Extract from ‘The Olympians – A Century of Gold’ by Sebastian Coe

Chapter 6. Emil Zatopek and the limits of endurance

In the late summer of 1946, during the first major international championship since the end of the war, a young Czechoslovakian runner, virtually unknown outside his own troubled country, trailed home in 5^th place in the European 5000 metres final, the length of the straight behind the winner. All the attention, certainly all Britain’s attention, had been on the victor, the slight, bespectacled Sydney Wooderson , cheated so often in the past by injury and by war, now finally winning a major title in a shattering final lap from the Dutchman Willem Slijkhhuis. No-one took a lot of notice of Emil Zatopek; 5^th place in Europe, even if it is the best run in your career so far, does not rate headlines.

It was a significant moment, though, for world athletics. From that day distance running was to be revolutionized, and a new order would be in command until well into the 1960s. These dozen years or so were to provide an unprecedented, and unrepeated, era in training and achievement, and were to give inspiration to runners throughout the world well after its principals had passed into the anonymity of retirement. It gave immortality and titles galore to two men, and an Olympic gold medal, in its dying phase, to a third. All three, by coincidence, were from what came to be called the Soviet bloc: Zatopek of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Kuts and Pyotr Bolotnikov of the USSR – the most devastating long-distance runners since the days of Paavo Nurmi.

It is hard, from our standpoint as television viewers of the 1990s, even to appreciate such dominance. A 10,000 metres race has its customary pattern, with which we have been familiar for a decade or two: the strong men try to run the finish out of their inferiors and out of each other, and the ‘kickers’ hand on to their heels till, say, the final 300 metres and trust the power of their final sprint against the stamina of the early leaders. Yet from 1948 to 1960, in every major championship (four Olympic, three European), the 10,000 metres was won by a street; in only one of them was there the slightest doubt at the start of the final lap as to who was going to win. Zatopek himself won four of theses titles, with winning margins of 48 seconds, 69 seconds, (a full lap!), 15½ seconds and 28 seconds; in none of them was there another runner in the final straight when he broke the tape. Kuts, his hard, uncompromising successor, won his Olympic and European 5000 metres final by 12.8 and 11 seconds respectively – quite astonishing margins in a race which, before and since, has almost always guaranteed a tight finish. From both men it was running of a class that literally had not been seen before, and each man made an Olympic Games his own.

Zatopek had first realized his own potential in 1941, when he was nineteen, and he had improved steadily but unspectacularly at 800 and 1500 metres until 1945, when the great Swedish middle-distance runner Anne Andersson paid a visit to Prague. Anderson’s physical condition, and the quality of his background work, transformed Zatopek’s own training. He added quality to the quantity he had already established, and blended both with the extraordinary determination he had acquired for stretching his own body to the utmost, whether in a race or a training session. Even on army sentry-duty he might spend an hour running on the spot, knees high, shoulders straight, loading ever more stamina into the training bank. He trained, in those years of his mid-twenties, harder than any athlete had ever trained before. In the winter, when by unwritten law no-one trained hard, he put on heavy baseball shoes, or even army boots, and ran through the snow-covered forests – fast quarter- or half-miles with short intervals of jogging in between, bounding sometimes in long, looping strides for half a mile at a stretch – observing all the time the effect the work was having on his body.

Coaches today would have channelled the work with far greater economy. They would have tempered the hard workouts with more relaxed sessions; they would have spent hours streamlining Zatopek’s tortured, hunched style, (a contemporary said he ran like a man who had just been stabbed in the heart); they might even have made him run a little faster. But he had built for himself in these long hours of relentless self-punishment a capacity for sustained speed – over ten or twenty laps – that few runners in the world could match, and a reserve tank at the end of a race to allow him to run flat-out for a lap. It was enough ammunition to beat the world.

