Endurance: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Emil Zátopek

To Debs, for her endurance

Contents

1 The Brown Paper Package (Prague, 1966)

2 Emil the Wimp

3 Ali

4 Born to Run

5 Horseplay

6 Dana

7 Olympian

8 Seeing Red

9 ‘Welcome to Hell, White Eagle!’

10 The Pitiless Race of Elimination

11 Get Zátopek

12 East v West

13 The Stand

14 Marathon

15 The British

16 Record Season

17 Duel

18 Love Over Gold

19 Reclaimed (Prague, 1968)

20 The Gift

Emil Zátopek: The Records

Bibliography and Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

1

The Brown Paper Package (Prague, 1966)

On 18 July 1966 a plane touched down on the black tarmac in Prague, and a bronze face peered from the oval window. Ron Clarke pulled his bag from the overhead rack, thanked the stewardess and emerged on to the steps into the Czech night. It took him a while to realise that the figure with his hand extended on the runway below was Emil Zátopek, older now, tufts of hair bookending a bald pate, but with eyes still alive and enquiring.

Clarke smiled. The Australian was a handsome man in his prime, with thick, jet-black hair and sun-smoothed skin. It was a fortnight since he had set the new 5000 metres world record in Stockholm and he was in demand. During his annual European summer tour, Clarke would run as many as 30 races in 50 days, but when word came through from the Czech Republic that Zátopek wanted to meet him, he changed his schedule. It was a meeting between athletics legends, and that pitted tarmac was actually a bridge across the generation gap.

Clarke was an amiable man prone to introspection, but resilience had been the sap that filtered down the family tree. His great-grandfather, Thomas Clarke, had been a gold miner in Victoria when the great Australasian mine was flooded by an underground river. The workers had continued to stave away at the walls as they knew they were close to a rich lode of gold, but the mine collapsed and water gushed in. Thomas escaped and spent 53 hours incessantly pumping water from the underground prison. Twenty-two men drowned but, as the scroll of honour that the Amalgamated Miners’ Association of Victoria later presented to him stated: ‘Your almost superhuman efforts were at last successful in reducing the water, enabling the relief party to reach and rescue your five famished mates who had miraculously been able to survive, sealed up in a remote part of the upper level.’

His son had also worked in the mines, and was crippled by them and then laid off from them, but his own son, Tom, Ron’s father, forged a new path as a sportsman, becoming a star in the religious fervour of Australian Rules football.

It could be said, then, that Ron Clarke came from the sort of stock that breeds champions. He had broken 11 world records in 1965 and was an elegant presence on tracks around the world, but it had all gone wrong at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Mining for his own gold, he had been the victim of one of the Games’ great upsets when Billy Mills, a half-Sioux Indian from the reservation and the Marines motor pool, had powered past him on the home straight of the 10,000 metres. That had been a brutal and physical race. Mohamed Gammoudi had clawed at Clarke and Clarke had shoved Mills off balance; when Clarke came home third, only a second behind Mills, he was sure that he would be disqualified. He smiled anyway because it had been a great race and Clarke liked running almost as much as he liked winning.

It got worse for him. In the 5000 metres final, Clarke led for 4000 metres but the tactics of his rivals upset his rhythm and belief. ‘Damn it!’ he said to himself and mentally quit. He knew he should have roused himself and fought on but he couldn’t. He was only ninth, and people began writing about his lack of a killer instinct. In the marathon he soldiered on manfully, but was a spent force, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. He was ninth again, but he had entered all three distance events and, really, who but Emil could expect to do that and thrive?

The cost of running intrigued Clarke. Ultimately, it was all about gold. Billy Mills’ success had even seen him rewarded with a ring forged from genuine Black Hills gold. The elders of the Oglala Sioux, the descendants of Crazy Horse and Red Cloud, gave it to him along with warrior status, something unprecedented for a half-breed. The flipside was those who failed: men like Kōkichi Tsuburaya, the Japanese runner who had finished ahead of Clarke in the 1964 Olympic marathon but would suffer career-ending injuries and then kill himself by slashing his right wrist with a razor blade. The note he left said simply: ‘Cannot run any more.’

