The Perfect Distance by Pat Butcher

Author:Pat Butcher
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781780225319
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

17

Run – and Take the Money

From the moment they began running competitively, Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe were governed by the rules of the Amateur Athletic Association. In the century since its foundation, the AAA had spawned myriad affiliate organisations and a panoply of regulations and restrictions. But one rule was paramount, and it was the very raison d’être for the AAA. It resides in a single word – amateur. Its root is the Latin amare – love. And that noble motivation – rather than money – was fostered by the AAA. Nowadays, ‘amateur’ is used pejoratively, but a hundred years ago, it was on the plus side of the philosophical divide.

There was no love lost between the amateurs and the professionals. The AAA was created in 1880 in an attempt to cleanse the professional swamp known as pedestrianism. The ‘peds’ were guilty of a multitude of sins, among them race fixing, deliberately losing, and competing in different parts of the country under assumed names. It was not unknown for rivals to be ‘knobbled’, that’s to say poisoned. And there were early attempts by athletes to boost their own performances: strychnine was a popular tonic, in small doses. It was all designed to get a better starting mark in the handicap racing which was widespread at the time, and to get better prices with the bookmakers. For gambling was the ruling passion of the sport.

It was how the sport had come into being at least two centuries beforehand. The example of the Greeks and the ancient Olympics seemed to have been all but forgotten. (But the ancient Greeks were never amateur in the sense that was conceived by the English establishment, anyway. Victory at Olympia might only have realised a crown of olive twigs, but their home towns and cities rewarded winners royally. And those rewards didn’t prevent them competing in the next Olympics, or the other Games – Nemean, Pythian, and so on – in the Hellenic world.) Pedestrianism grew out of the practice of noblemen betting on their servants racing against one another. Those early matches are probably also responsible for the predominance of the mile in English athletics, since many of the races would be held on highways and turnpikes, with the milestones marking the race distance. Despite the widespread cheating, by the middle of the nineteenth century there were legitimate great performances being recorded. But, since most of the races were ‘matches’ – one man (or very occasionally one woman) against another – if one of the competitors stopped before the end, as was also common, the match was deemed to be won, so the time was either not recorded or became incidental. In short, the time was unimportant. This is a practice which arguably could be reintroduced with much benefit to international athletics.

In the middle-distances, which have always been the touchstone of Anglo-Saxon – that is, British, Irish, American and Commonwealth (excuse the shorthand) – athletics meetings, times began to look impressive around 150 years ago.

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