
On the first day of the Olympics, Czech star Emil Zatopek stormed to victory in the 10,000m, beating British hopeful Gordon Pirie to win the first of what many assumed would be two gold medals. The United States captured its first track and field gold thanks to high-jumper Walter Davis, the six-foot-eight-inch Texan who set a new Olympic record in the process. The Soviets countered by sweeping the women’s discus. The second day of events saw an American stranglehold on the track and in the field; the Soviets ruled gymnastics. By the third day, newspapers around the world headlined the points table: the US was in first position, the USSR second, and Czechoslovakia third. Great Britain ranked fourth, and had yet to capture a gold. As promised, the fifteenth Olympiad was shaping into a battle between the United States and the Soviets.
National pride had always played a role in the Olympics, but never as much as it did in the 1952 Games. In the four years leading up to Helsinki, the Soviets had ‘mobilized to win the Olympic War’, as Life magazine put it. They had combed the countryside for athletes, hired hundreds of coaches, and poured billions of roubles into training programmes and stadia construction. No effort was spared. In Helsinki, Russia (along with Eastern bloc countries Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia) demanded separate ‘Reds Only’ housing and training quarters, and they afforded their athletes every luxury including platters of caviar and smoked salmon. In their camp in Otaniemi, they hung a huge portrait of Stalin over the entrance and erected a wooden scoreboard to post their points totals. The Cold War, which was developing on the Korean peninsula and through the atomic arms race, had entered the sporting arena with a decided chill.
The United States was equally focused on winning. And when it came to preparations they were hardly lacking. After all, the team was primarily composed of scholarship-funded college athletes who had devoted endless hours to training under the guidance of full-time coaches. One needed only to look at the jugs of vitamins available for ‘Americans Only’ in the Kapyla dining halls to appreciate the special treatment they enjoyed. Many complained that countries such as Britain, who had invented the idea of the amateur athlete, didn’t stand a chance in the face of what amounted to a ‘professional’ approach to sport. Rightly or wrongly, sport was changing, and Helsinki marked a symbolic shifting point. The only remaining question was who would win this particular match-up, and by what margin.
Santee had a front seat to this battle, particularly since one of the greatest rivalries between the two countries was in basketball. Half of the American team comprised University of Kansas players, and Wes was privy to the stories of seven-foot Russian stars and how long they had trained together. But Santee had his own concerns about winning for his country, particularly since the track and field squad was considered one of the big point scorers for the American team.
By Tuesday, 22 July, the day of his qualifying round, Santee had learned little about his race and he desperately wished Bill Easton was there with him. Santee discovered that he could not warm up on the track before the race, which was part of his normal routine, so he jogged around outside the stadium before returning to the locker-room to be called out for his heat. All around him athletes were speaking in unrecognisable languages, and he had no idea who among them he was competing against or what times they usually ran. His biggest fear was falling too far behind the leaders. There was no one to speak to about strategy. And he could not help thinking that he should not even have been in this race. The 1,500m was his best distance; he certainly had much more experience running it. Seldom did a runner, even one as naturally talented as Wes Santee, have the speed and stamina to compete at a world-class level in the 1,500m and the 5,000m. With each minute that passed, his apprehension grew.
When he saw Fred Wilt, the Indiana University alumnus who had competed extensively overseas, Santee hurried across the locker-room to speak to him. Wilt would know what Santee should do.
‘I really don’t know much,’ Wilt said after Santee had told him the names of those in the heat against him. ‘Except that Schade guy. He’ll probably run a steady, even race. Follow him.’
And with this information, Santee was called to the track for his heat by an Olympic official. He jogged into the stadium, feeling only slightly comforted by this one piece of advice. With Easton, he would have gone over the race on the blackboard in his office at KU, his coach indicating lap times to shoot for, how the other runners traditionally ran, and when to move with the pack or ahead of it. His race was literally drawn out for him in chalk. Only when Santee approached the starting line did he notice the German ace Herbert Schade. Except for the Canadian runner Ferguson, the rest of the field was a mystery. What if the German started out too fast or too slow? What was the best time he was capable of running? There were tens of questions he needed answered and only seconds before the race started. By the time the athletes were called to their marks, Santee felt overwhelmed. This was the Olympics. He was representing his country, and, perhaps more importantly, Kansas. He had to do well, yet he felt displaced, as if he had been blindfolded, led out into a dark field, and left alone to find his way out.
Soon enough the starting gun fired, and Santee was running. Into the first turn, he was in a good position behind Schade, right where he wanted to be. The first lap went well; Schade led, Santee kept back by several runners, but stayed close enough. By the third lap, Santee and the German were alone. The others had fallen back on the pace. Halfway through the race, Santee sensed his legs tiring, but he held on to second position. At the 3,000-metre mark he heard Schade’s time called – 8:23 – and then his own, two seconds slower. It was too fast. The best he had run this distance was 8:44, and he was 150 yards ahead of that pace. Santee began to lose confidence. He couldn’t maintain this kind of speed. What he should have known before this point in the race was that the German was using this heat to show how fast he was to Czechoslovakia’s Zatopek and France’s Mimoun, both of whom were in separate heats and would likely prove his stiffest competition in the final. An Olympic record would be broken if Schade continued at this pace, and he meant to continue.
Half a lap later, Santee lost momentum. His arms and legs leadened; his chest couldn’t bring in enough breath. His pace slackened. By 4,000 metres he hardly felt like he was moving, the sensation more like running through water than over a track. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. He couldn’t drive his legs. Runner after runner passed him and there was nothing he could do, even had he been suddenly infused with all the will power in the world. His body had given out. He finished at a dismally slow pace, thirteenth overall, in a time of 15:10.4 – the worst showing at this distance of his career.
