by Pat Butcher
There was more potential skulduggery in the final race, a 10 miles back in London, and maybe it was here that Lovesey got his inspiration for Wobble to Death. George’s tactics were unusually reticent for a man known for his bold front running. He had collapsed several times during the day prior to the race, and later claimed that he had been poisoned, although there was no proof. After a slow start which confounded everyone, including the following Cummings, the Scot forged ahead and took George’s world record in 51 minutes 6.6 seconds. On the brighter side, both had earned close to £1000, George had discharged his debts, and Cummings was able to invest in another pub.
Even over a century ago, there were the beginnings of a world circuit in pro and amateur sports. England and Australia had begun their home and away cricket ‘test’ matches, and boxers regularly criss-crossed the Atlantic. George ran in the USA and Australia, and a proposed match for Cummings in Russia was cancelled only at the last minute. It was just a decade before the inaugural modern Olympic Games were to be held in Athens, but it would be a long time, more than thirty years, before the Olympics would see the sorts of performances and times that George and Cummings produced in their next, final series. The highlight, appropriately for history and British tradition, was the mile, at Lillie Bridge Stadium in Fulham, south-west London, on the evening of Monday, 23 August 1886.
George was on the threshold of realising an ambition. Shortly after he had joined Moseley Harriers in 1878, he had announced to his astonished club-mates that he thought the mile could be run in 4 minutes 12 seconds. The amateur world record at the time was 4 minutes 24.5 seconds, although, as we know, Lang and Richards had run 4 minutes 17 seconds in Manchester in 1865. Even so! In training for the matches against Cummings, George reputedly returned times of 4.12 and even 4.10 (Cummings steered clear of time trials, preferring to husband his resources).
In the race, George led as usual, going through the first quarter in 58 seconds. A head taller than Cummings, the all-black-clad George slowed (again, as was the custom) to 2 minutes 1 seconds at half distance. Then, despite the frantic pace for these relatively poorly trained runners, as they approached the three-quarter-mile mark, Cummings did something which would ensure that this was to be the highlight race of the nineteenth century – he drew level. They passed the three-quarters together in 3 minutes 7 seconds. It was a fraction slower than in their mile of the previous year, but this time Cummings stayed in contention, and George could not ease down because Cummings then took the initiative. He sprinted ahead at the start of the final quarter, and had gained an eight-yard lead over George going into the back straight. But there was still a long way to go at such a pace, and George will have known that Cummings could not keep it up. Slowly, he began to catch the Scot, and the race became the model of how 800 metres races are won nowadays, as Coe has often characterised it: ‘by the man who slows down the least’.
Unknown to George – the tumult drowning out any information – Cummings had collapsed just after being passed sixty yards from the line. So George drove on, and snapped the tape in 4 minutes 12 seconds. He had broken Cummings and shattered the Scot’s mile record by over three seconds, or twenty metres. No amateur had come near it, and would not do so until well into the next century. George’s time was beaten only in 1915, when Norm Taber of the USA ran 4 minutes 12.6 seconds in a handicap race in Harvard Stadium at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just over a tenth of a second in twenty-nine years! That was just one measure of George’s greatness. It took another all-time great, Paavo Nurmi, to reduce the time substantially, which the Finn did in 1923, recording 4 minutes 10.4 seconds in Stockholm’s Olympic Stadium.
Sweden, fittingly, would be the backdrop for the next great national middle-distance rivalry in athletics history, that of Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson during the Second World War. When the conflict broke out in 1939, the world mile record was once again held by an Englishman – the second of seven across the century. Sydney Wooderson, who had run 4 minutes 6.4 seconds in August 1937, was the least likely looking world record-holder in the history of athletics. After the well-built George, the sturdy Nurmi, the well-fed Americans Taber and Cunningham, and the lissom, elegant Lovelock, the spindly bank clerk with wispy hair and pebble glasses resembled an escapee from an internment camp. His reeds of arms and legs stuck out of the black bag of his Blackheath Harriers club kit, but Wooderson was one of the most successful runners in the considerable canon of English middle and long distance.
