The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  In that decade match racing reached its peak, both in Britain and in the United States of America, notably on the East Coast – New York (where Myers ran) and Boston. Myers revised two-lap running in 1880, on the Manhattan AC track at 56th Street and Eighth Avenue. He ran 1 minute 56 seconds (an eighth of a second was the smallest fraction for stopwatches then). The IAAF book records that Myers was paced in the second half of the race, unusually on a 220-yard track. He went on to set four more half-mile records, eventually reaching 1 minute 55 seconds, again in New York. He was also a frequent visitor to England, since it was in the 1880s that matches between London and New York were instituted, effectively the first ‘international’ meetings. Myers would have some tight matches against the great Briton, Walter George.

  It’s another measure of the importance of the mile that 1500 metres times are considered incidental until close to the end of the nineteenth century, because they were so much inferior, compared to mile times. The 1500 metres (109 metres shorter than the mile) is a product of some of the original Continental tracks a century ago, many of which were 500 metres around, like a velodrome, since cycling was a much more popular sport across the Channel. The first world record in Oslo’s Bislet Stadium, a location which features prominently in this history, was set at 500 metres by Adriaan Paulen of the Netherlands in 1924. He went on to become president of the IAAF and was quite a character. He distinguished himself under fire while helping the US military in Holland in the final days of the Second World War in Europe, and was awarded medals for bravery. He died following a fall on ice in the Alps in the mid-1980s, while stopping over on his way back home from a meeting in Monaco. He was eighty-three years old, and still driving a sports car.

  More than a century prior to that, Charles Westhall probably ran the first sub-4-minute 30-second mile at Islington, north London, on 26 July 1852. I say ‘probably’, because the IAAF book records that initial reports claim ‘four minutes and a half, and something under’. Westhall, a pro, was eventually accorded 4.28. The next seven records, over thirteen years, were all set in Manchester, one of the most important centres for professional running outside of London. It was there, at the Royal Oak running grounds, that the first sub-4.20 was recorded by William ‘Crow-catcher’ Lang and William Richards, who raced a dead-heat on the 651-yard cinder track on 19 August 1865. The pair ran in at 4 minutes 17 seconds.

  All the marks prior to this had been in matches, one-on-one, but this was the race for something called the Champion Cup, and eight men were competing. A Scot, McInstay, was given 4 minutes 18 seconds, estimated from the five-yard gap between himself and Lang and Richards. The ‘winners’ had a run-off a week later for the cup, which Lang lifted after running 4 minutes 22 seconds. But there was then a hiatus in record breaking for over fifteen years. That would prefigure events in Britain a century later, when out of the desert appeared two trailblazers.

  Walter George and his Scottish rival Willie Cummings were precursors of Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe in several respects. At the very dawn of the sport, they were the first example of world-record rivals from the same country. They were the late nineteenth-century giants of the ‘cinder path’. There would be a similar apotheosis during the Second World War, with Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson in neutral Sweden. There have been many other minor national rivalries, but none so striking as these two pairs and the two subjects of this book, so it is worth comparing the earlier runners to our late twentieth-century heroes, to see how they measure up. At the press launch for their own proposed ‘matches’ in 1982, Ovett mentioned George and Cummings, and Hägg and Andersson, but, for a variety of reasons, principally injury and illness, the Ovett–Coe matches never happened, and the lessons of history remained unlearned.

  There is a terrible symmetry in the stories of George and Cummings, who raced at the very inception of ‘amateurism’, of Hägg and Andersson, who succumbed to its strictures, and of Coe and Ovett, who hastened its demise. Much of what I know about George and Cummings I have cribbed from the work of Peter Lovesey, celebrated internationally as an award-winning crime writer, but whose writing career began as a member of that little-known specialist group NUTS, the National Union of Track Statisticians. Lovesey was never an athlete of any repute, as he freely admits, but he fell in love with the sport (and the stats) as a youngster, and is responsible for one of the few good, well-written books on athletics, Kings of Distance, published in 1968.