Clarke came from gold-mining stock, but had been left with only world records in his panning dish, and these feats rendered conflicting emotions. He called each historic mark ‘a peculiar sense of disappointment’ and said the exhilaration would drain away, leaving only dejection and profound weariness. He likened it to turning 21 and finding out that, when the party ended, this milestone was much like any other.

So he was in Prague to meet a hero and find some answers. Zátopek had sent word that if Clarke would agree to run a 3000 metres race in Prague then he would meet him and, despite being some 15 years older, even join him on a training run.

Zátopek marched Clarke through customs, flashing officials a panoramic smile and waving to everyone. He was a terribly erratic driver, but somehow they made it to his home, where he introduced Clarke to Dana, his wife, and after an hour-and-a-half discussion on manifold subjects then took him to the track for the race.

Clarke was tired after his travel but he beat a man known locally as ‘the Head Waiter’ and Zátopek took him to his hotel, cheerily informing him that he would pick him up tomorrow at 5.30 a.m. ‘We went up to the small track in the woods, north of Prague, where he had run two successive 10,000 metres faster than almost anybody else had run one, [and] where he had set the 30,000 metres world record,’ Clarke recalled. ‘He ran me hard through the hills and he was full of enthusiasm. He told me about Fartlek training and we spoke about lots of things – politics, his early career and his training experiments.’ Clarke was pleased to hear Zátopek explain that he would run between lampposts holding his breath. Then he would try to make it to another lamppost. ‘I did something similar back home in Australia, where I’d try to see how far I could swim underwater. We had a really pleasant morning.’

After the training, Zátopek said, ‘You can’t go home without getting some Czech crystal.’

‘So he drives us down into the main street in Prague. It’s lunchtime and there are policemen everywhere. Emil parks up and had this habit of being able to whistle loudly through his teeth. A policeman came charging up with his pad out ready to book him. Then he sees that it’s Emil Zátopek. Emil signs the pad for him and hands the keys to the policeman. We go into a couple of shops and I find a beautiful glass bowl that I still have. We must have been in there for about half an hour. Then we came out and there was no car. I look around and am a bit confused but then I hear Emil whistle again. Instantly, from nowhere, the car speeds up to us and the policeman gets out. I thought, This is really something, this is true fame – being able to get an on-duty policeman to go off duty, park your car, wait for you while you go shopping and then bring the car back. Jeez. Then he took me to the airport and walked me through customs without stopping. He even took me out on to the tarmac and on to the plane again.’

It had been a brief meeting, but one which still resonated with Clarke when we spoke early in the summer of 2015. Zátopek had been long retired back in 1966, but Clarke still had an Olympic Games to go. Yet both men knew that the altitude of Mexico City in 1968 would jeopardise Clarke’s hopes of victory.

In 1968 Clarke was still the world record holder at both the 5000 and 10,000 metres, but he was a worried man. British experts had predicted deaths in the endurance events. Billy Mills called the physiological differences the ‘gulp gap’, while Dr Roger Bannister, famed for breaking the four-minute mile barrier but also an eminent neurologist, said athletes would be seriously endangering their health in Mexico.

Clarke tried to do all he could to compensate. His friend and sports medicine doctor, Dr Danny Zimmerman, known as ‘Zim’, had relatives in Mexico City and got hold of all the scientific data he could. They travelled there together the year before the Olympics to conduct experiments. Clarke ended a 5000 metres trial race with an ashen face and sunken features, reporting palpitations and a searing pain behind his eyes. His time was the worst since he had been a junior. Tests showed he had suffered a 16 per cent drop in haemoglobin, the red corpuscles carrying oxygen in the blood.