He broke world records for the 800 metres, the half-mile and the mile, and put off retirement a decade later in order to compete in the biggest and best cross-country race in the world, the English 9 Miles Championships, in 1947. He won that, too. Wooderson may have looked like a runt, but he was a giant. And his mile record was intriguing for other reasons. First, it came in a handicap race, where he was the scratch man. Second, he went through three-quarters of a mile in 3 minutes 7.2 seconds, that’s to say less than half a second faster than George had some fifty years beforehand. The difference by this time, however, was that harder training sustained Wooderson over a last lap of 59.2 seconds. George, even though pushed by Cummings, had the strength to muster only a 65-second final quarter.
In 1942, Hägg and Andersson set about Wooderson’s record with gusto. And tore it apart. Sweden remained neutral during the war, something which for years afterwards earned Swedes the contempt of many other Europeans, who suffered six years of death and destruction. There was inevitably some privation in the country, imports were scarce or non-existent, but in contrast to their Norwegian neighbours to the west, who fought the Nazis, or their Finnish neighbours to the north, who essayed a precarious balancing act between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, life carried on much as normal. Including domestic sport.
Hägg and Andersson provided much distraction, and an even broader template than George and Cummings for the Coe–Ovett rivalry of forty years later. The Swedes raced each other twenty-three times, at distances ranging from three-quarters of a mile to 5000 metres. In all, they set twenty world records. They ultimately took five seconds off Wooderson’s 4 minutes 6.4 seconds in six frantic steps, beginning and ending with Hägg, but with each setting three records en route. At distances from 1500 metres to 2 miles, they ran 38 of the world’s top 50 times. As an encore, Hägg ran the first sub-14-minute 5000 metres, a record which lasted until another immortal, Emil Zátopek, got into his stride in 1954. While the rest of the athletics world was otherwise engaged, Hägg and Andersson rewrote the middle-distance record book.
As I write this book, they are still alive. No one, apart from other Swedes, had spoken to them in years. And they had become so much a part of the furniture that, aside from the well-worn anecdotes that were bandied around, they were simply lionised at occasional awards ceremonies but otherwise left alone. I had known about them for years, since I started running the half-mile and mile myself, in 1960. Forty-three years later, I went to visit them. On my way to the Bislet Games in Oslo, it was a relatively short detour, to Malmö, in south-western Sweden.
They are now both in their mid-eighties, and both have difficulty with mobility. Hägg is confined to a wheelchair in the second-floor apartment home he shares with Daisy, his wife of fifty years. The indisposition, he conceded, could have been a result of his training schedule. I was fortunate in having as a friend a former Swedish international, now an athletes’ agent, Kenth Andersson. No relation to Arne, he was, however, a member of the same Malmö athletics club as Hägg, and had known the icon for years. We visited the Häggs’ suburban apartment in June 2003 on a cool and overcast morning quite out of keeping with the torrid summer which Europe otherwise enjoyed that year. Hägg (shades of Ovett) has built a reputation for being dismissive about his career and his achievements. But he goes further than the English hero, saying he was never much interested in sport, and never watches it nowadays. That was reflected in our interview: he said he knew of Coe and Ovett, but hadn’t seen any of their races, even on TV. H
owever, another club colleague recalled visiting Hägg one morning in the early months of 2000 and finding him watching a football match on TV. The old man, when confronted about this apparent contradiction, said, ‘The TV just happened to be on, and I couldn’t be bothered changing the channels.’ He was just as sharp with us, but grew more animated as the interview progressed.
He was the front-runner of the pair, but bore no ill-will towards Andersson, who would occasionally kick past him to victory, and a world record or two. ‘We both had our own tactics, and that’s the way it was,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘and Arne would lead occasionally. We had pacemakers in almost every race. It tended to be [Lennart] Strand in most races. First of all, he was a team-mate of mine, and also he had good pace judgement. We tended to dictate the races, since Arne didn’t have a pacemaker of his own. In the beginning, Arne beat me many times at the finish, but I learned that if I went faster, it would draw out his final sprint. Speed kills!’
