Читать книгу The Perfect Mile - Neal Bascomb - Страница 12
ОглавлениеIf 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 medals. The United States captured its first track and field gold thanks to high-jumper Walter Davis, the six-foot-eight-inch Texan who set a new Olympic record in the process. The Soviets countered by sweeping the women’s discus. The second day of events saw an American stranglehold on the track and in the field; the Soviets ruled gymnastics. By the third day, newspapers around the world headlined the points table: the US was in first position, the USSR second, and Czechoslovakia third. Great Britain ranked fourth, and had yet to capture a gold. As promised, the fifteenth Olympiad was shaping into a battle between the United States and the Soviets.
National pride had always played a role in the Olympics, but never as much as it did in the 1952 Games. In the four years leading up to Helsinki, the Soviets had ‘mobilized to win the Olympic War’, as Life magazine put it. They had combed the countryside for athletes, hired hundreds of coaches, and poured billions of roubles into training programmes and stadia construction. No effort was spared. In Helsinki, Russia (along with Eastern bloc countries Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia) demanded separate ‘Reds Only’ housing and training quarters, and they afforded their athletes every luxury including platters of caviar and smoked salmon. In their camp in Otaniemi, they hung a huge portrait of Stalin over the entrance and erected a wooden scoreboard to post their points totals. The Cold War, which was developing on the Korean peninsula and through the atomic arms race, had entered the sporting arena with a decided chill.
The United States was equally focused on winning. And when it came to preparations they were hardly lacking. After all, the team was primarily composed of scholarship-funded college athletes who had devoted endless hours to training under the guidance of full-time coaches. One needed only to look at the jugs of vitamins available for ‘Americans Only’ in the Kapyla dining halls to appreciate the special treatment they enjoyed. Many complained that countries such as Britain, who had invented the idea of the amateur athlete, didn’t stand a chance in the face of what amounted to a ‘professional’ approach to sport. Rightly or wrongly, sport was changing, and Helsinki marked a symbolic shifting point. The only remaining question was who would win this particular match-up, and by what margin.
Santee had a front seat to this battle, particularly since one of the greatest rivalries between the two countries was in basketball. Half of the American team comprised University of Kansas players, and Wes was privy to the stories of seven-foot Russian stars and how long they had trained together. But Santee had his own concerns about winning for his country, particularly since the track and field squad was considered one of the big point scorers for the American team.
By Tuesday, 22 July, the day of his qualifying round, Santee had learned little about his race and he desperately wished Bill Easton was there with him. Santee discovered that he could not warm up on the track before the race, which was part of his normal routine, so he jogged around outside the stadium before returning to the locker-room to be called out for his heat. All around him athletes were speaking in unrecognisable languages, and he had no idea who among them he was competing against or what times they usually ran. His biggest fear was falling too far behind the leaders. There was no one to speak to about strategy. And he could not help thinking that he should not even have been in this race. The 1,500m was his best distance; he certainly had much more experience running it. Seldom did a runner, even one as naturally talented as Wes Santee, have the speed and stamina to compete at a world-class level in the 1,500m and the 5,000m. With each minute that passed, his apprehension grew.
When he saw Fred Wilt, the Indiana University alumnus who had competed extensively overseas, Santee hurried across the locker-room to speak to him. Wilt would know what Santee should do.
‘I really don’t know much,’ Wilt said after Santee had told him the names of those in the heat against him. ‘Except that Schade guy. He’ll probably run a steady, even race. Follow him.’
And with this information, Santee was called to the track for his heat by an Olympic official. He jogged into the stadium, feeling only slightly comforted by this one piece of advice. With Easton, he would have gone over the race on the blackboard in his office at KU, his coach indicating lap times to shoot for, how the other runners traditionally ran, and when to move with the pack or ahead of it. His race was literally drawn out for him in chalk. Only when Santee approached the starting line did he notice the German ace Herbert Schade. Except for the Canadian runner Ferguson, the rest of the field was a mystery. What if the German started out too fast or too slow? What was the best time he was capable of running? There were tens of questions he needed answered and only seconds before the race started. By the time the athletes were called to their marks, Santee felt overwhelmed. This was the Olympics. He was representing his country, and, perhaps more importantly, Kansas. He had to do well, yet he felt displaced, as if he had been blindfolded, led out into a dark field, and left alone to find his way out.