Clarke had a habit of remembering the races he lost rather than the ones he won, and the defeat to Mills in Tokyo festered. He knew, because Mills had been fading, that he should have gone harder with a few laps left. He had let the Sioux Marine off the hook and suffered for it. On other occasions, it went brilliantly and he experienced what modern athletes would call ‘flow’, that other-worldly state where instinct and ability merge to form a perfect physical storm. It had been that way when he set the 10,000 metres world record in Oslo in 1965. His wife, Helen, had gone home early because her mother was dying of cancer, but she had won her race and got back to Australia just in time to say goodbye. Clarke had only one race left before he could go home to see his family. He was demob happy and in wonderful shape. It felt like the endgame. ‘All the stars were in the right place in the universe that day,’ he said. ‘It felt so good.’

But in Mexico City it would be very different. ‘I’d have been better off waiting for 1972,’ he said. ‘In the 10,000 metres it was like being in a sort of curtained room. You have to tippy-toe within yourself. Normally you keep pushing the curtain, but once you step beyond it you can never come back.’ He ran with care but when runners started to pass him on the last lap, and he saw more gold fading away, he was, in his word, ‘history’.

His heart stopped on the line. Dr Brian Corrigan, president of the New South Wales Sports Medicine Association, was a friend. He had predicted that unacclimatised athletes would suffer an 18 per cent decrease in performance or, put more bluntly, it would be like depriving a person of a pint of blood and asking them to run a mile. Corrigan saw Clarke struggling on his last lap and jumped the perimeter moat, which was no mean feat, protected as it was by barbed wire. He did not have the required pass but shoved someone aside. People had been circulating the arena with oxygen tanks to attend to runners as they keeled over. Corrigan grabbed one and ran to his stricken friend. He saw his face go from white to green and feared that he would die there and then. ‘It was a tragedy waiting to happen,’ Clarke said. ‘I would not have pushed myself that hard normally – I’m not that mentally strong – but it was the last lap of an Olympic Games. That was all I could think about.’

Corrigan probably saved Clarke’s life, and he recovered sufficiently to play a cautious, supporting role in the 5000 metres, but he was nowhere near the Olympic medals again. He never ran as well and struggled to be extraordinary any more.

When he broke down in training he needed walking sticks to get his legs moving again. After a lap or so they would warm up again and he would discard the props. Before and after every race, he would be in agony until he finally retired in 1970, with no gold medals but with 18 world records, more than almost any man in history other than Zátopek. Later Clarke found that he had damaged a heart valve in Mexico City and would be plagued by health problems for the rest of his life, reclaimed for the ordinary.

Back in 1966, with the wind blowing down the Prague runway and Zátopek holding his overcoat firmly against himself, both men sensed something bad was in the ether. Zátopek said goodbye and, as he shook Clarke’s hand, he smuggled a small brown paper package into his grasp. ‘You deserve this,’ he said, and then he began to leave.

Clarke looked at his package, clumsily tied together with old, yellow string, and thought, ‘He wraps presents like I do.’

‘Thanks, Emil,’ he said.

He was seated in the first row and looked out of the window again, a portal into another age and another world, the golden era of the 1950s and the mysteries of the Iron Curtain. ‘What the hell is this?’ he thought, as he felt the package in his pocket. He told himself he would plead ignorance if the customs people found it on him, but he wondered just what he was being asked to courier away from Czechoslovakia.

As the plane neared Heathrow, the co-pilot clicked on his radio and warned of turbulence. There would be a delay in landing, and finally Clarke’s curiosity got the better of him. He pulled out the package and began to unwrap it. To his amazement it was an Olympic gold medal. There was a scrap of paper underneath that simply read:

Emil Zátopek, 19 July 1966.

Emil knew inside that Ron could not win in Mexico, and this was his compensation: a medal won not in one race but through the admiration of another created by a lifetime’s work. In some ways, it meant more to get a gold that way.

