The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb
to Emil Zatopek, the Czech star who ran everything from the mile to the marathon at world-class levels. This was the level of enthusiasm Santee generated on and off the track. He loved racing in front of large crowds and never tired. His talent just barely outmeasured his confidence. On a flight to one meet, a Kansas Jayhawks team-mate held out a newspaper article to show Wes. ‘Look what it says here … [Santee’s college competitor] Billy [Herd] hasn’t been beaten in any kind of a race for almost two years. That includes relay carries … He’s gobbled up some pretty good boys too, Wes.’
Santee stretched his boots out into the aisle. ‘Yeah, he’s a good boy. But he hasn’t tried to digest me yet.’
In two-mile races during his sophomore year, Santee lapped his competitors. In cross-country meets he was slipping into his sweats before other runners had finished. During the indoor season he set record after record in the mile, leading his team to a host of dual meet victories. It was almost too easy. On campus he ran from class to class, and professors set their watches by the precise time at which he started his training sessions.
In April 1952 at the Drake University Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, one of the year’s most important outdoor track meets, Santee anchored the four-mile relay for his team. When the baton was passed to him, Georgetown’s Joe LaPierre was some sixty yards ahead. Santee blazed three 62-second quarter-miles, yet had trouble gaining ground because LaPierre was running brilliantly himself. As Santee sped into the first turn of the last lap, Easton yelled out, ‘He’s wilting in the sun!’ Santee was finally gaining. Stride after stride he closed the gap. When he burst through the tape yards ahead of LaPierre, setting a national collegiate mile record in 4:06.8, Wes Santee had officially arrived. ‘Santee’s not human,’ said the Georgetown coach. The Des Moines Register quipped, ‘Santee stuck out above every other athlete like the Aleutian Islands into the Bering Sea.’ The national papers picked up the best quote, from the Drake coach: ‘Santee is the greatest prospect for the four-minute mile America has yet produced. He not only has the physical qualifications, but the mental and spiritual as well.’
But first Santee turned his sights to the Olympics. As holder of national titles in the 1,500m and the 5,000m, he by right qualified for the American trial in each. In mid-June he went to California with Easton to spend a week training. They decided together that he should participate in both trials. ‘I just want to make the Olympic team,’ he told his coach. ‘Time or race isn’t important.’ On 27 June, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Santee placed second in the 5,000m trial, guaranteeing a trip to Helsinki. That night he dined on his customary steak and potato dinner and enjoyed quiet conversation with Easton back at the hotel. The next day, braving one of the coldest June days in Los Angeles history, he readied himself for the 1,500m trial in front of forty-two thousand spectators. Santee looked around for Easton, but couldn’t find him. A whistle was blown, the race called, and Santee approached the starting line alongside milers Bob McMillen and Warren Druetzler, both of whom he was sure he could beat. In the programme listing the qualifiers for the 3.40 p.m. race, Santee was predicted to ‘win as he pleases – he has all year’. He was revved to go.
Suddenly, two AAU officials grabbed his arm and shuffled him off the track before he could protest. ‘Wes, they’re not going to let you run,’ one official said.
‘What do you mean?’ Santee asked, shrugging off their hold on him. ‘What’s going on?’
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Easton running across the field. Though wearing a jacket, tie, and dress shoes, he was moving fast.
The race starter called, ‘Runners to your mark!’ and then the gun fired. Santee watched helplessly as the trial started without him.
Easton finally made it to his side. ‘Wes, I’m sorry. We’ve been in a meeting for over an hour and they’re saying you’re not good enough to run both races, and they won’t let you drop out of the 5,000 to run the 1,500.’
This wasn’t right. Only the previous week he had run the third fastest 1,500m time in AAU history: 3:49.3. It was the fastest time by an American in years. Santee welled with anger, and with balled fists looked ready to act out his frustration.
Easton pulled him to one side. The coach had the stocky build of a wrestler, and even then, in his late forties with a fleshy, oval face, he looked capable of stopping this tall athlete if necessary. His voice was calm. ‘They told me you were only 19 [sic] – not good enough to run the 5,000 against Zatopek followed up with the 1,500.I told them we don’t particularly want to run the 5,000; we want to run the 1,500. Their only response was, “You qualified for that, and you have to stay with it.”’
There was nothing to be done. Easton knew that no Olympic rule forbade an athlete from participating in two events. If he qualified, he qualified. Those were the rules, but the AAU ran the show, and if a rule interfered with what the AAU wanted, its leader either ignored the rule or changed it. This was the first time, yet unfortunately not the last, that the AAU would stand in Santee’s way. Yes, he was off to Helsinki to race in the 5,000m, but his best chance of coming home with a medal was in the 1,500m.
The three weeks between the trial and the opening ceremony in Helsinki was a whirlwind. Santee nearly died on a flight from Los Angeles to St Louis when the plane carrying America’s Olympic athletes went into a tailspin and passengers were thrown from their seats. When the plane finally righted itself, the preacher and polevaulter Bob Richards walked down the aisle asking for confessions. After a long layover in St Louis, they arrived in New York. Santee participated in the national TV show Blind Date, hosted by Arlene Francis, as well as the first Olympic telethon with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. He ran in an exhibition three-quarter-mile race on Randall’s Island and set a new American record of 2:58.3, not to mention leaving the Olympic 1,500m qualifiers far behind. The effort was born of frustration: to show the AAU officials his speed and prove their decision wrong. After a flurry of press interviews, he flew from New York to Newfoundland, then to London and, finally, to Helsinki. By the time Santee arrived in Finland he was a jumble of excitement, jet lag, hope, aggravation, patriotism, fear, and confusion – a very different cocktail of emotions from what he needed to perform at his best.
But there he was at the opening ceremony, right in the middle of it all and wanting to prove he deserved to stand side by side with the best runners in the world. When the ceremony ended, the 5,870 athletes from sixty-seven nations filed out of the stadium, soaked and cold. Santee had only a few more days to pull himself together for his qualifying round. His legs had never failed him before, and no matter the obstacle or his state of mind, he expected them to see him through once again.
To be great, one does not have to be mad, but definitely it helps.
Percy Cerutty, Australian athletics coach
All was quiet in Kapyla, the Olympic village in a forest of pine trees twenty miles outside Helsinki. John Landy and three of his four room-mates – Les Perry, Don Macmillan, and Bob Prentice – lay in their iron-framed beds. The Arctic twilight crept in around the edges of the window, the sheets were as coarse as burlap, and the piles of track clothes and shoes reeked, but the Australians were resting easily, exhausted from being thousands of miles from home and trying to prepare for the most important athletics competition of their lives. In the days before an Olympian’s event, he felt as if he were looking over the edge of a cliff; the nerves, upset stomach, and general unease took a lot out of an athlete. The anticipation was almost as trying as the event itself. Sleep was the only relief on offer, if one could finally fall asleep.
‘Wake up! Wake up! You don’t need all this sleep!’ Percy Cerutty yelled as he burst into the room, swinging the door wide open and switching on the lights.
‘Bloody hell, Percy!’ groaned one of his athletes. ‘Thanks for waking us.’
‘You blokes don’t need all this sleep,’ their coach shouted back. At 57, Cerutty was a whirling dervish, a short, fit man with a flowing white mane of hair, goatee, toffee-coloured face, blue eyes, and the kind of voice that could wake the dead when raised. It was often raised.