  Athletics, incidentally, is not a sport that generally fosters good writing. The biggest problem for the journalist is trying to find a common theme in a meeting featuring such a disparate collection of disciplines, and then working against the tyranny of the deadline. The only way to write well is to concentrate on one event and put as much preparatory work into it as you can. But what if that event is a damp squib? Or what if there are three, four or five world-class performances in a single meeting? Aren’t you letting down your readers if you don’t mention them? But that would diminish the cohesiveness and impact of a piece. For example, trying to reconcile the sprint, pole vault and shot put – though all can be described as ‘explosive’ events, reliant on fast-twitch muscle fibres – in a comprehensive report isn’t easy. Then again, it’s the wrapping for tomorrow’s fish and chips, as the critics of daily journalism would have it. As for books, in contrast to the lure of many other major sports, athletics has excited the interest of few talented writers. It is not for a shortage of ‘characters’.

  Walter Goodall George was a contemporary of another famous sporting ‘W.G.’ from the West Country – Dr Grace. They would have known each other, since the famous, fat cricketer was also a sprinter of some repute, despite that rapidly increasing girth. Born in 1858 in Wiltshire, George was the leading amateur of the day when athletics was riven by rivalry with pedestrianism. George was an intriguing character, and his domination of amateur middle-and long-distance running, and the fame which ensued from the extraordinary record he set in one of the final matches against Cummings, means that much was written about him.

  He began his working life as a pharmacist, which involved long hours as an apprentice, and although he was attracted to sport in his youth, his job meant that he could barely train. Nevertheless, he brought a scientist’s rigour to his sporting pursuit. Closeted most of the day amid the shelves of the pharmacy, the teenage George devised a system of exercises, later published, which he called ‘The 100-Up’. They were a precursor of what became known as isometrics, using the body as its own resistance, in bounding, press-ups, sit-ups, and so on. George would practise these exercises at every free moment during the day, making up for the time he could not spend walking or running. There would be an echo of George’s application and innovation almost a century later, when the neophyte coach Peter Coe would set out to educate himself well enough in athletics training and physiology to turn his son into a world beater and a worthy successor as world mile record-holder to Walter George.

  Willie Jeffrey Cummings was born in Paisley, near Glasgow, in June 1858, two months before George. While his ultimate rival was cooped up in the pharmacy as an apprentice chemist, Cummings was learning and earning as a ped. Beginning in the handicaps at eighteen, he became one of the best runners in Scotland over the next two years. By 1879, his growing reputation earned him an invitation to race at Lillie Bridge Stadium in west London, which was equally famous for its promotions of both amateur and professional athletics, albeit not at the same time. Cummings won the English Champion’s Belt, running the mile in 4 minutes 28 seconds.

  In the ensuing years, despite the occasional setback, he extended his range to 10 miles, thus running the same events as George. The Scot set pro world records from the mile (4 minutes 16.2 seconds, exactly two seconds faster than George’s amateur record) up to 10 miles (51 minutes 47.4 seconds). So good was he by this time, 1885, that the matches – wagers by and against rivals – had virtually dried up. He had to get the sort of job which was to become the staple of retiring professional foot
ballers throughout much of the next century. Cummings opened a pub in Preston.

  During the same period, on the same tracks, but assuredly not against Cummings – again a distant precursor of Coe and Ovett – George was dominating his amateur rivals. After an initial dalliance with cycling and track walking, he was invited to join Moseley Harriers in Birmingham. In the sort of coincidence that suggests predestination, George’s first mile victory came, like Cummings’, in a handicap, in 4 minutes 29 seconds, a similar time to that of the Scot, and in the same year, 1879. Over the next six years, George came to dominate the one version of the sport as comprehensively as Cummings did the other. If we were frustrated by the failure of Ovett and Coe to compete against each other more often, just imagine what it must have been like a century earlier. At least we got a match every couple of years, and two inside a week in 1980!

