The Perfect Mile

In the year since Landy had first called on Cerutty, he had paid close attention to the coach’s direction. He had paid ten shillings for lessons on how to move his arms and how to run like a rooster, clawing at the air. He had strengthened his upper body by lifting dumbbells. He had participated in running sessions on a two-and-a-half-mile horse path named the Tan (after the four-inch layer of tree bark discarded from tanneries, which cushioned the dirt), and bounded up and down Anderson Street Hill with the others under Cerutty’s watchful eye. Their runs provoked gasps from the Melbourne residents nearby. They couldn’t understand what these young men, hounded by a shirtless older man, were doing. Running for exercise was odd in and of itself, but a group doing so through the botanical gardens carrying bamboo poles in each arm and shrieking like banshees as Cerutty called to them to run like ‘primitive man’ was pure scandal.

What Cerutty had in mind for the ten-day training camp in Portsea would definitely have been beyond the observers’ comprehension. Landy was sceptical as well, yet there he was. By following Cerutty’s gruelling regimen, Landy hoped to win a spot on the Olympic team.

Before breakfast the men ran the Hall Circuit, a course that threaded through tea trees, up hills, down steep slopes, and across sand dunes for one mile and 283 yards; the runners were timed and pitted against one another with handicaps and a three-pence bet apiece. The winner won the pot, and Cerutty didn’t hesitate to direct runners around the wrong bend so that he could claim the prize himself. Sometimes he clocked their runs and badgered them to go faster, questioning their manhood or dedication, often both. He ridiculed and taunted them mercilessly, particularly Landy, whom he thought needed toughening up. ‘Move your bloody arms!’ he would shout. ‘Too slow! Too slow! … Come on, you lazy bastards! You’re hopeless bloody dogs! Children could run faster than that!’

Other training sessions were held on nearby golf courses, where Cerutty had his charges accelerate up hills to achieve the kind of energy explosion they needed in a race. They ran up sand dunes for the same effect, an exercise Landy particularly disliked. He preferred the rhythmic flow of running on flat ground. For resistance training they sprinted along the beach in knee-deep surf. When not running, they swam, surfed or hiked along the coast. They were always in a state of movement until Cerutty stopped to give a lecture on the grass beside the 300-metre Portsea Oval. There he taught his Stotan – part Stoic, part Spartan – philosophy. Cerutty had coined the term and its requirements:

1 Realization that, as Wordsworth the poet says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ which denotes there is no time for wasteful ideas and pursuits.

2 In place of wasteful hobbies there commences a period of supervised and systematic physical training, together with instruction in the art of living fully. This replaces previously undirected life.

3 Swimming will be done all the year round … This especially strengthens the will and builds resistance to quitting the task ahead.

4 The cessation of late hours. Amusements both social and entertaining should be reduced to a minimum, and then only in the nature of relaxation from strenuous work.

Cerutty delivered this philosophy along with quotes from Plato, Buddha, Jesus, Freud, Einstein, and St Francis of Assisi, among others. He stressed the importance of yoga, non-conformity, a diet of oats, the study of nature and animals, and running barefoot to connect with the Earth. There were also the impromptu lessons after meals, like the time when Cerutty lectured them on warming up. A cat was sitting on a ledge outside one of the huts when their coach snuck over and emptied a bucket of water over it. The cat leapt away and disappeared in a flash. Cerutty then expounded, ‘There. Did the cat do stretches? Did the cat jog around? Did the cat do knee bends? Did the cat have a tracksuit on before racing? No, the cat just got up and went. No more warming up. Forget it.’

For Landy, the son of an accountant and the product of private schools, this was wild stuff. He laughed off most of it, but there was wisdom in what Cerutty said about training hard. The body had amazing limits that most people never tested; Cerutty drove Landy to try. He had helped bring out a discipline and focus the young runner never suspected he had. This ability had been dormant, but now it revealed itself. The other athletes at Portsea were impressed by Landy’s discipline. During hard runs that seemed to last for ever, they also began to realise they could never match it.