There is another similarity between Hägg and Andersson and Coe and Ovett, in that the ‘third man’ eventually succeeded them. Lennart Strand went on to become a world record-holder himself, at 1500 metres. Steve Cram never paced for Ovett and Coe, but he followed them into the record books, at the 1500 metres and the mile. There is another less welcome similarity between Strand and Cram: both failed to win Olympic titles for which they were earmarked as favourites, Strand in London in 1948 and Cram in Seoul in 1988.
By the time Hägg and Andersson were doing battle with each other, the elusive 4-minute mile was tantalisingly close. ‘It was everyone’s dream to break the four-minute mile,’ says Hägg. ‘That’s why we ran it so often in Sweden at that time. We’d have done it too, if we’d run a little slower on the first two laps, say 1 minute 58 seconds. But it was the rivalry which determined the way we raced. We ran to win, not to break records. That was secondary.’
It must have been an extraordinary time for the pair of them. They were filling stadia around Sweden, albeit most of the races were either in the capital Stockholm, or in Gothenburg, where Hägg was based, and where his club, MAI, could ensure big crowds, and, perhaps, cover up the fact that both men were being paid. Hägg says that the most they got was 1000 kronor, but Kenth Andersson maintains that this has become part of the Hägg mantra, along with his ‘disinterest’. A persistent rumour is that Hägg demanded a kronor per metre, which would have netted him 5000 kroners when he became the first man to break 14 minutes over 5000 metres, and those are the sorts of sums that Arne Andersson recalls. At that time, 5000 kronor would have been an average annual salary, quite in keeping with the $50,000 per race that Hicham El Guerrouj can command today.
Hägg travelled twice to the USA for a series of races during the war. According to Kenth Andersson, these races were the first sports events to be broadcast live transatlantic (during the night) on Swedish radio. Like the leading athletes in the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932, Hägg was invited to Hollywood, to meet the stars. His favourite moment, he says, was getting a cowboy outfit and six-shooters from William Holden. At which point, he entertained us with his imaginary pistols. True to form, he wasn’t much interested in the athletics circuit in the USA. ‘I enjoyed America enormously,’ he says, ‘but to get there, the boat had to zig-zag across the Atlantic, to avoid the U-boats and the mines. I didn’t enjoy the races so much, because the track at Madison Square Garden was so small, and not in very good condition.’ His autobiography, incidentally, was titled, From Ålbaken [his birthplace] to Madison Square Garden.
When Hägg returned from his second trip to the USA in 1945, there was just time for him to reclaim the mile world record from Andersson before the pair were banned for life, for receiving payments. This wasn’t unusual. For the same reason, the French federation had banned a previous mile world record-holder, Jules Ladoumègue, in 1930; the great Paavo Nurmi was banned on the verge of the 1932 Olympics; and a decade after the Swedes, Wes Santee, the American challenger to beat Bannister to the first sub-4, was banned in 1955.
Andersson squeezed in a one mile race at peacetime London’s White City before the ban. He beat Sydney Wooderson, who went on to win the European 5000 metres title in Oslo in 1946. Andersson tried to get reinstated, in order to run in the Olympic Games in London in 1948, but to no avail. He was mortified, but Hägg never even sought reinstatement. ‘If you’re a professional, you’re a professional,’ he says, phlegmatically. ‘In any case, when I got the news, it was a sort of relief. I’d had enough, I didn’t want to continue [only twenty-seven]. I never felt any bitterness about being banned; I was glad to get a bit of distance between myself and the sport.’
On that downbeat note, we left to drive north. Arne Andersson had eventually gone back to live in his home town of Vännersborg, in central Sweden, on the south-west side of Sweden’s biggest lake, Vännern. The town is known as ‘Little Paris’, due principally to its theatrical tradition. There are half a dozen little theatres dotted around the town, with lots of old wooden houses rooted between the brick and concrete. The parks are pretty and filled with flowers, certainly so when we visited, and early afternoon sun brought temperatures into the high twenties. It was the sort of day I identified with strolling around the Scandinavian capitals – Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki – waiting for an athletics meeting amid a knowledgeable, appreciative crowd.