  The feats of the nineteenth-century rivals were all the more extraordinary considering that the sort of training done by them would hardly stretch a twelve-year-old schoolgirl today. (Yet their training in preparation for their eventual match was considered excessive.) George jogged a couple of miles a day, interspersed with faster runs, from a quarter to three-quarters of a mile, and some sprints. Cummings did even less, his principal efforts being around ten miles of walking a day in four sessions, with a slow run over a mile, lots of rest in between, and a ‘good spin on the track’ when he felt like it.

  Such a light training regimen led to frequent collapses during and after races, which would cause a national outcry today. For example, in the third of a series of races against Lon Myers in 1882, George fainted in the dressing room after his win at three-quarters of a mile, and remained ‘insensible’ for twenty minutes. But that was nothing compared with what Myers suffered. The American had collapsed in the final sprint – again a regular occurrence – and was out cold for two hours. Both were fine later, though, and Myers, a noted drinker and poker player – his career positively yells out for a movie – was back in the gambling halls that night. He eventually died of consumption, a typical nineteenth-century demise.

  Myers was, in short, the sort of man that Willie Cummings would have understood. Professional athletics survived the nineteenth-century rise of amateurism and its twentieth-century establishment around the world – in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Scotland, Cummings’ birthplace. There was a brief heyday for pro marathon running in the two decades following the introduction of the race in the first modern Olympics, in Athens in 1896. And there were still six-day running events, similar to the cycling ones nowadays, which remain the legacy of the early days of both sports.

  Indeed, when Peter Lovesey decided to become a crime writer, he used his researches into Victorian sport to write his first Sergeant Cribb book, Wobble to Death, a tale of ‘murder most foul’ committed during an indoor six-day walking race in gaslit London. ‘Wobbling’ was what the popular newspapers called walking. But the sprints were the best-known pro events, and exist to this day, the most famous being the Powderhall Sprints in Edinburgh and the Stawell Gift in Victoria, Australia. They have become somewhat incongruous in an era when the ‘amateurs’ can earn more than the pros, but they have the attraction of being handicaps, with the runner off scratch (at the back) often giving the others up to several metres start. They may be considered a curiosity nowadays, but it is only in the last thirty years or so that handicap racing has disappeared from mainstream athletics. Most of my summer track races when I began competing in the English Midlands in the early 1960s were at handicap events, often mixing cycling and running on grass tracks, organised as part of their annual sports day by local factories. Coe says he recalls the same thing in Yorkshire. The decline of industry, beginning in the late sixties, and the pit closures of the early eighties ultimately did for them.

  George and Cummings were racing when the rivalry between amateur and professional athletics was at its most virulent. It was the 1870s in Victorian England, a period of efflorescence for many of the social movements which Western society now takes for granted – women’s emancipation, universal education, organised labour, and the rise of the vocational clubs, whether in sports or the arts, a panoply of pastimes. The increasing leisure time of the working classes – fought for so valiantly by the labour movement against bitter opposition from the landed gentry and their factory-owning peers – meant that there was more time to spend on sport. But there were schisms in that area, across many disciplines.

  The issue of ‘broken-time’ payments, time off from work for footballers, cricketers, rugby players, even runners, meant that professional sports were burgeoning. The split between the amateur fifteen-player Rugby Union and the professional thirteen-player Rugby League, the latter practised mostly in the factory towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, dates from this period. The ‘amateurs’ – espousing the so-called Corinthian ethic of sport for its own sake, without the sullying influence of money, particularly through gambling, with its endemic hinterland of cheating and fixing – were very strong. They tended to be university men, better educated and connected, thus better able to maintain the status quo. But there were realists among them.

  Clement Jackson, Montague Shearman and Bernard Wise, the Oxford graduates who created the Amateur Athletic Association in 1880, were not so hidebound that they did not recognise where the future lay. While many members wanted to exclude working men from joining the AAA, Jackson insisted that the proposed embargo on ‘mechanic, artisan and labourer’ be dropped before he would sign the articles of association.