There was no sense of jealousy, however. In fact Landy took away from this time with Cerutty more than important lessons. He had won a tightly knit group of friends at Portsea, among them Perry and Macmillan as well as three-milers Geoff Warren and Trevor Robbins. The hard training and rustic setting combined to create a sort of boot camp, one that drew the athletes together. Landy, Robbins, Warren and two others bunked in the ‘ski hut’, which was a modified wooden container originally used to import Volkswagen cars. The first night Landy stayed there he had a bad dream about trying to get out of a hole. The nightmare was so vivid that he literally clawed his way out of his top bunk and crashed to the floor. The next night he agreed to be roped into his bed. Meanwhile, Perry and Macmillan, the two more established Stotans, were staying with Cerutty in an old cabin nicknamed after the luxury hotel, ‘Menzies’, because of its superior accommodation. One morning after a particularly cold night, Landy approached Macmillan and explained, ‘It’s pretty tough out here. Nobody will get up and get the breakfast. If you do and get everything out and ready, the second you turn your back, suddenly all these vultures’ – and Landy then jokingly mimicked a vulture poised to strike with its claws – ‘and little monkeys come down and eat it all up and go back up to their bunks, and yours is gone.’ By the end of the story, he had Macmillan in hysterics. With each such episode at Portsea, the others liked Landy more and more.

By the tenth day of camp, the gang of runners had bonded. They were both exhausted and inspired. Cerutty came away with a better understanding of what made his runners tick. Of Landy he wrote, ‘He undervalues himself, his achievements, and his possibilities, merely because he measures himself not against mediocrity but against the highest levels … Courage and desire to excel without undue display of effort, much less suffering, causes him to run well within himself … What his highest potential level is I can only guess at.’ Though Cerutty thought it unlikely that Landy would ever become a true Stotan, they both knew who had set him on the path to athletic greatness.

On 12 January 1952, in Melbourne, Landy set out to break 4:10 in the mile, the time established by the Australian Olympic organisers to qualify for Helsinki. Without ‘Big Mac’ Macmillan to push him, Landy led from the start, pushing harder than ever before, but he crossed the finish line a second short. ‘It is bad luck,’ he said after the race. ‘I don’t suppose there will be enough finance to send us both [Macmillan and Landy] to the Olympics.’ He swallowed his disappointment, and only a few hours later ran a 3,000m race in 8:53, breaking the Australian open record. The training at Portsea had increased his endurance, but not his speed over shorter distances. Two weeks later in Sydney he beat Macmillan by inches, but again the time was too slow to qualify.

By the cut-off date for selection, Macmillan and Landy had both run the qualifying time in the 1,500m, but only Macmillan had run the requisite speed for the mile. When the list of sponsored Olympic team members was published in March, Landy’s name was missing. There was a loophole, however. If Landy and a few others could come up with $A750 each, they could join the team. It was a lot of money, a year’s wages for some, and the Geelong Guild Athletic Club rallied to raise it for Landy. They held Saturday night dances and ‘chook’ raffles, which awarded the winner a dressed hen. With a lot of work and good intentions, the club members raised most of the money, but they were still $A250 short. Landy’s father made up the difference. His son was going to the Olympics. John heard the news while driving a tractor on his family farm on the South Gippsland coast, 130 miles south-east of Melbourne. He had only eight weeks to train.

Before Landy left for Europe, Joseph Galli published an article in a magazine by the name of Sports Novels whose title mirrored what many were thinking: ‘Victorian John Landy May Soon Become Our Greatest Middle-Distance Runner’. It was the reason so much effort had been made to send him. Landy was quoted thanking Cerutty for his guidance, and then the miler made a prediction, not of future success but rather of his untapped potential: ‘I don’t know just what my body can stand up to,’ he said – not yet.