As he put on his sweatsuit, Santee was exhausted physically, but the fear and dread before the race had taken an even greater toll. Emotionally he was a wasteland. He didn’t want to speak to anybody. He was embarrassed when he left the stadium, wanting to hole up in his room until they flew out of Helsinki. As he later said, ‘Not only did I lose, I wasn’t even in the race.’ For an athlete who had seldom known defeat, particularly on this scale, this was agony. It was like the loss of a first love. His heart literally ached.
Sitting in the stands at the Olympic Stadium on 24 July, Landy did not like his chances in the 1,500m set to take place in less than hour. He was in the fourth, and probably most difficult, heat in the qualifying round. Only the top four finishers in his race moved forward to the semi-final, and his eight-man heat included French and Yugoslav champions El Mabrouk and Otenhajmer, as well as America’s Bob McMillen and England’s Roger Bannister, the latter of whom Landy had met briefly while competing in London. Landy knew that his best time in the distance (3:52.8) was several seconds slower than his competitors, plus he was much more accustomed to running a mile than 1,500m.
Although only 120 yards shorter than the mile, the 1,500m was an awkward race. Standard European tracks, Helsinki included, were 400 metres in length, meaning that runners competed over three and three-quarter laps. Landy disliked the race, as he later explained: ‘There’s nothing graceful about it. You don’t start where you finish, it’s ugly.’ The split times were difficult to understand, and given the incomplete first lap, he found it hard to get into his rhythm.
At that moment, however, Landy was more interested in watching the 5,000m final, which was about to start. He had failed to qualify for the longer event, finishing over thirty seconds behind the winner of his heat, Alain Mimoun, in tenth position overall. It was a poor showing, but his personal best, achieved in early February, had been only two seconds faster. He had to settle for watching his friend and countryman Les Perry try to take home a medal in an event featuring the ‘human locomotive’ Emil Zatopek, former gold medal winner Gaston Reiff, new Olympic record holder Herbert Schade, and English up-and-comer Chris Chataway, as well as the fearsome French-Algerian Mimoun. It promised to be a must-see battle.
When the gun went off, the red-headed Chataway moved into an early lead, at the head of the pack for the first lap, with Schade behind him and Perry in the middle of the pack. The Australian team cheered on the ‘Mighty Atom’, but by the end of the third lap, with the first four runners averaging sixty-seven seconds per lap, Perry looked like a minor player on a great stage. Soon enough, Zatopek was setting the pace. The very sight of the 30-year-old Czech army major was frightening. His bony five-foot-eight-inch frame sped down the track in an unrhythmic mess of arms and legs. His head rolled back and forth as he ran; his tongue protruded from his mouth; his face contorted as if, one sportswriter noted, he was experiencing an ‘apoplectic fit’. Yet the runners knew he was fitter than they were, and Zatopek did not hesitate to inform them of the matter, mid-race. While his competitors gasped for air, the Czech considered it a good time for a conversation. During his 10,000m final, in which he’d broken his own world record, Zatopek had run alongside the Russian Anoufriev, who had set a rapid early pace, and admonished him on the dangers of going out too fast. As Zatopek blazed into the lead in the 5,000m final, he yelled back at Schade in German, ‘Herbert, do two laps with me!’
Two thousand metres from the finish, the tactical race began. Schade, answering Zatopek’s taunt, burst into the lead, with Chataway and Reiff staying close behind. Zatopek faded. Then Pirie picked up his tempo, shifting easily past the Czech and the rest of the field. Schade quickly regained first position, pushing Pirie aside, then Mimoun started to make his move. With just over a lap to go it was Schade, Chataway, Mimoun, Zatopek and Pirie. At the bell, Zatopek kicked. From the stands the spectators could almost feel the excruciating effort required of him to make the move. But it was to no advantage. Chataway cruised past him a hundred metres down the track with Schade and Mimoun breathing down his neck. Zatopek trailed in fourth position, looking altogether finished. Schade then regained the lead, only to have Chataway steal it right back at the final turn.
‘ZAT-O-PEK! ZAT-O-PEK! ZAT-O-PEK!’ The cry erupted from the stands. The crowd was on its feet. Face twisted, mouth gaping, arms flailing, eyes open wide, Zatopek found another spurt. Suddenly Chataway caught the track’s edge with his foot and went crashing onto the red brick surface, churning up a cloud of dust behind him. Mimoun and Schade attempted to hold off Zatopek as he drove around the turn, but there was nothing they could do to keep him from victory. The crowd boomed again when the Czech sprinted down the straight. Every step looked like it would be his last, yet somehow he found a way to continue forward. He snapped the tape with a new Olympic record time, with Mimoun second, Schade third, Reiff fourth, Chataway fifth (after picking himself up off the track), and Perry in an exhausted sixth place.
Announcers, journalists, spectators, and athletes alike understood that they had just witnessed greatness in the form of Emil Zatopek. He had now claimed his second gold medal, and with his participation in the marathon a few days later, a race he had never run, Zatopek was proving he deserved the acclaim of being the finest distance runner since Nurmi. Although Perry had not medalled, he had run his best time, and Landy had to believe that his friend was proud simply to have competed in the same race as his hero Zatopek. Landy himself was impressed by the Czech’s tactical skill, but more than that, he had never seen someone with such overpowering physical fitness.
Everyone in the stadium was still revelling in Zatopek’s victory when the 1,500m qualifying rounds began. While Landy warmed up with a light jog on the infield, his countryman Don Macmillan placed fourth in his heat, qualifying for the semi-final the next day. Of the runners in the three heats before Landy’s who advanced to the next round, all had run better than his fastest 1,500m time. He had his work cut out for him.
