Читать книгу 26.2 - The Incredible True Story of the Three Men Who Shaped The London Marathon - John Bryant - Страница 8
ОглавлениеIn the spring of 1948, in a London still recovering from the Blitz, a diminutive, middle- aged and slightly balding café owner from Birmingham turned up, and announced to the world: ‘I am the Great Dorando.’
He stepped out of the shadows to haunt the Olympic Games, which were staged defiantly in this austere city that was still patching itself up from the ravages of war; he swanned his way around town, cashing in on the Olympic fever that was beginning to build up in the press, and would boast colourfully of the exploits of forty years before.
Dorando told the tale of how, on a scorching hot day in July 1908, he had staggered into the stadium at Shepherd’s Bush looking near to death, and how he stole headlines around the world during one of those endless Edwardian summers before the war to end all wars ripped the world apart. He told how the famously evocative picture of him reeling and collapsing dramatically at the finish of London’s first-ever Marathon had turned him, like Charlie Chaplin, into one of the first internationally recognised celebrities of the twentieth century.
In the London of 1948, he was invited for drinks here, a lunch there. For one crazy moment he was the hero men still spoke of whenever they told of the Marathon.
‘I am,’ he boldly asserted, ‘the man who long ago launched the great marathon craze on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. I am the man who thousands flocked to see when I conquered the finest runners in the Madison Square Garden in New York. I am the man who was given a special Golden Cup by the hands of the Queen of England herself for my pluck, my courage and for Italy.’
By the time he strutted around Britain’s capital, two world wars had wiped the name and the memory of Dorando from the headlines. But here, as a battle-weary world once more turned their thoughts to the bloodless struggle of sport, the legend seemed to rise from the dead.
On 5 August 1948, as the day of the Games loomed closer, four Italians from Dorando Pietri’s hometown of Carpi, near Modena in Italy, along with three reporters, turned up on his doorstep to meet him. The Italians began to talk to Dorando in the lilting strains of the local Carpigian dialect, and as the panic showed in the imposter’s eyes, one of them told how he had seen the real Dorando lowered into his grave in 1942 and inspected the words on his tombstone, announcing that here lay the ‘Champion Runner of the World – Gold Medallist’.
A few days after the hoaxer was unmasked, the Evening News in London printed an apology to the real Dorando’s widow, Teresa Dondi, who lived on until 1979 in San Remo. The hoax Pietri’s real name was Pietro Palleschi. He was married to an English woman called Lucy Evans, born in Tuscany, and in 1948 he was 65 years old. Pictures in the London newspapers taken outside the Temperance Bar he ran in Barford Street, Birmingham, show him in a white coat.
It was an amazing story but such was the power of the man who, forty years before, had shaped the future of twentieth-century sport, that, like others from those same Games in 1908, the legend lived on. The Games were important because they defined sporting archetypes that were to endure for the better part of a century.
As the life of Queen Victoria drifted to a close, a new century was opening: the century of the Edwardians, which swept in an era that was to bring the most profound changes – industrialisation, worldwide conflict and changes on a scale never seen before – changes that would overturn the rules by which we wage wars, run races and live our lives.
As the twentieth century was born, the British were at war with the Boers in South Africa. The theatre of that war was visited by those great chroniclers of Empire and chivalry, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. It brought fame to Robert Baden-Powell and sowed the seeds of the Boy Scout ethos that was to influence generations, who would die in far fiercer conflicts to come. And it set the stage for the young Winston Churchill, who witnessed the very rules of war mutate as he galloped through the century from horse to Spitfire.
The real spirit of the age was the way in which so many questioned the patterns of Old World thinking. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain was the most powerful nation in the world. A quarter of the world’s land mass, and a quarter of the world’s population, owed allegiance to the Union Jack. Occasional setbacks such as the British defeat by the guerrilla tactics of an amateur army of Dutch settlers in the Boer War could be taken in their stride, but other nations were confident of taking up the challenge to British supremacy. Increasingly, Germany posed as the new strong man of Europe, and across the Atlantic America was confident that she would soon outstrip Britain as the most powerful nation on earth.
Sport, like every other aspect of life in the new century, was in a state of revolutionary change; already the hard edge of professionalism was cutting into the character of games codified by the Victorians to help civilise the gentleman amateur. Spectators who could pay their monies at the turnstiles were becoming central to the progress and conduct of team sports, and winning became more important than taking part. The spoils of victory could make you rich, or turn you into that strange new twentieth-century beast – the celebrity.
In 1896, Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s dream of resurrecting the ancient Greek Olympics was realised. He had in mind conduct and rules for competitors that embraced fair play yet prepared them to be physically fit for the battlefields of the future. The objective of this French aristocrat was to promote a vision of sport uncorrupted by the real world. De Coubertin saw sport as pure, unsullied by professionalism, nationalism and the drive to win at all costs.
But these were never the values of the ancient Greek Olympics. Rather, they were the romantic and mythological values of the European middle classes, practised by the gentlemen amateurs who prided themselves on playing the game. Despite de Coubertin’s idealism, however, the nations of the world refused to play the game on the Olympic track or in the trenches.
On the very eve of those 1908 Games, world leaders met at The Hague to lay down the laws of war. They thought they could civilise war, come to terms with the industrialisation of war machines – which now included weapons of mass destruction, bombs, balloons, the aeroplane and poison gas – and prescribe codes of conduct for struggles yet to come. Also there at The Hague in May 1907, the International Olympic Committee was eager to take on board British proposals for the future conduct of the Olympic movement, and following the Games in 1908, the British sporting authorities, appalled by the rows and rivalries that had nearly wrecked the Olympics, commissioned a sixty-page report to defend what the British regarded as the laws of sport.
Conan Doyle, who was knighted for writing a history of the Boer War, was fiercely critical of the way the Boer had used dirty tricks in South Africa. He believed soldiers should stand and battle cleanly in a fair fight and scorned the part-time guerrilla or the invisible sniper.
At the Olympics, which he attended as a reporter for the Daily Mail, he was equally critical of those who tried to cheat or bully their way to victory. But cheating and bullying, particularly by what the British knew as ‘athletics’ and the Americans as ‘track and field’, was to be so fierce that the London Olympic Games of 1908 were to be remembered as ‘The Battle of Shepherd’s Bush’. The fallout from those Games was to haunt sport for one hundred years and give us the sporting archetypes recognised today.
These were never quaint nostalgic Games. Instead, they brutally foreshadowed the path Olympic sport was to take in the future. The most immediate legacy from 1908 came from the Marathon course that gave birth to the standard marathon distance now accepted worldwide. But the most enduring legacy came in the way sport was to be defined throughout the twentieth century.
That hoaxer who turned up in London in 1948 was an embodiment of the myths and mysteries that surround the 1908 Games. Here was a man trading on somebody else’s fame, somebody else’s legend. He knew that those Games were still alive in folk memory and, in victory or defeat, what lives on is greatness; we thirst for legends. The Games of 1908 were packed with legends and the hoaxer realised that in Dorando he had the perfect example of one money-spinning legend – the sporting celebrity.
Baron de Coubertin fought in vain to keep the Olympics free from professionalism, nationalism and winning at all costs, but these Games were ferociously competitive and soon descended into international uproar. Too many, it seemed, believed in the great fallacy that sport is first and last about winning. It never is – it’s about style and it’s about glory. Some of the athletes who lined up for the gun in 1908 realised that truth.
The winners and losers might have caught an echo of that sentiment in the words of the American sports writer and poet Grantland Rice, penned while the scars of the 1908 Olympic Games were still painful and raw:
When the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks – not that you won or lost –
But how you played the Game.