At Kapyla Village in Helsinki, Cerutty finally quieted down. Landy lay in bed, uncertain as to how he would stack up against the world’s best. He had made great strides in his development and had run well in England, but still he was unsure. And he was very sensitive to the fact that he owed his Olympic ticket to the generosity of family and friends. He felt pressure to live up to the efforts they had made to get him there in the first place. Yet each day he spent on the track, observing the speed and fluid style of other athletes, his confidence in his ability to compete against them weakened. His coach might have believed he had the greatest insight into running and training, but Landy knew these Europeans and Americans had pretty good ideas of their own about what it took to be world class. He knew he would soon find out how good.

4

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same …

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling, ‘If …’

The rain during the opening ceremony left the red brick-dust track a soupy mess. During the night, Finnish groundskeepers spread petrol over it and lit hundreds of small fires to burn off the water. Smoke billowed into the sky over the stadium and its acrid scent permeated the surrounding streets. By dawn on Sunday, 20 July, the track had dried, and it was levelled and smoothed out by concrete rollers before the first athletes arrived.

Wes Santee woke up in his room unsure of what to do. Throughout the morning, tens of thousands of people descended on the stadium. Scores of athletes, many of whom represented countries that had been at war a few years earlier, milled about the Olympic Village, passing the time between training sessions, meals, and their competitions. Santee dared not step outside Kapyla, certain he would get lost or run into trouble. He was one of the youngest members of the USA track and field team. It was his first Olympics, and for the life of him he could not find out what he needed to know. When was he competing? Against whom? And when could he train? Remarkably, this fundamental information proved elusive. Everyone had their own races to worry about, and for an Olympics that was being built up as a contest for national pride, particularly between the Americans and the Soviets, Santee was beginning to realise that this did not necessarily mean team leadership and cooperation were priorities.

He was left to fend for himself, a situation that was utterly foreign to him. At the University of Kansas, he was used to being surrounded by team-mates who looked after one another. He was also used to having his coach tell him when to arrive for practice, who he was competing against the next weekend, how to run the race, what to eat beforehand, when to arrive at the stadium, and where he was allowed to warm up. This management of the details allowed him to concentrate on the one thing he had supreme confidence in: his running. As a member of the United States Olympic team, however, directions to the dining hall and bedroom were about the most useful bits of information he had been given. He felt alone and, as the Games commenced, increasingly panicked. The pit in his stomach came less from thoughts of his upcoming race than from how he was going to find out when it was scheduled to take place.

After a day spent scrambling about trying to track down team officials, he cornered a few older American athletes who had a schedule of events and listings about who was competing in which heats. Santee was scheduled to run in the 5,000m qualifying round on 22 July at five o’clock, and yes, there would be an announcer calling out the lap times so that he knew the pace he was running. As far as what kind of competitors he was going to face and whether it would be a slow or fast race, they had no idea. It was quite certain, however, that as part of the American team, which had won half of all the track and field gold medals presented in 1948, Santee was expected to win. Late that afternoon when he went to work out on the training track, he was the only American to neglect to wear his ‘U.S.A.–Helsinki–1952’ jersey, instead choosing to appear in his orange-red pants and blue University of Kansas jersey. He wanted to win for his country as much as anyone, but at that moment he felt a lot more comfortable in his KU colours.

On the first day of the Olympics, Czech star Emil Zatopek stormed to victory in the 10,000m, beating British hopeful Gordon Pirie to win the first of what many assumed would be two gold medals. The United States captured its first track and field gold thanks to high-jumper Walter Davis, the six-foot-eight-inch Texan who set a new Olympic record in the process. The Soviets countered by sweeping the women’s discus. The second day of events saw an American stranglehold on the track and in the field; the Soviets ruled gymnastics. By the third day, newspapers around the world headlined the points table: the US was in first position, the USSR second, and Czechoslovakia third. Great Britain ranked fourth, and had yet to capture a gold. As promised, the fifteenth Olympiad was shaping into a battle between the United States and the Soviets.