Landy stepped up to the line. Three minutes and fifty-seven seconds later, his Olympic hopes were dashed. El Mabrouk came from behind to finish first with a time of 3:55.8, an unexceptional pace. McMillen, Bannister, and the Hungarian Tolgyesi followed him in, with Landy one second behind in fifth position. As Landy later described it, the last hundred metres of the race was a ‘mad scramble’, but he was too tired in the final straight to overtake Tolgyesi.
The Australian miler was disappointed in himself, regardless of his doubts before the race. He had travelled all this way and failed to make even the semi-finals. He knew the reason, too: since his good runs in England, he had come off his peak, a consequence of incomplete training. Cerutty took his athlete’s loss as a personal affront, and after the race he was not exactly comforting to Landy. The exact form of his vitriol is probably best left forgotten, but his coach’s general attitude towards Landy, rightly or wrongly, was that he lacked a ‘killer instinct’. And worse, throughout the Australian team, which was not performing well except for sprinters Shirley Strickland and Marjorie Jackson, there were grumblings that many athletes had not deserved to make the Olympics in the first place. In fact, the team manager issued a report after returning to Australia that bluntly stated, ‘No man or woman should be selected for future Australian teams who is not prepared to undergo a Spartan-like period of self-denial and rigorous training as practiced in other countries.’
Unfair as this attitude was, it stung Landy, who had been one of the last athletes to make the team. However, he refused to wallow in his failure to qualify for the 1,500m or 5,000m finals. He thought there was a lot he could learn while in Helsinki, especially from the athletes who had so far dominated the Games. The chance to observe Zatopek, for one, tempered the disappointment Landy felt.
Long before his 5,000m win and subsequent marathon victory, Zatopek was of interest to Landy. Cerutty often talked of him, and Les Perry idolised him because of his infamously hard training schedule and unrivalled record in distance running. When Perry first arrived in Helsinki, he had put on his tracksuit and run the three miles across to Otaniemi where the Iron Curtain countries were housed. Once past the guards at the gate, he’d found Zatopek down on the track and ran alongside him until he’d mustered the nerve to say, ‘I’m Les Perry from Australia.’ Zatopek had put his arm around the bespectacled fan and said in English, ‘You come from the other village to see me? You honour me! Join me. We will run together.’ After working out, they’d had a shower, dinner, and tea, then Zatopek had invited Perry to watch the Bolshoi Ballet performing in the camp. When Perry finally returned to Kapyla, he regaled his room-mates with the experience.
After his 1,500m loss, Landy made it his job to study other athletes at the old track near the stadium where they trained. He spent hours there, mentally noting how they ran and learning about their training methods. Zatopek, to whom Landy later referred as the ‘Piped [sic] Piper of Hamelin’, fascinated him the most. With a pack of other devotees at the track, Landy followed the Czech as he jogged forward and backward, speaking about running. There was much to take in and a lot to jot down afterwards because Zatopek talked almost as fast as he ran. He happily shared his love for the sport and spoke about how he had achieved so much since taking up running at the age of 19. ‘When I was in the 1950 European Championships …’ he began one story, talking about the race and the athletes he had competed against; ‘last year I was doing twenty by 400m in training …’ he revealed, or ‘I ran in the snow in my army boots …’ The Czech’s training methods were clearly based on making running a way of life. He believed in training one’s will power in small steps, every day. Discipline was the key. As for style, which he was accused of lacking, he was plainspoken: ‘I shall learn to have a better style once they start judging races according to their beauty. So long as it’s a question of speed, my attention will be directed to seeing how fast I can cover the ground.’
His three gold medals proved to Landy that Zatopek was on the right track. He wasn’t about antics, Eastern philosophy, recriminations, or wild theories – unlike Cerutty, who had Don Macmillan preparing for the 1,500m final by jogging around the track wearing two tracksuits and a towel wrapped around his head. Zatopek had devised schedules and methods of maintaining the balance between speed and endurance throughout the year. Landy liked this analytical approach. Cerutty disliked schedules: he felt they confined the soul. The two men were opposites, and Landy had the intelligence and independence to understand that all he owed his coach were his achievements to date. While in Helsinki, Landy plotted his future.
Roger Bannister was too exhausted to sleep. No amount of tossing, turning, shuffling, or kicking his feet against the sheets would allow him to drop off. Every second and minute brought the 1,500m final closer; every hour a new wave of anxiety swept over him. At 4.30 p.m. the next day he would line up against eleven of the best middle-distance runners in the world. His confidence was torn by having already run two races instead of the one he had expected to run to qualify for the final. He feared he was already beaten.
The past week had brought only restless days and nights. He and his room-mates – sprinter Nicholas Stacey, quarter-miler Alan Dick, and three-miler Chris Chataway – had tried to relieve the constant churning of their thoughts about victory or defeat, and about what would make the difference between the two. Resting on their unkempt beds, they spoke of politics and history, read books, or joked around with one another. One evening, Stacey mounted a wooden box, as if it was an Olympic podium, to accept his imaginary gold medal and offer a congratulatory speech. At other times they discussed their competitors, particularly Zatopek, whom they thought inhuman in ability. ‘While he goes for a twenty-mile training run on his only free day,’ Chataway said, ‘we lie here panting with exhaustion, moaning that the gods are unkind to us, and that we’re too intelligent to train hard. It’s all nonsense.’ Inevitably, the four thought again and again about that second when the starting gun would fire, and whether or not they would prove good enough. Regardless of what happened, they promised one another that once the Olympics had ended they would never put themselves through this torture again.