Zátopek and Clarke both knew that the rarefied air would smother the life from the fading trail of an Olympic dream. What they did not know was that these two pre-eminent figures of post-war endurance running would both suffer such savage fates at the time of the 1968 Olympics. Clarke would collapse and suffer health problems for the rest of his life until he died, shortly after our interview in 2015. Zátopek’s fate would be much worse.

2

Emil the Wimp

Usain Bolt may have redefined the parameters of human possibility with his record-breaking madness, but science is not easily seduced, and raises one pertinent question: why are we so obsessed with a man who cannot beat a squirrel?

Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, is not one of those blown away by Bolt’s munificence. Instead, he points out that, in relative terms, the Jamaican’s feats are utterly pedestrian, whereas elite endurance runners are truly incredible.

‘The maximum sprinting speed of Bolt is around ten metres per second, which is well below the maximum galloping speed of most mammals,’ Lieberman said of the Jamaican sprint star. ‘Bolt would be beaten by any dog, or even a squirrel. A lion could go twice as fast for much longer. We suck. The truth is, as sprinters, man is pathetic. We did not evolve to do it. We were hunters and so what makes us special is our ability to run long distances.’

By contrast with Bolt, elite marathon runners run at a pace of up to six metres per second for 26.2 miles. Lieberman pointed out in his paper, The Evolution of Marathon Running, written with Dennis Bramble, that this meant that, over long distances, man could outrun all mammals, even horses.

This is partly down to our ability to keep cool. Most mammals slow down after short distances because they rely on panting as a cooling mechanism, and that interferes with respiration. By contrast, we have become what Lieberman terms ‘specialized sweaters’, meaning we can get rid of heat via a higher density of sweat glands.

The upshot of all this is that endurance runners are true masters of the universe, whereas sprinters are abject failures.

Emil Zátopek is probably the greatest of these masters, but the first were the Finns. When Zátopek emerged on the international scene, Finland had won five of the last six Olympic gold medals in both the 5000 and 10,000 metres. It was a curious phenomenon. In the early 20th century running was deemed an ungentlemanly pursuit, even lazy, as it involved the use of labour that could be put to more practical uses. For these reasons the first big names of distance running, the Kolehmainen brothers, would turn training into a clandestine affair and would work out at night in overcoats. That all changed in 1912 when Johannes, a vegetarian bricklayer, went to the Olympic Games in Stockholm and won three gold medals. That he expressed his anger at hearing the Russian national anthem played in his honour only made him more popular at home. When Finland finally gained independence from Russia in 1917, ‘Hannes’ became a totem for national pride, the very embodiment of Finnish sisu, loosely meaning guts and spirit, even when he moved to the USA and competed under the winged fist of the Irish-American Athletic Club. In his review of the 1912 Olympics, James E. Sullivan, the outspoken former secretary of the United States Olympic Committee, wrote, ‘I have been an official at five Olympic Games since their revival in 1896 and I have seen all the great distance runners from America and Europe, but never have I had the pleasure of seeing such a phenomenal piece of human machinery.’

Sullivan may have been biased, having suggested England would become ‘athletically degenerate’ after griping his way through the 1908 London Olympics, but there was no debate about Kolehmainen’s successor.

Paavo Nurmi was the son of a carpenter who suffered from a weak heart and died young, leaving his teenage heir to grow up fast. Kolehmainen’s success had inspired a generation of Finnish boys to run, and Nurmi committed himself to a monastic regime. He joined this throng and then joined the army, where he confounded his commanders with the speed with which he completed a 20-kilometre march while clad in full combat gear, complete with a 30lb backpack. The following year, 1920, he went to the Olympic Games in Antwerp and duly won the first of nine gold medals. His 10,000 metres rival, Joseph Guillemot, of France, had just finished his lunch because he was unaware that the King of Belgium had requested an earlier starting time for the final so that he could attend an arts function. No sooner had he crossed the line behind Nurmi than he vomited on the winner’s shoes.