He took on the best over the red cinders of Wembley Stadium on the first day of athletics at the 1948 Games. In one of the few warm days of that fortnight he ran the 10,000 metres field into the ground. The Finn, Viljo Heino, world record-holder and favourite for the title, ran with Zatopek’s pace for half the race; then Zatopek surged for half a lap and opened a gap of ten metres. Heino simply stopped. No-one else got within shouting distance of the Czech, and to the delighted chants of his compatriots in the crowd, he won by three-quarters of a lap.

The next day he qualified in the heats of the 5000 metres for a final as strange as it was exciting. Again Zatopek commanded the leading bunch, which soon reduced itself to three men – him, Gaston Reiff of Belgium, Slijkhuis of Holland. Three laps from the finish Reiff pounced and opened up an apparently unassailable lead on Slijkhuis, with Zatopek, who appeared to have lost heart or concentration, or perhaps just strength, in a hopeless position forty metres from the leader. So they stayed until the start of the final back straight when, with the race as good as over, all hell broke loose as Zatopek began his sprint.

Within seconds he had raced past the tiring Slijkhuis, and began to close on Reiff. As the final bend unfolded, with the whole crowd on their feet roaring, it suddenly looked as if Reiff could lose. Ahead of him, eighty metres over the puddles and the squelchy cinders, was the tape; but his effort had come, with great courage, three laps before, and he was nearly spent. And behind him was this lunatic sprinting. As the tape drew nearer, even above the yelling of the crowd he could hear the pattering, splashing danger of Zatopek. Reiff dragged one last effort out of his legs, and the gold medal – Belgium’s first ever Olympic track victory – was his. Five metres more and it could have been a dead heat. Ten metres more and Zatopek would have won.

As it was, it was yet another in a succession of breathtaking Olympic 5000 metres finals, and for Zatopek and Reiff it was just another act in a long-running battle of wits and strength that would reach and even more exciting climax in Helsinki four years later.

In 1952 Zatopek was no longer the raw Czech surprise he had been in 1948, He had broken world records almost at will, he had won the European 10,000 metres with ridiculous ease, and in the 5000 metres, before a disbelieving partisan crowd in Brussels, and he had unleashed his famous last-lap sprint and left the local hero Reiff for dead. He was the undisputed master of distance running and yet now, at the age of thirty, he had suffered some unexpected defeats, and he was by no means undisputed favourite for Olympic gold medal – even at 10,000 metres.

Favourite or not, Zatopek’s week in Helsinki remains the supreme feat in distance running history, at the Olympic Games or anywhere else. True to his reputation, if not to current form, he won the 10,000 metres by the usual and tested expedient of systematically running the legs of the opposition – by running too fast for them, by surging whenever he thought fit, and by taking a further twenty metres from them in the last lap. He won by a good 100 metres, received his medal, and prepared for the 5000 metres,

He knew that by now, despite his capacity for successive fast laps, he was not really quick enough to break a 5000 metre field – the German Herbert Schade would be able to lead the pack just as quickly as he could; Reiff would be in the line-up again searching for revenge; and Zatopek could not be sure that his final weapon, his 400-metre charge after the bell, would be enough to out-sprint the young British runners Chris Chataway and Gordon Pirie, who had taken to the distance with such success. At the bell, Reiff faded out of contention and Zatopek was positioned perfectly, on the shoulder of Schade, who had led virtually from the gun. Zatopek launched himself into the final lap as only he knew how – he kicked, laid back his head, and charged. The crowd roared, and he was away.

Then something happened to Zatopek which, literally, had never happened to him before in a major race. At the start of the back straight into the last lap three men sped past his right shoulder – the young Chataway, Herbert Schade, who by rights should now be struggling in the wake of the Zatopek acceleration, and the French-Algerian Alain Mimoun. With 300 metres to go, Zatopek had been striding away from the field; with 250 metres to go he was a mere fourth, his tactics exposed.

