26.2 - The Incredible True Story of the Three Men Who Shaped The London Marathon. John Bryant
‘Strip out, gentlemen, please!’ came the booming command. The crowd would hush, waiting to catch a glimpse of the eight or nine figures crouching to strain for the first smoke of the gun that would pitch them forwards like shots from a sniper. For a moment, they would be frozen and the stomachs of the spectators would flutter as they held their breath, waiting to witness the young, fit men fighting to get the better of each other in this trial of strength, speed and will.
Then they’d be off, with some heavy-footed and making fierce noises as they moved, others staying too long in contact with the South African soil between strides. Their facial expressions were quite extraordinary too. Teeth were clenched in ferocious or agonised grimaces. Some looked as though they were snarling. Heads would be thrown back or jerked to one side; arms thrashed wildly instead of pumping in time with the legs. Energy would be spent recklessly as torsos rocked and twisted. It was like watching men trying to grab a lifeline just out of reach.
But when Halswelle came out of the holes he had scraped at the start, he was a revelation. You could see that he had a gift, that he ran with fire in his belly. Once he took off, he seemed to gain a yard or two just by starting.
It was hard to believe that a man could fly into action so quickly. There was no slow build-up, no hesitancy, no changing of gear. Ruthlessly, smoothly, the legs produced a stride that could cut through the opposition like a sword on the battlefield. The body was steady, the face showed no strain. Arms and legs moved forward with no sideways sway; the head looked as though it were floating, with no rise and no fall – it was all poise, pace and purpose.
Like an arrow snapped from a bowstring, he reached towards a finish that wasn’t just a simple piece of rope between two posts but a declaration of his rightful place as a champion. For other runners a race was fun, a gamble, a game – maybe a way to a prize – but to Wyndham Halswelle it was a declaration of his identity.
‘By God,’ one of the troopers muttered, his eyes shining as he watched him run, ‘he’s got class!’ But even as he ran, the gambling men, those who had taken the illicit bets, knew what was to come.
As Halswelle eased ahead, one man clawing his way down the track stretched forwards a hand and clipped his trailing leg. Suddenly, the beauty of the arrow that seemed to be heading straight for the target was thrown off-course. Halswelle tripped, one leg smacked against the other, then he lurched. It was his own speed, his own purity of motion, that brought him crashing down.
He fell heavily, his hands scraped red raw by the sand. His knees, from which the blood dripped, left stains where the blood met the dust of the veldt. Halswelle shook his head in anger: he had been way in front and the other runners knew it, but he had been robbed. It was enough to make him want to throw the whole thing in.
Looking down at him was a trooper shaking his own head in disbelief. The man who hauled Halswelle to his feet that day was a squat, tough-looking member of the regiment with an accent that reeked of the borders between England and Scotland. His name was Jimmy Curran.
‘You need to learn a thing or two, sir,’ he said, looking down at the fallen man. It was a meeting that was to change both their lives.
Dorando Pietri took his first, wobbly steps in the sleepy village of Mandrio, a 20- minute jog-trot from the town of Carpi, between Verona and Bologna in the north-east of Italy – a maze of cobbled streets huddled around a grand piazza and still, in the days when Pietri was young, half hidden behind the city walls. His father, Desiderio, scraped a living where he could – selling fruit, baking bread, renting a shop here, a market stall there.
Dorando was born on 16 October 1885, the third of four sons. A small, wiry child, he was full of energy – strong as a bull, they used to say – and always hungry. With three sons to feed and another on the way, Desiderio would drag his wife, Maria, and their family from village to village and from town to town, desperately seeking work.
At one point, in search of pay, Desiderio took his family to settle in Carpi, the traditional centre for the making of straw hats, with grasses to plait and softening water flowing through its streams. It was here, in a new century of industrialisation and mass production, that men from Rome would tell you how a machine could make as many hats in a day as a family might fashion in a week. People poured into Carpi in the hope that the hat trade might bring them if not wealth then at least sufficient prosperity to fill the stomachs of their children.
Even then, there was a special, indefinable quality about Dorando. Somehow he sensed that the world ran far beyond the horizons of Carpi. He had learned from his restless older brothers that adventure and perhaps even fortune and fame were to be had out there beyond the town. To the south was Rome while to the north were London and Paris. He would hear snippets of news from there; sometimes strange words, unfamiliar accents, even foreign languages as travellers and businessmen passed through Carpi.
Sometimes, too, visitors would come to the piazza and Dorando would sit open-mouthed in wonder as the first flickering silent movies gave him glimpses of a world beyond even the wonders of Rome and Paris. Here was America, a new land of promise where any dream seemed possible. His father was a labourer while his mother looked after them all by scouring the markets for food, and although Desiderio and Maria had never learned to read without effort, they could add up well enough. They understood enough to know that this new century might offer the chance to make more lire by your wits than by your hands.
They had seen the frustration in the eyes of the two elder brothers, Antonio and Ulpiano. Carpi, it seemed, was always too small for them. The builders and developers were beginning to pull down the city walls, but for Antonio and Ulpiano, the place seemed like a prison and they couldn’t wait to leave.
While Dorando’s father sold apples and roasted chestnuts close to the market in Carpi, Antonio, who was six years older than Dorando, tried to make his way by working in the hat factory. But he hated it, for it was noisy and it reeked of sulphur, while the constant need to lift heavy parcels was too much like hard work.
‘I feel trapped, it’s like being a slave,’ Antonio would complain restlessly.
Ulpiano, four years older than his brother Dorando, had no intention of being a slave. He was restless and ambitious. Even as a boy, those who knew him would say there was something shifty about him.
‘He looked like a little fox,’ said a boyhood friend, who’d spent a lifetime making shoes in Carpi. ‘He had the face of someone full of cunning so he went to England – he’d do anything to get out of Italy. Ulpiano was on the make. He learned English, got to know what life was like out there in the world. He was always going to make a fortune, one way or the other.’
Dorando’s mother and father had seen how their elder sons had felt about staying on in Carpi, and they didn’t want Dorando to go the same way. They clung onto him.
‘You’ll never be hungry here at home,’ his mother would say, while his father, also small and wiry, was forever pointing out to him the important men who ran the hotels, the hat factory, even the big sports club La Patria in Carpi.
‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘you can make something of yourself here in Carpi. You don’t have to spend your life selling fruit and bread like me. You’re a little boy now, but you can be a big man. You don’t have to leave. Show them you can do it, right here in Carpi.’
It was as if a torch had been passed into Dorando’s hand, like a gift from father to son; it lit up his life. He looked at those people in Carpi with new eyes and saw the ones who represented something grander than others renting a shop here or a stall there. They were big men and he studied their every move, watched what they represented. As his father’s words stiffened his ambition, Dorando toyed with the idea of perhaps getting an apprenticeship or at least something more ambitious