National pride had always played a role in the Olympics, but never as much as it did in the 1952 Games. In the four years leading up to Helsinki, the Soviets had ‘mobilized to win the Olympic War’, as Life magazine put it. They had combed the countryside for athletes, hired hundreds of coaches, and poured billions of roubles into training programmes and stadia construction. No effort was spared. In Helsinki, Russia (along with Eastern bloc countries Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia) demanded separate ‘Reds Only’ housing and training quarters, and they afforded their athletes every luxury including platters of caviar and smoked salmon. In their camp in Otaniemi, they hung a huge portrait of Stalin over the entrance and erected a wooden scoreboard to post their points totals. The Cold War, which was developing on the Korean peninsula and through the atomic arms race, had entered the sporting arena with a decided chill.

The United States was equally focused on winning. And when it came to preparations they were hardly lacking. After all, the team was primarily composed of scholarship-funded college athletes who had devoted endless hours to training under the guidance of full-time coaches. One needed only to look at the jugs of vitamins available for ‘Americans Only’ in the Kapyla dining halls to appreciate the special treatment they enjoyed. Many complained that countries such as Britain, who had invented the idea of the amateur athlete, didn’t stand a chance in the face of what amounted to a ‘professional’ approach to sport. Rightly or wrongly, sport was changing, and Helsinki marked a symbolic shifting point. The only remaining question was who would win this particular match-up, and by what margin.

Santee had a front seat to this battle, particularly since one of the greatest rivalries between the two countries was in basketball. Half of the American team comprised University of Kansas players, and Wes was privy to the stories of seven-foot Russian stars and how long they had trained together. But Santee had his own concerns about winning for his country, particularly since the track and field squad was considered one of the big point scorers for the American team.

By Tuesday, 22 July, the day of his qualifying round, Santee had learned little about his race and he desperately wished Bill Easton was there with him. Santee discovered that he could not warm up on the track before the race, which was part of his normal routine, so he jogged around outside the stadium before returning to the locker-room to be called out for his heat. All around him athletes were speaking in unrecognisable languages, and he had no idea who among them he was competing against or what times they usually ran. His biggest fear was falling too far behind the leaders. There was no one to speak to about strategy. And he could not help thinking that he should not even have been in this race. The 1,500m was his best distance; he certainly had much more experience running it. Seldom did a runner, even one as naturally talented as Wes Santee, have the speed and stamina to compete at a world-class level in the 1,500m and the 5,000m. With each minute that passed, his apprehension grew.

When he saw Fred Wilt, the Indiana University alumnus who had competed extensively overseas, Santee hurried across the locker-room to speak to him. Wilt would know what Santee should do.

‘I really don’t know much,’ Wilt said after Santee had told him the names of those in the heat against him. ‘Except that Schade guy. He’ll probably run a steady, even race. Follow him.’

And with this information, Santee was called to the track for his heat by an Olympic official. He jogged into the stadium, feeling only slightly comforted by this one piece of advice. With Easton, he would have gone over the race on the blackboard in his office at KU, his coach indicating lap times to shoot for, how the other runners traditionally ran, and when to move with the pack or ahead of it. His race was literally drawn out for him in chalk. Only when Santee approached the starting line did he notice the German ace Herbert Schade. Except for the Canadian runner Ferguson, the rest of the field was a mystery. What if the German started out too fast or too slow? What was the best time he was capable of running? There were tens of questions he needed answered and only seconds before the race started. By the time the athletes were called to their marks, Santee felt overwhelmed. This was the Olympics. He was representing his country, and, perhaps more importantly, Kansas. He had to do well, yet he felt displaced, as if he had been blindfolded, led out into a dark field, and left alone to find his way out.

Soon enough the starting gun fired, and Santee was running. Into the first turn, he was in a good position behind Schade, right where he wanted to be. The first lap went well; Schade led, Santee kept back by several runners, but stayed close enough. By the third lap, Santee and the German were alone. The others had fallen back on the pace. Halfway through the race, Santee sensed his legs tiring, but he held on to second position. At the 3,000-metre mark he heard Schade’s time called – 8:23 – and then his own, two seconds slower. It was too fast. The best he had run this distance was 8:44, and he was 150 yards ahead of that pace. Santee began to lose confidence. He couldn’t maintain this kind of speed. What he should have known before this point in the race was that the German was using this heat to show how fast he was to Czechoslovakia’s Zatopek and France’s Mimoun, both of whom were in separate heats and would likely prove his stiffest competition in the final. An Olympic record would be broken if Schade continued at this pace, and he meant to continue.