Throughout his life and career, Nurmi’s achievements would also be besmirched by critiques of his personality. The ‘Stoneface’ moniker was well-suited and, in 1924, the French journalist Gabriel Hanot wrote, ‘He is ever more serious, reserved, concentrated, pessimistic, fanatic. There is such coldness in him and his self-control is so great that never for a moment does he show his true feelings.’

Yet he did embrace fame and went on a lucrative tour of the USA, where the media loved his mystique and painted him as a figure cut from folklore. Contenders had to be found to be beaten. On one dramatic occasion Nurmi was taken to Los Angeles to take on eight Hopi Indians. The Real American newspaper remarked on his ‘stolid’ features as it gave him top billing in its edition of 1 May 1925, flanked by Sitting Bull’s Indian Smoke column: ‘Paavo Nurmi, the famous Finn whose frail legs and stout heart have made him the most talked about athletic figure in the world today, thrilled a crowd of more than 45,000 persons at the Coliseum last Saturday in the greatest track and field meet ever staged in America.’

By that time Nurmi was acclaimed as the biggest star in sport. His refusal to give interviews only led to a melting pot of myth and gossip, but it was the 1924 season that truly cemented reality into rock-solid legend.

Nurmi was now the best runner at every distance, from 1500 to 10,000 metres. He was an irresistible metronome, winning each race by running even pace, regardless of the situation, nonchalantly ignoring all rivals and only glancing at the watch he held in his hand. This unique signature would end with him hurling the watch into the infield as he sped to the line on the last lap.

Olympic chiefs were concerned that his dominance would devalue the Games and turn the global celebration into a one-man exhibition. Thus, they scheduled the 1500 and 5000 metres finals just 55 minutes apart. Nurmi was nonplussed and, three weeks before the 1924 Olympic Games, embarked on a trial run in Helsinki. He started the 1500 metres at a ferocious pace and duly broke his own world record with a time of 3 minutes 52.6 seconds. Fifty-five minutes later he returned for the 5000 metres. To the astonishment of all watching, he set a second world record in a shade over an hour, clocking 14 minutes 28.2 seconds. These feats were made more remarkable by the fact he had seriously injured a knee in a fall that Easter. He had still been suffering with it when the Olympic trials were held and Ville Ritola had set a new world record in the 10,000 metres. Ritola was one of 20 children and had emigrated to America when he was 17. Now the Finnish officials decided not to risk a confrontation between their two stars on the first day of the Olympics and so only Ritola was entered for the 10,000 metres, leaving Nurmi to remain fresh for the shorter distances. For Nurmi this was nothing less than a betrayal and, beneath that stone face, his emotions boiled and bubbled towards a cathartic revenge.

Ritola duly won the 10,000 metres in a world record time of 30 minutes 23.2 seconds. Such was Nurmi’s anger at his snub that he was said to be running a 10,000 metres of his own, alone on a training track, at the same time. Legend has it that he completed it in 29 minutes 58 seconds.

That was not enough for him and he needed the public to see who was best too. Four days later his chance came. First, he won the 1500 metres. It was no contest as he held his stopwatch until the last rival had been vanquished and then tossed it away. As the crowd celebrated his Olympic record, he calmly picked up his watch and disappeared to prepare for the long-awaited 5000 metres and his duel with Ritola. It was an enthralling battle. The field, including a certain Herbert ‘Johnny’ Johnston, from Britain, had decided to start at a gallop to take advantage of Nurmi’s perceived tiredness. Finishing times for races generally plummet with the passing of years, so it was a sign of true speed that the first 1000 metres were covered at the same pace as the 1972 Olympic final. Nurmi hung on. And then he shed the race of its bit-part players and he and Ritola took centre stage. Nurmi led throughout those latter stages, but Ritola was his shadow. On the final lap, stopwatch finally discarded, Nurmi dredged his anger for more fuel. Ritola tried to pass him just 30 yards from the tape, but Nurmi held firm and won.

