The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