He responded almost with desperation, but with just the glimmer of realization, as they began to lean into the final bend, that all was not well with the men in front. Chataway, in the lead, was beginning to struggle, Mimoun was closing on Schade, who in turn was inching up to the elbow of the leader. Zatopek was on them like a lion. With 180 metres to go there were four men in a line across the track, and the one on the outside, in lane three, head rolling, arms thrashing, red vest heaving with the effort, was moving the fastest of them all. Chataway, exhausted, tripped on the concrete surround and fell. Mimoun and Schade fought against the numbing fatigue into the straight and towards the tape. Ahead of them, his face a picture of agony mingled with power and pride, ran Zatopek, into the tape and through it – the greatest, most exciting victory of his career.

To say that after that triumph the marathon was a formality is unforgivably to devalue the race. Twenty-six miles and 385 yards can never be a formality, and Zatopek had never run that distance in competition in his life, But though he might not have known it, his idiosyncratic preparation for the long track events had been ideal - the 100-plus miles a week, the fast intervals and the long striding would today be considered a hard but almost perfect regime for a marathon runner; in 1952 it was almost certainly a better preparation than even Jim Peters, hot favourite for the Olympic title, had undergone.

In the event, Zatopek stayed with Peters and with Jansson of Sweden for the early part of the race, and then is supposed to have asked, (partly, one would imagine, as a stroke of devastating gamesmanship, and partly out of a genuine desire for information) whether or not ‘ we ought to be going faster?’ Getting no cogent answer from Peters or Jansson, who were understandably quite happy not go any faster, Zatopek left them, accelerated away and arrived at the finish with a little over two and a half minutes to spare, tiring, it is true, but tiring less than the men behind him. The ovation that greeted him as he arrived at the stadium, from a Finish crowd for who distance running was meat, drink and mother’s milk, bore witness to the magnificence of his triumph. It would a giant to step into his shoes.

Incredibly a giant appeared, in the guise of a short, stocky, tense, hard-bitten sailor from the Ukraine with a tough imperviousness to pain fired in wartime Russia, and honed on a training regime that was so demanding it almost destroyed him, let alone the colleagues with whom he trained. Like Zatopek, Vladimir Kuts realized early on that he lacked the finishing kick of the true racing athlete, and like Zatopek, whose exploits he admired unreservedly, he strove to build up the maximum sustained pace over a long distance that his body could stand.

He never found for himself the finishing burst that Zatopek was able to command, but in a way he never needed it. Successive quarter miles at maximum pace in training, with minimum jogging rests in between; six half-miles as fast as he could in a single session, or three top-speed three-quarter miles…sometimes he had to forgo training on the day following his more rigorous sessions, and rarely was he able to train more than five days a week, such was the punishment to which he submitted himself.

In 1954, at the European Championships at Berne, he did a Zatopek on Zatopek, pounding away at a high cruising speed for lap after lap of the 5000 metres while the Czech champion and Chris Chataway played cat and mouse and waited for the Russian dynamo to come back to them. He did not; he held onto his relentless pace and left the others to battle for the lesser medals.

By the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, with Zatopek now confirmed almost to guest-appearance status in the marathon, Kuts had taken over the mantle of long-distance king, despite his celebrated defeat by Chataway two years earlier in the White City thriller. It was clear to the world that the only way to beat Kuts was to stay on his heels, soak up the murderous surges, the half-lap sprints, the strength-sapping fast quarter-miles that the Russian was likely to throw in when they were least expected, and then to race him over the last 400 metres. One person, it seemed, might be able to do it in the Melbourne 10,000 metres – Britain’s Gordon Pirie.