By the morning of Saturday, 26 July, Bannister was the only one of his room-mates still tense, though he tried not to show it, as far as possible keeping to himself his doubts about being able to win the race. The others had finished their events, nobody in triumph, and Chataway most disastrously, of course, by falling on the final lap of the 5,000m final. Bannister had watched the race, and its conclusion impressed on him how important his finishing kick would be.
Absence of victory was the same story for the entire British team. Just two days of competition remained on the track and in the field and they had won only a handful of medals, not one of them gold. Nor had any British athlete won gold in any of the other events. The British reporter who had said before the Games ‘I will eat a pair of spiked shoes if our team doesn’t win twelve gold medals’ was dangerously close to having a mouthful of leather. Headlines cried out ‘Don’t Worry, We Are Still in the Fight’, yet column after column reported failure and missed chances.
There was one hope left, though: Roger Bannister. Now, more than ever, his countrymen rallied around him. A few days before, the Daily Mirror columnist Tom Phillips had compared Bannister to a great racehorse trainer who ‘rarely bothered about picking minor honours here and there. If he wished to win a classic race, he got his horse perfectly fit for that day and nearly every time his horse was first past the post.’ Phillips concluded, ‘I believe Bannister will win and teach some of our other athletes, and the officials and coaches, a lesson in strategy and tactics.’
If confidence could be drawn from the number of column inches guaranteeing his victory, Bannister was a sure thing. Most sportswriters considered him their favourite. But his legs hurt. He hadn’t slept soundly in days. He was plagued by worries, both real and otherwise. His qualifying round and semi-final in the previous two days had been brutal. To avoid the jostling and elbowing of a crowded field he’d run both races in the second and third lanes, adding at least twenty yards to each and exhausting himself even more. The semi-final had been especially taxing because there was a fight to the finish that placed him a narrow four-tenths of a second ahead of Jungwirth from Czechoslovakia, who had failed to qualify. Usually Bannister required three or four days of recovery after such a race because of his limited training regime, but now he had been given only twenty-four hours.
In his room, waiting as the minutes ticked past, Bannister knew the 1,500m final would draw the world’s attention. He knew the stands would be jammed to capacity. He knew his competitors had also trained for thousands of hours for this day, and that they would strive with every muscle and ounce of will to claim victory. It was impossible not to rehearse the coming race over and over again in his head. How quickly should he start? Should he stay on the inside lane or move to the outside? Where must he be by the third lap? How close to the finish could he start his burst?
When Bannister made his way down the tunnel underneath the stadium that afternoon, he was no less tortured. His face was blanched, his step uncertain. Australian miler Don Macmillan walked alongside him. He was in bad shape as well, dehydrated and soaked with perspiration after the voodoo warm-up imposed by his coach, yet he noticed that Bannister, against whom he had run in New Zealand in 1950, was pale and nervous.
‘Good luck, Don,’ Bannister said, heading up into the stadium.
‘Thanks, Roger,’ Macmillan choked out.
The time had come. When the Duke of Edinburgh arrived in the stands, the crowd cheered. The sun even broke through the clouds to honour this signature Olympic race. While the other athletes stretched and jogged around the infield to warm up, Bannister rested on the bench. Chris Brasher, the British steeplechaser and former president of the Cambridge University Athletic Club, watched from the stands and later described his friend’s appearance: ‘There was a peculiar loneliness about Roger. He stood apart from the others, looking drawn and white, as if he were about to go into a torture chamber.’ Chris Chataway was also in the stands. He had written to his mother the day before to tell her how concerned he was about Bannister’s state in the days before his race. As Chataway waited for the race to begin, he worried that his room-mate had already defeated himself in his mind. However, though tense and sapped of energy from two heats, Bannister still felt that he had a chance. Every race was imperfect, and he had always come through in the past.
Once Finnish middle-distance runner Denis Johansson had completed a presumptuous pre-race victory lap, the starter called the race. With the eleven others, Bannister came to the line. The crowd hushed for the gun. He had prepared his whole athletics career for this moment. Suddenly, they were off.
The German Lamers carried the field through the first lap in 57.8 seconds, looking as though he might be pacing for his countryman and the favourite to win, Werner Lueg. Throughout this first lap, Bannister stayed to the inside; he did not have the energy to battle in the middle of the pack. Lamers soon faded, and Lueg took the lead, finishing the second lap at a slower pace in 2:01.4. By this time Bannister had managed to come up through the field and was running in fifth place. At the bell, Lueg was still leading. He finished the third lap in 3:03, still on the slow side given the field’s talent. Only three-quarters of a lap to go.
In the radio broadcast booth, BBC announcer Harold Abrahams was worried for Bannister, despite the fact that he was in the right position – third – for making his break. ‘He is not running as well as one would hope,’ Abrahams said. ‘He is looking rather tired.’
In the back straight of the last lap, the race heated up. Two hundred metres from the finish and the whole field was nearly sprinting. Down the straight, Aberg of Sweden and then El Mabrouk of France tried to surge to the head of the pack. Bannister was next, deciding to strike at the same time Lovelock had in the 1936 Olympics final to win the gold.
‘Bannister is in third position with 180 metres to go. Bannister fighting magnificently. Bannister now trying to get into the lead.’