Ironically, it was only Nurmi, after winning five Olympic golds in 1924, who met film stars and was fêted in America. He had his photograph taken with Mary Pickford, the Hollywood siren, and was courted by media barons. Ritola, who had actually lived in America for seven years and had won a staggering six medals at the Paris Olympics, went back to working on construction sites.

Each man would beat the other at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, Ritola taking the 5000 metres gold and Nurmi winning the 10,000 metres, but history has polarised their achievements.

What is unarguable is that these Flying Finns were part of a cultural phenomenon. According to Jack Schumacher, a 1930s German writer, ‘Nurmi and those like him are animals in the forest. They began to run because of a profound compulsion, because a strange dreamlike landscape called them with its enchanting mysteries. Their awe-inspiring times are a way of giving thanks to Mother Earth.’

An overblown appraisal, perhaps, but it is one that hints at the mythology that began to swathe Finnish running in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, in his book Running, the Norwegian folklorist Thor Gotaas points out that between 1912 and 1940, the Finns set more than 70 world records at distances beyond 1500 metres. But Ritola went back to manual labour and Nurmi was banned by the IAAF (athletics’ governing body) over allegations of professionalism. The Finnish Athletics Federation investigated and said that there was no evidence ‘of padded expense accounts relating to races in Poland, Italy and Germany’, but the IAAF disagreed. In truth, they were right. Athletics would not officially go professional until 1982, but promoters had long been finding ways to circumvent athletics’ amateur status to entice the best to their meetings. The conflict meant Nurmi did not get the chance to end an unprecedented Olympic career by following in the 40,000 footsteps of Hannes Kolehmainen, who had signed off with a gold medal in the marathon in 1920. Nevertheless, Finland was the centre of the running universe. Who, on earth, could stop these superhuman Flying Finns?

***

The boy standing by while his brother ran away in a wheat field did not seem a likely usurper. Emil was one of seven children and his brother Bohus was deemed the best runner when it came to escaping from their father, František, a struggling carpenter. František did not rule his household with a rod of iron so much as a 12-inch carpenter’s ruler. Previously, he had used his belt to issue beatings, but his wife, Anežka, had burnt it in an attempt to save her sons. ‘When Father called us from the courtyard we knew our escape was over,’ Zátopek recalled in the book Dana a Emil Zátopkovi vypravují (I Declared ): ‘One after another we had to go there and offer our hands, and when Father started hitting we would all shout and scream and jump about. The worst thing of all was that, at these executions, the little boys and girls of the neighbourhood rushed out and for us it was terribly shameful to cry in front of these spectators.’

Bohus decided he had suffered enough that day and took off, pursued by František and assorted voyeurs. They could see the raised arm edging through the wheat field that lay adjacent to the house in Kopřivnice, a small town in the Moravian-Silesian region of Czechoslovakia. Just in front of František the wheat swayed with the unseen movements of the desperate Bohus. It was, perhaps, the first race of the Zátopek family: father versus son, with blood, sweat and tears at stake. Ultimately, František tripped over a large rock and fell, allowing the shifting wheat to usher in Bohus’ victory. As the father made his way back to his house, the neighbours watching and pointing, a woman approached him with a wry smile. ‘Well then, Mr Zátopek,’ she said. ‘Who won?’

Emil developed a different tactic based on evasion rather than escape. Hence, he kept his distance and, whenever his father shouted ‘Emil’ and he had to make his way to the courtyard, he gave in to a fit of histrionics. The shouts and screams would spring the neighbours from their daily routines, and they would round on František and tell him not to beat his boy so savagely. František tried to explain that Emil was faking it – exaggerating for the very purpose of eliciting sympathy – but it was to no avail. Emil got away with a couple of symbolic swipes on the bottom. The only downside was the children in the neighbourhood began to refer to him as ‘Emil the Wimp’. Time-travellers seeking prescient landmarks on the road to international fame and a dominant role in Czech history would have been frustrated.

Emil was born on 19 September 1922 in a house in Kopřivnice. His mother was so poor that, when she was pregnant