.
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 he returned in the early afternoon, he ran from his house into the fields to help with the ploughing or to corral one of the four hundred head of cattle. At dusk, when his father called it a day, an exhausted Santee didn’t walk home for supper, he ran – fast, wearing his cowboy boots. As the distance from his father lengthened, a weight lifted from his shoulders, and by the time he had washed up and changed clothes he was as fresh as if he hadn’t worked at all.
Later, when a remark, a look, or seemingly nothing at all set off his father’s rage, this freshness was torn from Wes. He took the brunt of his father’s anger, saving his younger brother Henry, who suffered from rickets as a child, and his younger sister Ina May from the worst of it. David Santee dispensed his cruelty with forearm, fist, rawhide buggy whip, or whatever else was at hand. Once it was a hammer. Wes considered himself lucky that his old man didn’t drink or the situation could have been really bad. Some sons of abusive fathers want to become big enough to fight back; Santee wanted to become fast enough to get away.
Very early on he recognised that he had a gift for running. He was never very good in the sprint, but if the game was to run around the block twice, he always won. In eighth grade, when Wes was in his early teens, the high-school coach came down to evaluate which kids were good at which sports. That was how a small town developed its athletes. The coach threw out a football to see who threw or kicked it the furthest, threw out a basketball to see who made a couple of jump shots. Then he told Santee and the other twenty kids in his class to run to the grain elevator. Within a few hundred yards Santee was all alone and knew he had the others whipped. This was ‘duck soup’ he said to himself as he ran to the grain elevator and back and took a shower before the others had returned. Most walked half the distance.
When a new kid named Jack Brown, who was rumoured to be quite a runner, arrived in town, the townspeople urged Santee to race him. The first day of his freshman year, Santee joined Brown at the starting line of the half-mile track used for horse races and almost lapped him by the finish. It felt good to be better than everybody else at something. What had started as a combination of fun – running to chase mice or the tractor – and a means to escape his father’s clutches had now become a way to excel. Each race he won bolstered his pride.
J. Allen Murray was there to help him on this path. Murray was Ashland’s high-school track and field coach (as well as history teacher and basketball/football coach). He believed Santee could be the next Glenn Cunningham, the most famous United States middle-distance runner and a Kansas native. The problem was that Santee barely had enough time for classes, let alone running, because his father wanted him home to work. Murray told Wes that if he didn’t have time