The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