Andersson’s apartment was at the far end of the main street from the shops, a new, stylish block, with entry codes for each apartment at the front gate. The code for Andersson’s apartment was 0007, and he could have passed for an ageing James Bond. Still a handsome man, he was easily recognisable as the tall, blond, wavy haired, lantern-jawed but intense competitor from the early forties. And, contrary to the historical accounts which painted him as a morose, monosyllabic character, he was chatty, courteous and very witty.
Andersson also had problems of mobility, with an arthritic left foot, but he could still get around, unlike his wheelchair-bound former rival. The pair still speak regularly, and, though they live about 400 kilometres apart, they manage to meet a couple of times each year, usually at the Sweden–Finland match, still the biggest fixture (for both countries) on the national athletics calendar. Andersson conceded that the press at the time had tried to depict him as the darker character, the dour, big-city slicker, in contrast to the fun-loving country boy Hägg. ‘But it didn’t really take off,’ he said. Kenth Andersson interjected to say that Vännersborg was hardly a big city, but, sharp as a spoke, Arne shot backing admonishingly, ‘Remember, I was living in Stockholm at the time.’
Hägg ultimately won 15 of their 23 encounters, but Andersson was quick to point out that he won 5 of their 6 races in 1944, implying that he was getting the upper hand towards the end of their rivalry. There is still a competitive edge to their relationship, albeit a joky one. Showing some photographs that morning, Hägg had mused, ‘Arne looks very tired in this one.’ Andersson had an unprompted riposte, referring to famous photos of Hägg training alongside a lake with the mountains in the background: ‘Of course, Gunder would only run there when there was a photographer around.’ He characterised Hägg’s ‘disinterest’ as a form of naïveté: ‘He certainly didn’t know his winning times. It would always be approximate, so maybe he wasn’t that interested,’ he said, before adding with a grin, ‘if you could believe what Gunder said.’
But he conceded that his rival, like Ovett prior to the 1980 Olympic 800 metres, ‘was very relaxed. He would often fall asleep in the dressing room before races, whereas I would be pacing up and down.’ Personally, I think sleep at such times reveals nerves just as much as pacing up and down: it’s an attempted escape from confrontation, and certainly not a sign of relaxation. However . . .
Andersson admitted he’d been very angry after the ban, but he’s long worked that out, and he’s put a veneer of amusement onto the whole experience. ‘We got tired of racing each other sometimes. We often went through 800 metres in 1 minute 57 seconds, when the rabbit dropped out. If I’d gone
up to Gunder at that point, we probably could have run under four minutes [for the mile], but we were running to win, so we forgot about times and concentrated on each other.’
Hägg had earlier confirmed the story of how he began in athletics on the family farm, with his father timing him with an alarm clock: ‘My father knew nothing about running; he was simply my timekeeper. I had a three- or four-kilometre circuit that I ran as fast as I could, to get an idea if I could be a world-class runner. What I didn’t know was my father subtracted one minute from my real time, in order not to deter me.’
Andersson had a good tale of his own, from wartime, when he was conscripted into the Swedish Army. ‘I was a bad soldier, the second lowest grade, a corporal. But when I got selected to represent the army in a cross-country match, I got a temporary promotion. It was a three-man team, and I told one of the officers not to go off too quickly, but he started to fall back, and I tied a rope around his waist, and was trying to pull him along. This incident became quite famous, because it got shown on the news-reels that preceded the movies in the cinemas. But when we’d got back from the race, I was demoted back to corporal.’
Both men would take three to four months off running at the end of the summer, which was necessary, as both admitted they trained intensively, although rarely, if ever, more than ten kilometres at a time. ‘We had a saying in those days,’ says Andersson, ‘the further you ran, the more stupid you were. We were thinking particularly of marathon runners, so we were careful that we never ran too far.’
Unlike Hägg, Andersson has seen many of Ovett’s and Coe’s races. Like his rival, he feels that the Brits would have broken many more records if they had raced each other more often. ‘I loved to watch Coe run,’ he says. ‘I got the impression that he and Ovett were real enemies, but I suppose that was the media.’