Soon enough the starting gun fired, and Santee was running. Into the first turn, he was in a good position behind Schade, right where he wanted to be. The first lap went well; Schade led, Santee kept back by several runners, but stayed close enough. By the third lap, Santee and the German were alone. The others had fallen back on the pace. Halfway through the race, Santee sensed his legs tiring, but he held on to second position. At the 3,000-metre mark he heard Schade’s time called – 8:23 – and then his own, two seconds slower. It was too fast. The best he had run this distance was 8:44, and he was 150 yards ahead of that pace. Santee began to lose confidence. He couldn’t maintain this kind of speed. What he should have known before this point in the race was that the German was using this heat to show how fast he was to Czechoslovakia’s Zatopek and France’s Mimoun, both of whom were in separate heats and would likely prove his stiffest competition in the final. An Olympic record would be broken if Schade continued at this pace, and he meant to continue.
Half a lap later, Santee lost momentum. His arms and legs leadened; his chest couldn’t bring in enough breath. His pace slackened. By 4,000 metres he hardly felt like he was moving, the sensation more like running through water than over a track. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. He couldn’t drive his legs. Runner after runner passed him and there was nothing he could do, even had he been suddenly infused with all the will power in the world. His body had given out. He finished at a dismally slow pace, thirteenth overall, in a time of 15:10.4 – the worst showing at this distance of his career.
As he put on his sweatsuit, Santee was exhausted physically, but the fear and dread before the race had taken an even greater toll. Emotionally he was a wasteland. He didn’t want to speak to anybody. He was embarrassed when he left the stadium, wanting to hole up in his room until they flew out of Helsinki. As he later said, ‘Not only did I lose, I wasn’t even in the race.’ For an athlete who had seldom known defeat, particularly on this scale, this was agony. It was like the loss of a first love. His heart literally ached.
Sitting in the stands at the Olympic Stadium on 24 July, Landy did not like his chances in the 1,500m set to take place in less than hour. He was in the fourth, and probably most difficult, heat in the qualifying round. Only the top four finishers in his race moved forward to the semi-final, and his eight-man heat included French and Yugoslav champions El Mabrouk and Otenhajmer, as well as America’s Bob McMillen and England’s Roger Bannister, the latter of whom Landy had met briefly while competing in London. Landy knew that his best time in the distance (3:52.8) was several seconds slower than his competitors, plus he was much more accustomed to running a mile than 1,500m.
Although only 120 yards shorter than the mile, the 1,500m was an awkward race. Standard European tracks, Helsinki included, were 400 metres in length, meaning that runners competed over three and three-quarter laps. Landy disliked the race, as he later explained: ‘There’s nothing graceful about it. You don’t start where you finish, it’s ugly.’ The split times were difficult to understand, and given the incomplete first lap, he found it hard to get into his rhythm.
At that moment, however, Landy was more interested in watching the 5,000m final, which was about to start. He had failed to qualify for the longer event, finishing over thirty seconds behind the winner of his heat, Alain Mimoun, in tenth position overall. It was a poor showing, but his personal best, achieved in early February, had been only two seconds faster. He had to settle for watching his friend and countryman Les Perry try to take home a medal in an event featuring the ‘human locomotive’ Emil Zatopek, former gold medal winner Gaston Reiff, new Olympic record holder Herbert Schade, and English up-and-comer Chris Chataway, as well as 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 his feet against the sheets would allow him to drop off. Every second and minute brought the 1,500m final closer; every hour a new wave of anxiety swept over him. At 4.30 p.m. the next day he would line up against eleven of the best middle-distance runners in the world. His confidence was torn by having already run two races instead of the one he had expected to run to qualify for the final. He feared he was already beaten.
