The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