This was it, Bannister thought. Although he had suffered nothing but dread since learning of the added semi-final, he was now in the ideal spot to win the gold. He had managed the jostling field, kept with the pace, and avoiding tripping. As he moved into the final turn, now in second place, he called on the full effect of his finishing kick – his most potent weapon. He gave the order to his legs to go, but for the first time in his life his kick wasn’t there. When he should have leapt ahead, he stalled. His legs just didn’t have the energy. It was a shock. Little Josey Barthel from Luxembourg swept by him, unbelievably, impossibly. Then the American, McMillen, passed him as well. Bannister felt drained and helpless, knowing he had lost.
‘Bannister is fading!’ Abrahams called into the microphone.
Lueg held strong, stretching his lead by three yards at the end of the turn. Barthel then struck, delivering the finish Bannister wanted for his own. The Luxemburger cruised past Lueg in the final fifty metres with McMillen also coming up fast.
‘And it’s Barthel wins. Second, the American. Third, Lueg. Fourth, Bannister. Time, 3:45.2.’
It was a new Olympic record, and the surprise upset of the Games. Bannister was so exhausted by the end of the race that he had to hold on to the back of Lueg’s singlet to keep from pitching to the track. He hadn’t even claimed a bronze. The British team was distraught. Columnists began to sharpen their pencils. This was a betrayal of trust.
Barthel was handed roses, and then he rested on a bench to take off his shoes. The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling observed, ‘He had had no trainer and no compatriot with him when he came into the stadium, and he was still alone. It must have been a great solace to him on the night before the race, knowing he had nobody to disappoint.’ How different it was for Bannister who, full of emotion, later watched Barthel mount the victory dais and weep tears of joy while Luxembourg’s anthem played throughout the stadium. For Bannister, the Helsinki final was a disaster. He told his friend Brasher years later, ‘A disaster is something which is shared between you and the public which expects something of you and which you cannot or have not fulfilled.’
As he headed back to the Olympic Village later that afternoon, fending off the press who were preparing to excoriate him for his insufficient preparations, Bannister needed to find a way to overcome what had happened. He couldn’t go out a loser. His answer would be to attempt a challenge that had been in the making for a very long time: the four-minute mile. And he would not be alone in the effort.
5 (#ulink_d390484e-0f55-5375-b037-7d29140c4218)
The man who has made the mile record is W. G. George … His time was 4 minutes 12.75 seconds, and the probability is that this record will never be beaten.
Harry Andrews, 1903
To the furthest limit he searches out.
Job 28:3
Before stopwatches, cinder tracks, and perfect records, man ran for the purest of reasons: to survive. The saying goes that ‘Every morning in Africa, an antelope wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or an antelope – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.’ There are few instincts more natural than the body in full motion as it races across a field or through the trees. From the beginning, we were all made to run. In days past, when ‘survival of the fittest’ meant exactly that, the only measure of the race was whether the hunted reached safety before being overtaken. Seconds and tenths of seconds had no meaning.
Sport evolved from this competition to survive. In ancient Egypt, newly chosen kings went on a ceremonial run, as historian Edward Sears wrote, that ‘symbolized laying claim to his domain and proved that he was fit enough for the demands of his position’. Thirty years after the king’s coronation, and every three years thereafter, he was challenged to run the same long distance he had as a young man. If he failed, he lost his power to rule. Other early societies proved status through skills such as hitting targets with a bow and arrow, lifting heavy rocks, or jumping across streams; but the ability to run faster and further than others remained a dominant standard.
It was fitting that the first event in civilisation’s earliest and greatest celebration of sport, the Olympic Games in 776 BC, was a foot race. A Greek citizen named Coroebus sprinted 200 yards across a meadow alongside the river Alpheus and was crowned winner with a garland made from the leaves and twigs of an olive tree. Sporting ability was integral to Greek life, and its people were the first to promote what would later be phrased mens sana in corpore sano – the sound mind in a sound body. Ancient Olympic champions were treated like gods, worthy of worship and great odes. The athletes ran their races naked and barefoot, and as the years passed they instituted ten-month training regimes and began to specialise in certain distances. Longer races involved running from one end of the stadium to the other and back, the distances varying from stadium to stadium. Success was recorded by how many victories an athlete had claimed over his fellows, not by their times (crudely measured, in those days, by sundial or water clock).
The Romans favoured gladiator contests over athletics, but they made two important contributions to the story of the four-minute mile: first, they were devoted to statistics and detailed the results of their sporting heroes (namely chariot racers); second, they were the first to come up with the distance of the mile. Roman soldiers calculated their long marches in mille passus (mille, one thousand; passus, a two-step stride). Given that each stride was roughly two feet and five inches – shorter than average because the soldiers carried over fifty pounds of provisions and weapons – the earliest mile translated to roughly 1,611 yards.
In sixteenth-century England, footmen, who travelled long distances by the sides of heavy coaches, steering their masters away from dangerous spots in the road, were the first to race, often at the bidding of their masters. They used the mile-posts, first installed by the ruling Romans, as starting and finishing lines. This tradition developed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into village festival ‘freak runs’, where the competitors ran on stilts or while carrying a load of fish. Endurance contests, whether walking or running, were also popular.
By the nineteenth century, ‘pedestrians’, as the English runners were known, were running on the roads for cash. Events were often organised by local pubs in order to draw a crowd. Since the mile race was a favourite, it paid to specialise in that distance. The idea of competing for a mile record instead of simply against one’s opponent in a particular race evolved gradually from the standardisation of the mile at 1,760 yards, advances in timekeeping, and an early industrial society’s passion for quantifying everything in sight. It so happened that a grass track divided into quarter-miles fitted nicely on to a cricket ground or football field, and it was much safer racing there than on increasingly busy roads. Technology, progress, and coincidence had played its part. Now all the mile race needed was a few fast souls.