The past week had brought only restless days and nights. He and his room-mates – sprinter Nicholas Stacey, quarter-miler Alan Dick, and three-miler Chris Chataway – had tried to relieve the constant churning of their thoughts about victory or defeat, and about what would make the difference between the two. Resting on their unkempt beds, they spoke of politics and history, read books, or joked around with one another. One evening, Stacey mounted a wooden box, as if it was an Olympic podium, to accept his imaginary gold medal and offer a congratulatory speech. At other times they discussed their competitors, particularly Zatopek, whom they thought inhuman in ability. ‘While he goes for a twenty-mile training run on his only free day,’ Chataway said, ‘we lie here panting with exhaustion, moaning that the gods are unkind to us, and that we’re too intelligent to train hard. It’s all nonsense.’ Inevitably, the four thought again and again about that second when the starting gun would fire, and whether or not they would prove good enough. Regardless of what happened, they promised one another that once the Olympics had ended they would never put themselves through this torture again.
By the morning of Saturday, 26 July, Bannister was the only one of his room-mates still tense, though he tried not to show it, as far as possible keeping to himself his doubts about being able to win the race. The others had finished their events, nobody in triumph, and Chataway most disastrously, of course, by falling on the final lap of the 5,000m final. Bannister had watched the race, and its conclusion impressed on him how important his finishing kick would be.
Absence of victory was the same story for the entire British team. Just two days of competition remained on the track and in the field and they had won only a handful of medals, not one of them gold. Nor had any British athlete won gold in any of the other events. The British reporter who had said before the Games ‘I will eat a pair of spiked shoes if our team doesn’t win twelve gold medals’ was dangerously close to having a mouthful of leather. Headlines cried out ‘Don’t Worry, We Are Still in the Fight’, yet column after column reported failure and missed chances.
There was one hope left, though: Roger Bannister. Now, more than ever, his countrymen rallied around him. A few days before, the Daily Mirror columnist Tom Phillips had compared Bannister to a great racehorse trainer who ‘rarely bothered about picking minor honours here and there. If he wished to win a classic race, he got his horse perfectly fit for that day and nearly every time his horse was first past the post.’ Phillips concluded, ‘I believe Bannister will win and teach some of our other athletes, and the officials and coaches, a lesson in strategy and tactics.’
If confidence could be drawn from the number of column inches guaranteeing his victory, Bannister was a sure thing. Most sportswriters considered him their favourite. But his legs hurt. He hadn’t slept soundly in days. He was plagued by worries, both real and otherwise. His qualifying round and semi-final in the previous two days had been brutal. To avoid the jostling and elbowing of a crowded field he’d run both races in the second and third lanes, adding at least twenty yards to each and exhausting himself even more. The semi-final had been especially taxing because there was a fight to the finish that placed him a narrow four-tenths of a second ahead of Jungwirth from Czechoslovakia, who had failed to qualify. Usually Bannister required three or four days of recovery after such a race because of his limited training regime, but now he had been given only twenty-four hours.
In his room, waiting as the minutes ticked past, Bannister knew the 1,500m final would draw the world’s attention. He knew the stands would be jammed to capacity. He knew his competitors had also trained for thousands of hours for this day, and that they would strive with every muscle and ounce of will to claim victory. It was impossible not to rehearse the coming race over and over again in his head. How quickly should he start? Should he stay on the inside lane or move to the outside? Where must he be by the third lap? How close to the finish could he start his burst?
When Bannister made his way down the tunnel underneath the stadium that afternoon, he was no less tortured. His face was blanched, his step uncertain. Australian miler Don Macmillan walked alongside him. He was in bad shape as well, dehydrated and soaked with perspiration after the voodoo warm-up imposed by his coach, yet he noticed that Bannister, against whom he had run in New Zealand in 1950, was pale and nervous.
‘Good luck, Don,’ Bannister said, heading up into the stadium.
‘Thanks, Roger,’ Macmillan choked out.