Half a lap later, Santee lost momentum. His arms and legs leadened; his chest couldn’t bring in enough breath. His pace slackened. By 4,000 metres he hardly felt like he was moving, the sensation more like running through water than over a track. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. He couldn’t drive his legs. Runner after runner passed him and there was nothing he could do, even had he been suddenly infused with all the will power in the world. His body had given out. He finished at a dismally slow pace, thirteenth overall, in a time of 15:10.4 – the worst showing at this distance of his career.

As he put on his sweatsuit, Santee was exhausted physically, but the fear and dread before the race had taken an even greater toll. Emotionally he was a wasteland. He didn’t want to speak to anybody. He was embarrassed when he left the stadium, wanting to hole up in his room until they flew out of Helsinki. As he later said, ‘Not only did I lose, I wasn’t even in the race.’ For an athlete who had seldom known defeat, particularly on this scale, this was agony. It was like the loss of a first love. His heart literally ached.

Sitting in the stands at the Olympic Stadium on 24 July, Landy did not like his chances in the 1,500m set to take place in less than hour. He was in the fourth, and probably most difficult, heat in the qualifying round. Only the top four finishers in his race moved forward to the semi-final, and his eight-man heat included French and Yugoslav champions El Mabrouk and Otenhajmer, as well as America’s Bob McMillen and England’s Roger Bannister, the latter of whom Landy had met briefly while competing in London. Landy knew that his best time in the distance (3:52.8) was several seconds slower than his competitors, plus he was much more accustomed to running a mile than 1,500m.

Although only 120 yards shorter than the mile, the 1,500m was an awkward race. Standard European tracks, Helsinki included, were 400 metres in length, meaning that runners competed over three and three-quarter laps. Landy disliked the race, as he later explained: ‘There’s nothing graceful about it. You don’t start where you finish, it’s ugly.’ The split times were difficult to understand, and given the incomplete first lap, he found it hard to get into his rhythm.

At that moment, however, Landy was more interested in watching the 5,000m final, which was about to start. He had failed to qualify for the longer event, finishing over thirty seconds behind the winner of his heat, Alain Mimoun, in tenth position overall. It was a poor showing, but his personal best, achieved in early February, had been only two seconds faster. He had to settle for watching his friend and countryman Les Perry try to take home a medal in an event featuring the ‘human locomotive’ Emil Zatopek, former gold medal winner Gaston Reiff, new Olympic record holder Herbert Schade, and English up-and-comer Chris Chataway, as well as the fearsome French-Algerian Mimoun. It promised to be a must-see battle.

When the gun went off, the red-headed Chataway moved into an early lead, at the head of the pack for the first lap, with Schade behind him and Perry in the middle of the pack. The Australian team cheered on the ‘Mighty Atom’, but by the end of the third lap, with the first four runners averaging sixty-seven seconds per lap, Perry looked like a minor player on a great stage. Soon enough, Zatopek was setting the pace. The very sight of the 30-year-old Czech army major was frightening. His bony five-foot-eight-inch frame sped down the track in an unrhythmic mess of arms and legs. His head rolled back and forth as he ran; his tongue protruded from his mouth; his face contorted as if, one sportswriter noted, he was experiencing an ‘apoplectic fit’. Yet the runners knew he was fitter than they were, and Zatopek did not hesitate to inform them of the matter, mid-race. While his competitors gasped for air, the Czech considered it a good time for a conversation. During his 10,000m final, in which he’d broken his own world record, Zatopek had run alongside the Russian Anoufriev, who had set a rapid early pace, and admonished him on the dangers of going out too fast. As Zatopek blazed into the lead in the 5,000m final, he yelled back at Schade in German, ‘Herbert, do two laps with me!’