  It was against this background two years later that Walter George applied for an exemption to race against Cummings. George was so good that he had had to run the mile alone at the inaugural AAA Championships in 1880. No one dared risk the embarrassment of being beaten out of sight by him. At the championships of 1882, he won the half-mile, the mile, the 4 miles and the 10 miles. No one could touch him. At the same time, Willie Cummings was beating all-comers in the professional ranks, and setting times that were better than George’s. The press was clamouring for a match between the two, but George didn’t want to sacrifice his amateur status, and in his letter to the newly minted AAA suggested that he would race Cummings for nothing, and that he would donate his share of the gate-money to the charity of his choice, the Worcester Royal Infirmary.

  The AAA had to refuse his offer because their credibility and whole raison d’être was at stake. Their definition of ‘amateur’ began, ‘one who has never competed with or against a professional’. So the AAA committee unanimously turned down George’s application for a dispensation, and he returned to record breaking, improving all the amateur world bests from 1 to 10 miles. However, he finally cracked three years later, having run up a debt of £1000, and turned professional in order to run against Cummings. They ran two series of three races in 1885 and 1886, one of which justified the later overworked sobriquet, ‘Race of the Century’.

  Thirty thousand paying customers – and many more having broken through the barriers or watching from adjacent buildings and rooftops – saw George win the first race, the mile, in London in 1885, in 4 minutes 20.2 seconds. But the time might have been much faster if Cummings had stayed the course. The Scot slowed halfway round the last lap, after they had passed the three-quarters in the extraordinary time of 3 minutes 7.5 seconds, only half a second down on the best time for that distance alone. When Cummings faltered, George relented, as was common practice in those days, even though a new record seemed inevitable.

  The race was as much a collision of cultures as characters. As has been said, pedestrianism was rife with all sorts of cheating and sharp practice. With so many handicap events, it was relatively easy to look as if you were running hard, while deliberately failing to win. Thus your ‘mark’, or the number of extra yards’ start you’d be given over the scratch man next time, would be increased. Similarly, with communications being far less sophisticated in the late nineteenth century, it was relatively common to run under assumed names in dif
ferent parts of the country. Celebrity tended to militate against that practice, and the more famous athletes, like Cummings, had to essay other stunts, such as arranging results with rivals, either to influence future betting odds or simply to get a share of the prize money.

  In the races themselves, it seemed to be accepted that baulking opponents was part of the game. In that first mile race at Lillie Bridge, Cummings ran close enough to George that he could employ a tried and tested pedestrian stunt, clipping the examateur’s heels as his feet kicked up, trying to break his stride and concentration. Obviously it made no difference to the result on that occasion.

  Just to prove that good ideas are never outmoded, when the mass marathon-running boom began a century later, with big prizes for winners even in remote cities, there was an upsurge in blatant cheating and ‘ringing’. One Rosie Ruiz feigned a fatal disease in order to gain an entry to the Boston Marathon in 1980. She ran the first couple of miles of the race, took a subway train to within reach of the finish, and ran in the ‘winner’. Despite suspicions over her freshness and plumpness, particularly from the men’s winner, Alberto Salazar, she was given the trophy. It was only because a sharp-eyed reader saw her picture in the next day’s newspapers and reported having spotted her on the train during the race that her cover was blown. A disgruntled Jacqueline Gareau, who had questioned the result from the moment she crossed the line herself, saying she had never even seen Ruiz, was brought back from Canada the following week to receive the trophy from the mayor of Boston.

  There are scores of such examples, one featuring twins, each of whom ran half the race, but the most ridiculous case was the coach who ran the second half of the race for his athlete after swapping vests and numbers in bushes mid-route. They were quickly busted, since the coach had a moustache, and the runner didn’t.

  There were strong suspicions that George ‘threw’ the next race in the first series, a 4 miles in Edinburgh, in order to keep the match alive. Cummings wasn’t even required to race the whole distance, the race umpire telling him he had done enough with a quarter of a mile to go after George had dropped out.