The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