The time had come. When the Duke of Edinburgh arrived in the stands, the crowd cheered. The sun even broke through the clouds to honour this signature Olympic race. While the other athletes stretched and jogged around the infield to warm up, Bannister rested on the bench. Chris Brasher, the British steeplechaser and former president of the Cambridge University Athletic Club, watched from the stands and later described his friend’s appearance: ‘There was a peculiar loneliness about Roger. He stood apart from the others, looking drawn and white, as if he were about to go into a torture chamber.’ Chris Chataway was also in the stands. He had written to his mother the day before to tell her how concerned he was about Bannister’s state in the days before his race. As Chataway waited for the race to begin, he worried that his room-mate had already defeated himself in his mind. However, though tense and sapped of energy from two heats, Bannister still felt that he had a chance. Every race was imperfect, and he had always come through in the past.
Once Finnish middle-distance runner Denis Johansson had completed a presumptuous pre-race victory lap, the starter called the race. With the eleven others, Bannister came to the line. The crowd hushed for the gun. He had prepared his whole athletics career for this moment. Suddenly, they were off.
The German Lamers carried the field through the first lap in 57.8 seconds, looking as though he might be pacing for his countryman and the favourite to win, Werner Lueg. Throughout this first lap, Bannister stayed to the inside; he did not have the energy to battle in the middle of the pack. Lamers soon faded, and Lueg took the lead, finishing the second lap at a slower pace in 2:01.4. By this time Bannister had managed to come up through the field and was running in fifth place. At the bell, Lueg was still leading. He finished the third lap in 3:03, still on the slow side given the field’s talent. Only three-quarters of a lap to go.
In the radio broadcast booth, BBC announcer Harold Abrahams was worried for Bannister, despite the fact that he was in the right position – third – for making his break. ‘He is not running as well as one would hope,’ Abrahams said. ‘He is looking rather tired.’
In the back straight of the last lap, the race heated up. Two hundred metres from the finish and the whole field was nearly sprinting. Down the straight, Aberg of Sweden and then El Mabrouk of France tried to surge to the head of the pack. Bannister was next, deciding to strike at the same time Lovelock had in the 1936 Olympics final to win the gold.
‘Bannister is in third position with 180 metres to go. Bannister fighting magnificently. Bannister now trying to get into the lead.’
This was it, Bannister thought. Although he had suffered nothing but dread since learning of the added semi-final, he was now in the ideal spot to win the gold. He had managed the jostling field, kept with the pace, and avoiding tripping. As he moved into the final turn, now in second place, he called on the full effect of his finishing kick – his most potent weapon. He gave the order to his legs to go, but for the first time in his life his kick wasn’t there. When he should have leapt ahead, he stalled. His legs just didn’t have the energy. It was a shock. Little Josey Barthel from Luxembourg swept by him, unbelievably, impossibly. Then the American, McMillen, passed him as well. Bannister felt drained and helpless, knowing he had lost.
‘Bannister is fading!’ Abrahams called into the microphone.
Lueg held strong, stretching his lead by three yards at the end of the turn. Barthel then struck, delivering the finish Bannister wanted for his own. The Luxemburger cruised past Lueg in the final fifty metres with McMillen also coming up fast.
‘And it’s Barthel wins. Second, the American. Third, Lueg. Fourth, Bannister. Time, 3:45.2.’
It was a new Olympic record, and the surprise upset of the Games. Bannister was so exhausted by the end of the race that he had to hold on to the back of Lueg’s singlet to keep from pitching to the track. He hadn’t even claimed a bronze. The British team was distraught. Columnists began to sharpen their pencils. This was a betrayal of trust.
Barthel was handed roses, and then he rested on a bench to take off his shoes. The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling observed, ‘He had had no trainer and no compatriot with him when he came into the stadium, and he was still alone. It must have been a great solace to him on the night before the race, knowing he had nobody to disappoint.’ How different it was for Bannister who, full of emotion, later watched Barthel mount the victory dais and weep tears of joy while Luxembourg’s anthem played throughout the stadium. For Bannister, the Helsinki final was a disaster. He told his friend Brasher years later, ‘A disaster is something which is shared between you and the public which expects something of you and which you cannot or have not fulfilled.’
As he headed back to the Olympic Village later that afternoon, fending off the press who were preparing to excoriate him for his insufficient preparations, Bannister needed to find a way to overcome what had happened. He couldn’t go out a loser. His answer would be to attempt a challenge that had been in the making for a very long time: the four-minute mile. And he would not be alone in the effort.
