The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb
camp, one that drew the athletes together. Landy, Robbins, Warren and two others bunked in the ‘ski hut’, which was a modified wooden container originally used to import Volkswagen cars. The first night Landy stayed there he had a bad dream about trying to get out of a hole. The nightmare was so vivid that he literally clawed his way out of his top bunk and crashed to the floor. The next night he agreed to be roped into his bed. Meanwhile, Perry and Macmillan, the two more established Stotans, were staying with Cerutty in an old cabin nicknamed after the luxury hotel, ‘Menzies’, because of its superior accommodation. One morning after a particularly cold night, Landy approached Macmillan and explained, ‘It’s pretty tough out here. Nobody will get up and get the breakfast. If you do and get everything out and ready, the second you turn your back, suddenly all these vultures’ – and Landy then jokingly mimicked a vulture poised to strike with its claws – ‘and little monkeys come down and eat it all up and go back up to their bunks, and yours is gone.’ By the end of the story, he had Macmillan in hysterics. With each such episode at Portsea, the others liked Landy more and more.
By the tenth day of camp, the gang of runners had bonded. They were both exhausted and inspired. Cerutty came away with a better understanding of what made his runners tick. Of Landy he wrote, ‘He undervalues himself, his achievements, and his possibilities, merely because he measures himself not against mediocrity but against the highest levels … Courage and desire to excel without undue display of effort, much less suffering, causes him to run well within himself … What his highest potential level is I can only guess at.’ Though Cerutty thought it unlikely that Landy would ever become a true Stotan, they both knew who had set him on the path to athletic greatness.
On 12 January 1952, in Melbourne, Landy set out to break 4:10 in the mile, the time established by the Australian Olympic organisers to qualify for Helsinki. Without ‘Big Mac’ Macmillan to push him, Landy led from the start, pushing harder than ever before, but he crossed the finish line a second short. ‘It is bad luck,’ he said after the race. ‘I don’t suppose there will be enough finance to send us both [Macmillan and Landy] to the Olympics.’ He swallowed his disappointment, and only a few hours later ran a 3,000m race in 8:53, breaking the Australian open record. The training at Portsea had increased his endurance, but not his speed over shorter distances. Two weeks later in Sydney he beat Macmillan by inches, but again the time was too slow to qualify.
By the cut-off date for selection, Macmillan and Landy had both run the qualifying time in the 1,500m, but only Macmillan had run the requisite speed for the mile. When the list of sponsored Olympic team members was published in March, Landy’s name was missing. There was a loophole, however. If Landy and a few others could come up with $A750 each, they could join the team. It was a lot of money, a year’s wages for some, and the Geelong Guild Athletic Club rallied to raise it for Landy. They held Saturday night dances and ‘chook’ raffles, which awarded the winner a dressed hen. With a lot of work and good intentions, the club members raised most of the money, but they were still $A250 short. Landy’s father made up the difference. His son was going to the Olympics. John heard the news while driving a tractor on his family farm on the South Gippsland coast, 130 miles south-east of Melbourne. He had only eight weeks to train.
Before Landy left for Europe, Joseph Galli published an article in a magazine by the name of Sports Novels whose title mirrored what many were thinking: ‘Victorian John Landy May Soon Become Our Greatest Middle-Distance Runner’. It was the reason so much effort had been made to send him. Landy was quoted thanking Cerutty for his guidance, and then the miler made a prediction, not of future success but rather of his untapped potential: ‘I don’t know just what my body can stand up to,’ he said – not yet.
At Kapyla Village in Helsinki, Cerutty finally quieted down. Landy lay in bed, uncertain as to how he would stack up against the world’s best. He had made great strides in his development and had run well in England, but still he was unsure. And he was very sensitive to the fact that 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.
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