The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb
the fearsome French-Algerian Mimoun. It promised to be a must-see battle.
When the gun went off, the red-headed Chataway moved into an early lead, at the head of the pack for the first lap, with Schade behind him and Perry in the middle of the pack. The Australian team cheered on the ‘Mighty Atom’, but by the end of the third lap, with the first four runners averaging sixty-seven seconds per lap, Perry looked like a minor player on a great stage. Soon enough, Zatopek was setting the pace. The very sight of the 30-year-old Czech army major was frightening. His bony five-foot-eight-inch frame sped down the track in an unrhythmic mess of arms and legs. His head rolled back and forth as he ran; his tongue protruded from his mouth; his face contorted as if, one sportswriter noted, he was experiencing an ‘apoplectic fit’. Yet the runners knew he was fitter than they were, and Zatopek did not hesitate to inform them of the matter, mid-race. While his competitors gasped for air, the Czech considered it a good time for a conversation. During his 10,000m final, in which he’d broken his own world record, Zatopek had run alongside the Russian Anoufriev, who had set a rapid early pace, and admonished him on the dangers of going out too fast. As Zatopek blazed into the lead in the 5,000m final, he yelled back at Schade in German, ‘Herbert, do two laps with me!’
Two thousand metres from the finish, the tactical race began. Schade, answering Zatopek’s taunt, burst into the lead, with Chataway and Reiff staying close behind. Zatopek faded. Then Pirie picked up his tempo, shifting easily past the Czech and the rest of the field. Schade quickly regained first position, pushing Pirie aside, then Mimoun started to make his move. With just over a lap to go it was Schade, Chataway, Mimoun, Zatopek and Pirie. At the bell, Zatopek kicked. From the stands the spectators could almost feel the excruciating effort required of him to make the move. But it was to no advantage. Chataway cruised past him a hundred metres down the track with Schade and Mimoun breathing down his neck. Zatopek trailed in fourth position, looking altogether finished. Schade then regained the lead, only to have Chataway steal it right back at the final turn.
‘ZAT-O-PEK! ZAT-O-PEK! ZAT-O-PEK!’ The cry erupted from the stands. The crowd was on its feet. Face twisted, mouth gaping, arms flailing, eyes open wide, Zatopek found another spurt. Suddenly Chataway caught the track’s edge with his foot and went crashing onto the red brick surface, churning up a cloud of dust behind him. Mimoun and Schade attempted to hold off Zatopek as he drove around the turn, but there was nothing they could do to keep him from victory. The crowd boomed again when the Czech sprinted down the straight. Every step looked like it would be his last, yet somehow he found a way to continue forward. He snapped the tape with a new Olympic record time, with Mimoun second, Schade third, Reiff fourth, Chataway fifth (after picking himself up off the track), and Perry in an exhausted sixth place.
Announcers, journalists, spectators, and athletes alike understood that they had just witnessed greatness in the form of Emil Zatopek. He had now claimed his second gold medal, and with his participation in the marathon a few days later, a race he had never run, Zatopek was proving he deserved the acclaim of being the finest distance runner since Nurmi. Although Perry had not medalled, he had run his best time, and Landy had to believe that his friend was proud simply to have competed in the same race as his hero Zatopek. Landy himself was impressed by the Czech’s tactical skill, but more than that, he had never seen someone with such overpowering physical fitness.
Everyone in the 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