Running a mile in less than five minutes was considered the breaking point until Scottish landowner Captain Robert Barclay came along. Famous for his cheerful disposition, predilection for lifting heavy objects, and for walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours, Barclay won 500 guineas by posting a 4:50 mile in 1804. Then, in 1825, James Metcalf, ‘a tailor by trade, but a pedestrian by profession’ who trained by chasing hounds, beat Barclay’s time by a margin of twenty seconds. Over the next sixty years, various milers chipped away at the record, second by painful second, the best runners earning championship belts for their efforts. Over time, the stakes wagered rose into the thousands of pounds.
For most of the nineteenth century, the ‘gentleman amateur’ was absent from this scene. This British public school ideal, favoured by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, was indeed a noble thought, but the runners guided by subscribing to its strict rules were no match for the best of the professionals. That was until chemistry apprentice Walter George began training seriously and reduced his mile time to 4:18.8 in 1884. As this was just two seconds shy of the record held for the previous eight years by the professional William Cummings, a showdown between the two was inevitable.
To test himself against Cummings, George was forced to forfeit his amateur status, despite having offered his earnings from the races to a hospital charity. After a series of preliminary races where both had a share of the victories, on 23 August 1886 Cummings and George faced off for the ‘Mile of the Century’. Twenty-five thousand spectators crowded around a bicycle track to watch George run so fast that he left Cummings unconscious behind him on the last lap. His record of 4:12.8 lasted for three decades and set the stage for Paavo Nurmi to introduce the four-minute mile to the world, establishing an irresistible challenge to athletes that would guarantee their place in history.
It is impossible to know who first uttered the challenge of running the mile in less than four minutes. Reports date back to 1770 of an English runner who made the distance from Charter House Wall to Shoreditch Church in the City of London in this time, but even nineteenth-century historians raised a sceptical eye to the account. In 1915, when American Norman Taber broke George’s record by less than two-tenths of a second, the athletics world was not set on fire. It was too slim a difference to warrant much more than a passing remark in the record books. Then, on 23 August 1923, 26-year-old farm engineer Paavo Nurmi from Turku in Finland was drawn into a faster first lap than he would have liked by Swedish miler Edvin Wide. Nurmi, who always ran with a large stopwatch in his hand and preferred an even-paced race, kept up with Wide’s fast start. By the third lap Wide had faded, but Nurmi continued the pace. He broke Taber’s record by two seconds with a 4:10.4. It was a giant step forward, given how long it had taken Taber to reduce Walter George’s mark by just a fraction of a second. Suddenly the mile record was in play again, and when, at the 1924 Paris Olympics, Nurmi won gold medals in the 1,500m and 5,000m in the space of forty-two minutes, he looked capable of anything. Joseph Binks, a noted journalist and former British miler, suggested to Nurmi that the mile barrier was within grasp. Nurmi replied, ‘No. Four minutes four seconds, maybe!’ Self-deprecation or not, the Finnish miler had put the possibility of a four-minute mile on the table.
Inspired by Nurmi, a new wave of talented milers appeared in the 1930s, and their races packed stadiums around the world. Races at Madison Square Garden rivalled modern-day prize fights. The air was dense with smoke, the crowds rowdy and devoted to their favourite runners, and the stands so close to the track that fans felt the rush of air when the field surged past. The first miler to run four minutes and single digits was Frenchman Jules Ladoumegue. An orphan who first ran in village-to-village races, Ladoumegue competed on pure emotion. Before races he was so agitated that he had to be pulled to the starting line. If a door closed suddenly behind him, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Once running, though, he loved the heat of battle and became a national treasure for his efforts. On 4 October 1931 he took advantage of a windless, sunny Parisian afternoon and the pacemaking of half-miler Rene Morel to reduce the mile record to 4:09.2.
Jack Lovelock, the New Zealand-born but British-adopted miler with a compact frame and keen idea of his abilities and limitations, was the next to lower the record. In his youth he had developed his smooth running style by striding alongside a stone wall while a friend on the opposite side chastised him whenever he saw his head moving up or down. On 15 July 1933 in Princeton, New Jersey, he ran a 4:07.6 while representing Oxford University against the Americans. After the race, the New York Herald Tribune praised, ‘It was all so easily accomplished, with so little outward evidence of stress and strain, as to make a four-minute mile seem just around the corner.’ Lovelock never reduced this time, but his Olympic gold medal in the 1,500m, his epic races against Glenn Cunningham and Sydney Wooderson, and his insight about training and tactics added to his legacy.
With a time of 4:06.8, Lovelock’s rival, the American Glenn Cunningham, seized the mile record only eleven months after the New Zealander had claimed it. The ‘Kansas Powerhouse’ was legend long before he ran the fastest mile in the world. At the age of 7, he and his brother tried to stoke the fire in their small schoolhouse’s stove by dousing the coals with kerosene. His brother died as a result of the accident, and Glenn burned his legs almost beyond repair. During recovery he found walking more painful than running, and an athlete was born. Cunningham learned to work around his disability, and at his first inter-varsity mile at the University of Kansas, he exploded on the last lap to beat the field. His running inspired a generation of Kansas farm boys and gave Americans the hope that the four-minute mile could be theirs.
Sydney Wooderson brought the mile record back to England in 1937. Walter George, now 79 years old, was there to see it. At five feet six inches and 126lb, Wooderson was an atypical miler. When he stepped on to the track in his thick glasses and with the meek demeanour of a solicitor’s clerk, he looked the underdog. Once running, however, he was an indomitable force. He dealt with his loss to Lovelock at the 1936 Olympics by staging an attempt to beat Cunningham’s mile time. On 28 August 1937 at Motspur Park, he arranged for pacemakers from his athletic club to lead him around the first three laps. Using his famed kick, he handled the last lap alone and registered a time of 4:06.4.