And Pirie tried. As if tied to the waistband of Kut’s shorts, mesmerized by the back of Kut’s red vest, Pirie responded to everything – to the sprints, the sudden slowing down, the unexpected bursts of near-suicidal pace – for twenty of the twenty-five laps. Then, the story goes, Kuts slowed down almost to a halt, stepped out into the third lane of the track, and for the first time in race looked into the face of the automaton who had followed his every footstep for eight long kilometres. And Kuts knew he had won. Pirie, the only man capable of taking on a runner of Kuts’s steel, had run himself well-nigh insensible; he had nothing else to give. In the remaining few laps Pirie slipped back, almost uncaring, through the pursuing field and Kuts, desperately tired but by now unbeatable, won with half the straight to spare. He and Pirie had run the first half of the race in 14 minutes 7 seconds, roughly the time it had taken Zatopek to win that pulsating 5000 metres in Helsinki four years before. It was a lethal pace; Kuts had just survived it: Pirie manifestly had not,

Nor could he stay with Kuts later in the week when, unusually, the 5000 metres proved something of an anti-climax after the heroics of the 10,000 metres, and Kuts, with the ease of a Zatopek, simply ran faster than everyone else for twelve and a half laps to beat Pirie by twelve seconds and Britain’s Derek Ibbotson by a further four seconds.

Kuts was only twenty-eight, but his health had always been suspect, (his heart eventually gave out, and he died in 1975 at the age of only forty-eight), and it was no real surprise that he had lasted only a couple of seasons more at the top. What was surprising was that the man that took his place was a little-regarded Russian runner, only slightly younger than Kuts himself, who had trailed in sixteenth and ninth respectively in the two Melbourne races. He had beaten Kuts only once, in 1957 when the champion was unfit and out of form, and he had himself not been well enough to contest the European Championships in 1958.

But Pyotr Bolotnikov had the full backing, as well as the confidence, of the Russian coaching machine, and he had the application and courage of a Kuts. He came to Rome in 1960 with best times that were undoubtedly very good, but which gave no indication that he was anything like a certainty for a gold medal. Indeed, almost the first thing he did on arrival in Rome was to withdraw from the 5000 metres. For the only time in the post-war era, it was scheduled at the start of the week’s programme, the 10,000 metres towards the end; with his best chance resting on the longer race, Bolotnikov passed up what, with hindsight, must have been a very fair chance of a double gold.

To the spectators it can hardly have seemed a classic. Not until seven kilometres had gone did a breakaway occur, with Bolotnikov well to the fore. Not until two laps from the finish did he make his decisive move. But then it was Zatopek and Kuts all over again, with an injection of pace that was quite unanswerable; Bolitinkov was in a clear lead with 600 metres to go, and he increased it all the way to the bell, into the final bend and to the tape.

Bolotnikov remained in command for one further championship, the European in Belgrade in 1962; but the Zatopek era was at a close, and perhaps he had been lucky to profit from its dying stages. By now coaches and distance runners were learning their lesson – sustained speed was the sine qua non of any prospective champion; interval training of a high quality now had to be accompanied by long, punishing mileage to increase stamina. Speedwork had to be introduced to counter any last-lap kick from anyone who survived the pace.

From now on a fast, level-paced race was not enough. Relentless, lap-after-lap bulldozing could bring world records to those such as Ron Clarke, and later to athletes such as David Bedford, Emiel Puttemans or Brendan Foster, but it could rarely win the races that mattered. More ‘character’, better tactics, subtler coaching, a more balanced approach, more attention to the build-up to a big race, more analysis – all would bring the achievements of the best distance runners closer to each other, the outcome of a race less predictable, never a foregone conclusion at the bell.

There have been twenty-two major athletics championships since Bolotnikov retired, (eight Olympic Games, nine European Championships and five World Championships). In those forty-four long-distance men’s track finals, only five – three at 10,000 metres and two at 5000 metres – have been won by more than two and a half seconds. This in itself is a tribute to the training revolution precipitated by Zatopek and Kuts. But most of all it is a tribute to their quality as competitors, and a measure of the awesome degree of superiority that they were able to achieve over their Olympic contempories.

Information submitted by: Martin Bates

November 2007