Endurance by Rick Broadbent

Author:Rick Broadbent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

13

The Stand

The world was changing in 1952 and Emil Zátopek was acutely aware of it. He was so attuned to the shift in power in sport that he fell into a depression. His mood was not helped by knowing the Russians were going to take part in the Olympic Games for the first time for decades.

Zátopek had taken some time off in the mountains. This time he refrained from skiing but did train by wading through chest-high snow, to the amusement of onlookers. He met with members of ‘the select team’ to discuss his aims and plans. Zátopek said that, if he was fully fit, then he thought he could win two gold medals for his country at the Olympics in Helsinki.

That satisfied the suits, but problems lay ahead. One of Zátopek’s whims was to ignore the masseur in the army’s central quarters. He reasoned that his muscles seemed to work well enough without the help of others. The masseur, though, was persistent. ‘Let me set you straight,’ he told Emil. ‘You’ll see how good it is for you. And for me too; it will impress people if I say I massage Zátopek.’

Eventually, Zátopek capitulated. Just before the Czech cross-country championships he went to the masseur’s cold quarters. For half an hour the masseur covered Emil in soap and iced water. Afterwards, he found that other athletes had exhausted the hot water supplies and so he was forced to rinse off in cold water too. The following day he had a temperature and a sore throat. The doctor told him to stay in bed for a week but Zátopek had promised to run and told the doctor that the posters were already advertising his appearance in Prešov. He could not simply lie in bed and let the event pass. The doctor took some convincing, but eventually travelled to the course with Zátopek. ‘One way or another I’ll run,’ he said, but he suffered terribly. The rivals stayed close to him for the whole ten kilometres and, although he did win, it was by a slender margin and a post-race examination found that the illness had got to his heart. Again confined to bed, Zátopek defied his doctors and got out of bed to do some basic exercises. He put on two tracksuits to force himself to sweat. He ran more and more and always dressed warmly, believing that he would drip away the illness.

He was suffering from debilitating headaches and the Olympics were just two months away when he went to Kiev to compete in a USSR–Czechoslovakia meeting. To the dismay of his handlers, he was beaten over 5000 metres by both Vladimir Kazantsev and Nikifor Popov. Zátopek had not lost a race over 5000 metres since Reiff had beaten him in Prague in September, 1948. In the preamble to the next Olympics, he had started to show untimely intimations of mortality. Kazantsev’s time of 14 minutes 13.2 seconds was a Soviet record. The 10,000 metres offered only the slightest

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