Slowly, by investing more and more time and energy in training, milers approached the goal of four laps of the track in four minutes. But six and a half seconds was a long time off, and the small reductions made by the best runners to the record were just that, small reductions. The possibility of seeing ‘the other side’ of the numerical barrier was looking increasingly uncertain.
When Swedish runners Gundar Haegg and Arne Andersson finished their epic battles by the end of the Second World War, the four-minute mile appeared unattainable. Of the two, Haegg had a more natural, flowing stride, but Andersson trained harder. A year apart in age, they reached their peak at the same time. Separately, they were the finest milers, in terms of fitness and form, possibly ever to have graced the track; racing against each other, they looked to be the best that ever would. Over the course of three and a half years, Haegg and Andersson passed the mile record back and forth to each other:
Their duels inspired great performances, yet the barrier still stood untouched. Journalists and statisticians tried to convince the athletics world that the record would inevitably be run. They calculated that the average world-class miler could sustain a 7.33-yard-per-second speed (or 15mph). This meant that the difference between Haegg’s best time and the four-minute mile was a short twelve yards – less than 1 per cent of the race’s total distance. Nothing. But others disagreed, quite publicly as well. Coach Brutus Hamilton, one of the most revered figures in athletics, published ‘The Ultimate of Human Effort’, listing the perfect records for the javelin, shot-put, 100m, 400m, mile, 5,000m, and 10,000m beyond which man could never go. Hamilton backed up his analysis with detailed statistics, but many would have considered his word final had he simply jotted these ‘perfect records’ down on a cocktail napkin. Of the question ‘Can the mile be run in four minutes flat?’ Hamilton wrote, ‘Not quite.’ The fastest time that would ever be possible, he stated, was 4:01.6. Although Hamilton, who wrote the article in 1935, had by 1945 been disproved by two-tenths of a second, he still found the idea of anyone running faster difficult to imagine.
Many wanted the bogey to go away, including the 1912 Olympic 1,500m champion Colonel Strode-Jackson, who wrote at the height of the Haegg–Andersson struggle, ‘When we stop this nonsense of running like a metronome and with the watch always in mind, we will get back to real racing, the triumph of one runner over another. That is what racing was meant to be and what it will be when we get the four-minute myth out of the way.’
Myth or not, twelve yards or many more, the barrier remained, and with each passing year, as runners attempted to break through its walls and failed, the mile barrier grew in notoriety. By 1952, as Frank Deford, one of the finest writers to report on the challenge, pointed out, ‘The Poles had been reached, the mouth of the Nile found, the deepest oceans marked, and the wildest jungles trekked, but the distance of the ground that measured a mile continued to resist all efforts to traverse it, on foot, in less than four minutes.’
The 1952 Olympic flame had barely been snuffed out in the Helsinki stadium when the editorials and reviews of the Games began to spin off the presses. Two points were indisputable: the Finns had proved to be fine hosts of the competition, and more records were broken in these Games than in any other Olympics in history.
Fewer than forty-eight hours after the closing ceremony in Helsinki, another competition was held, this time in London’s White City stadium, pitting a British Empire team against the United States. The stadium had staged an Olympic Games itself in 1908 and was infamous for setting the official marathon distance at 26 miles, 385 yards (instead of simply 26 miles) so that the race would finish in front of Queen Alexandra’s royal box. The stadium was now used for greyhound racing and an assortment of other events, including athletics. The Americans beat the British Empire team, as they had beaten the world a few short days before.
In the four-mile relay, where four runners from each team ran a mile, Roger Bannister earned the Empire team an early lead. But the second member of his team lost this advantage. Running third leg for the Americans, Wes Santee threatened to stretch out a lead for his team too great to overcome, but John Landy, running in the same leg for the Empire team, managed to close on Santee in the final 440. The anchors for each team traded leads, but in the end the Americans won. It was the first time Bannister, Santee, and Landy had competed in the same race. None of the three remembered much of the other, not a conversation, nor an impression of one another’s abilities. Yet as these three milers went their separate ways – Bannister back to life at St Mary’s Hospital, a short distance away by Tube, and Landy and Santee on long flights to their respective countries – each charted a course in the days ahead that would bring them back together again. It would be a struggle they and tens of millions would never forget.
Santee flew back with an American team flush with victory. Although the Soviets had fought well in their events and had, for a few days, looked like they might actually win the most medals, they hadn’t been able to match the strength of the United States track and field team, which won fourteen gold and thirteen silver and bronze. Among his team-mates, Santee was in the minority of those who did not medal. Watching the 1,500m final, knowing he had beaten the second-place finisher Bob McMillen ‘every time we had stepped on a track’, left him feeling empty and as helpless as a puppet. He was certain he could have won the race had he been given the chance the amateur officials had stolen from him in Los Angeles.
Before heading back to the University of Kansas, Santee went to visit his parents in Ashland for the first time since he had ridden away on that unnamed horse. If he was waiting for his father to say how proud he was of his son, Wes left empty-handed. Either his father simply didn’t understand what he had accomplished through his running, or the man just couldn’t express any feeling other than bitterness. Either way his silence stung. Over the past two years he had tried to convince his mother to leave his father, but she told Wes that since he had left his father had mended his ‘negative ways and stopped being so mean’. Regardless, Wes wanted nothing to do with the man.
