The Man Who Ran Faster Than Everyone by Jack Batten

Author:Jack Batten [Batten, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77049-063-5
Publisher: Tundra
Published: 2002-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Lou Marsh was a man of simultaneous and conflicting roles: a sportswriter and editor for the Toronto Daily Star for forty-three years, an NHL referee (as shown above), Longboat’s secret trainer, and a writer who frequently mistreated Longboat in print.

With their man out of the race, Marsh and Morton climbed back on their bikes to chase the other runners through the last miles. What they saw was a race that produced the most bizarre finish in the history of the Olympic marathon.

The plucky little Dorando passed Hefferon in the two miles leading up to Shepherd’s Bush, and it was Dorando who entered the stadium first. But almost immediately, the 65,000 spectators realized that Dorando was struggling with disorientation. To complete the race, he needed only to turn left and run two-thirds of the way around the track to the finish line. In a mental fog, Dorando turned right. Several officials reached out and guided him in the correct direction. Dorando staggered for 50 yards and collapsed. Officials lifted him off the track and again shoved him on his way. Dorando collapsed twice more. Each time, friendly officials revived him, carried him a few yards, gave him pushes and small pats of comfort until Dorando at last tottered across the finish line.

Seconds after Dorando’s questionable triumph, John Hayes entered the stadium. He, too, had passed Hefferon. Hayes finished second, then Hefferon, then another American named Joseph Forshaw. An Italian flag was run up over the stadium to mark Dorando’s victory, and Queen Alexandra presented the woozy little runner with a gold cup. But the American Olympic delegation objected to the win on the very good grounds that Dorando had been illegally assisted to the finish line. Before the day was over, Olympic officials moved swiftly to uphold the American protest, to disqualify Dorando, to declare Hayes the Olympic champion, and to bump all the other finishers up one place in the final standings.

Meanwhile, Longboat, Flanagan, and Marsh were busy explaining why the pre-race favorite, Longboat, had flamed out. Flanagan contributed little of value to the discussion because he had passed the hours of the marathon sitting in the stadium where he expected to watch his man come home in first place. Marsh, still concealing his part in Longboat’s training, never really addressed Longboat’s collapse, but stuck to his theory that Longboat had possessed the stamina to whip the field. The trouble, in Marsh’s opinion, lay with the course and its twisty nature. “If the race had been over a road with a straight stretch where Longboat could have seen the leader,” Marsh insisted, “he would have won handily.”

As for Longboat, he blamed the ferocious heat for his troubles. The sun and humidity had combined in the 20th mile to hit him with the suddenness and power of a heavyweight’s punch. Three weeks later, Longboat added another factor. On Tuesday, August 3, when he and Flanagan sailed into New York City on board an ocean liner named the Kronprinz Wilhelm, Longboat told the waiting newspaper reporters that “the pounding on the hard pavement knocked me out.

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