Back in Lawrence, Santee sat down with Coach Easton, who did express his pride in Wes. Easton suggested he could learn a great deal from his Olympic experience, but Santee was less philosophical. It was not in his nature to suffer defeat. In his high school senior year he had lost the mile race in the state finals to Bill Tidwell. Although expected to win, particularly since he had in his sophomore and junior years, Santee had refused to be crestfallen. His close friend Don Humphreys had been surprised at his indifference. ‘I couldn’t understand how you could be up after losing the mile by a stride or two,’ he’d remarked to Wes. ‘I know Tidwell was a good distance runner, but it never occurred to me that he could beat you.’ Santee had explained in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘Oh, Tidwell, he’s not a miler.’ It took a while for Humphrey to understand this response. Then he thought of a football player who gets knocked down in a game and gets right back up and sets out to return the favour. Santee had that killer instinct. As Humphreys later said, ‘Guys like that never get whipped in their minds. Even when they get beat, they’re not beat.’
In Helsinki, Santee felt he had learned how to fend for himself and compete against the best. He wanted to prove what a big mistake it had been to prevent him from running in the 1,500m; more importantly, he also wanted to show how good he really was. He set his sights on a goal that had always been on the horizon for him: the four-minute mile. In the list of high-school prophecies published when he graduated was the following: ‘Wesley Santee has recently broke the world mile record in a time of 3 min., 58.3 sec. And it should stand for many years to come.’ Since his win at the Drake Relays the previous spring, the prediction by sportswriters that he was a sure bet for the world mile record had brought the goal closer in sight. His blistering three-quarter-mile run in New York before leaving for the Olympics had made him realise just how close. Only days after returning to campus, Santee marched into the office of the University of Kansas newspaper. He had an announcement to make: Wes Santee was going to be the first to run the four-minute mile. For years he had known he was capable. Now his intention was a matter of public record.
John Landy had a different announcement to make when he landed in Melbourne, but one just as telling. Directly after the British Empire versus United States match, he had boarded a flight to Australia. He had declined to join Macmillan and Perry, who, accompanied by Cerutty, were running in a series of competitions in Scandinavia. Landy needed to get back to his agricultural science studies, which had fallen by the wayside as a result of his efforts to make the Olympic team. And he wanted to start training again. Landy was determined to show that his trip to Helsinki had been worth the time and money it had taken to get him there. This desire to redress his failure to qualify in either of his events, a failure that had been met with what he believed was unwarranted criticism, was also woven into his excitement about the prospect of becoming a faster and stronger runner. He felt he had been given the lessons now – in terms of improving his stride and training methods – to reach this new level. Zatopek and other European middle-distance runners had shown him how.
For his stride, he would be helped by a pair of European track shoes he had bought. Landy wanted nothing more to do with the kangaroo-hide track shoes made in Melbourne, which were designed primarily for sprinting on grass tracks. Therefore, the spikes were built up in the front, so much so that it was awkward to lower the heel of the foot to the ground. They required him to run on his toes. In Helsinki, Landy noticed that the European middle-distancers ran in spikes with flat soles and a heel, and they had a smoother, more relaxed stride. But shoes alone would not change his running style; he would also have to practise the arm and leg action of the Europeans until it became habit.
But, as Zatopek had shown, style was not what separated the Czech from every other distance runner in the world. It was his demanding training, and Landy felt that if achieving fast mile times was mostly a question of working hard, he was willing to make the sacrifice. On the flight back to Australia, he spent many hours rehashing in his notebook the type of training sessions Zatopek had discussed with him and other runners, concocting a plan to achieve for himself the kind of fitness Zatopek had revealed in Helsinki. By doing so, he hoped to beat Don Macmillan’s national record in the mile – 4:08.9 – and win the Australian championship in early 1953.
When Landy arrived at Melbourne’s airport, journalists herded around the athletes asking for their comments on the Olympics and on the future. Some complained of having travelled too far with too little rest; others denied that they were ready to retire; many defended their achievements or lack thereof. Landy spoke of Emil Zatopek. He explained how the Czech had proved his superiority, earning three gold medals. ‘He thoroughly deserved his success because he is the hardest trained athlete in the world,’ Landy said. It was obvious to those who knew the young Australian miler that he meant to claim this distinction for himself. Though his goals had nothing yet to do with a four-minute barrier, unwittingly they had set him on its path, and he would soon show that nothing was safe from his determination.
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Neal Bascomb
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: This edition does not include illustrations.The inspirational story of three international runners attempting to achieve what no one had managed – to break the four-minute mile barrier. It was the ultimate test of endurance, and the human drama that unfolded is told here for the first time.In sport, running the four-minute mile was the elusive Holy Grail, considered by most to be beyond the limits of human endeavour.Then in late 1952, shortly after the Helsinki Olympics, three men set out to challenge the record books: Roger Bannister, the Oxford medical student, the great British hero who epitomised the ideal of the amateur athlete; John Landy, the tireless Australian, the romantic who trained night and day in search of perfection; and the American Wes Santee, son of a Kansas ranch hand, a natural runner and the quickest of the three (′I was just born to run fast′).Three men, each of contrasting character, competing thousands of miles apart, but all with the same valedictory goal. The Perfect Mile is the stirring account of their quest for sporting martyrdom, charting their journey through triumph and failure, culminating in the moment when Bannister broke the record in a monumental run at the Iffley Road cinder track in Oxford in May 1954. It was a feat that became one of the most celebrated in the history of British sport.Far from bringing an end to the rivalry, this watershed moment turned out to be merely the prelude to a final climactic battle three months later – the ultimate head-to-head between Bannister and Landy in what was dubbed ‘the mile of the century’ at the Vancouver Empire Games.Bascomb provides a fascinating account of what happened and an invaluable insight into the motivations and characters of three amazing achievers.