The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  The circumstances of their ban were quite extraordinary. It does not appear that there was any outside pressure from the international federation for the move; it was simply a decision of the Swedish federation’s president, Bo Ekelund. Andersson says, ‘Everybody knew, including the federation. One of the officials actually said to me one time, “You guys are getting too much.” What could I say? I could hardly deny it. It was bad book-keeping that did it for us. Someone was supposed to have offset the fees against other expenses, but it never got done. The public was very mad: I met people who told me they never went to an athletics meeting again after that. From one Friday – when we were banned – to the next, stadiums that would be completely full [i.e., have a crowd of twenty thousand] for our races had about four thousand people. Folks just stopped going.’

  Andersson was very good company, and, like a good trouper, he saved the best till last. ‘Do you know,’ he began, ‘I was contacted on my sixty-fifth birthday by Arne Lungqvist?’ This is the Swedish official best known nowadays for being the hardline anti-drugs campaigner at the international federation. He was the Swedish federation’s president at the time, 1983. ‘Lungqvist announced to me that I had been reinstated as an amateur.’ Andersson paused, to enjoy the anticipated reaction. ‘I thought, That’s some good to me now, at the age of sixty-five,’ he said, feigning resentment, before continuing with a glint of satisfaction, ‘But, after a while, I went to the fridge anyway, and cracked open a bottle of champagne. It was worth some sort of celebration.’

  18

  Milers

  The mile! Four laps of the track. Like a four-act play. Prologue, Exposition, Action, Dénouement. All inside four minutes. Aristotle could not have conceived a better dramatic formula. It is the ultimate in audience involvement in track and field athletics – neither too short, nor too long. It is the fine balance between the blazing, witless energy of the sprint and the tactical ennui of the 10,000 metres. Such has been the history and impact of the mile on the sport, it is the only imperial distance which the authorities, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) retains on its world record lists. It is the Perfect Distance.

  The mile has always had this special place in athletics folklore. Although it has never been run in the (wholly metric) Olympic Games, the mile is a seminal distance. The Olympic equivalent is the 1500 metres, three and three-quarter laps of the track, 109 metres shorter, sometimes known as the ‘metric mile’. But its very awkwardness denies it the character of the mile.

  When athletics became formalised in the mid-nineteenth century, the mile took pride of place. The early mile records were far superior to the times set at 1500 metres, the ‘Continental’ distance, probably a product of the 500-metre velodromes. In the 150-year history of the mile record, there has inevitably been a preponderance of Brits, mostly English. There was no one else running it for the first twenty years, and, despite regular transatlantic matches, it took the Americans another thirty years to make an impact. That was principally because Walter George had put the record ‘out of sight’. His extraordinary time lasted until 1915, when Norman Taber finally ran a fifth of a second faster.

  The late nineteenth-century London–New York matches, the subsequent Oxbridge–Ivy League matches, and the Commonwealth connection would ensure that Anglo-Saxons dominated thereafter. In the twentieth century, six Brits, three Americans, three New Zealanders, two Australians and an English-speaking Tanzanian, Filbert Bayi, held the mile world record. Nevertheless, a third of the record breakers have been non-Anglo-Saxons, drawn to the unfamiliar (for them) distance by the famed 4-minute barrier, a spurious blockage, as Dr Roger Bannister was first and loudest to acknowledge. Apart from being the first to run under 4 minutes, Bannister brought a scientist’s rigour to his sport with his announcement immediately afterwards that 3 minutes 30 seconds would be breached one day.

  The great Paavo Nurmi of Finland was the first non-English-speaker to hold the mile record, with his 4 minutes 10.4 seconds in 1923. Twenty years later, Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson admitted that their obsession with the mile was due to a desire to break the 4-minute ‘barrier’. The fact that they broke the record six times, bringing it down to just over a second shy of the target, is testament to that. But, for Bannister, as an Englishman, it was more than that. He had been brought up on the pre-war feats of Sydney Wooderson, the mile and half-mile world record-holder, and there was a whole historico-cultural framework into which Bannister’s running of the first sub-4-minute mile would fit. Britain’s role in the winning of the Second World War was still a fresh memory, despite continuing social and economic privation at home, Everest had just been conquered and a new monarch’s reign had just begun.

  Sir Roger Bannister still has his principal home in Oxford, about a mile from the Iffley Road track, where he became the first man to break 4 minutes on 6 May 1954. ‘It did emerge as a consequence of the way in which we in Britain thought about running, thought about the mile as a particular British event and we were part of the Wooderson tradition, with [Walter] George before him,’ Bannister says. ‘The mile was the race. It is the classic distance. In the 800, if you get a bad position at the start, the first bend, it’s not easy to correct it, but with the mile it was a bit more so. The mile was more interesting. I wasn’t aware at all that it would attract such attention, but it was not as easy to do as some people might have thought, because it depended on the weather. These are all parallels, if you like, with Everest: a gale blowing can add three or four seconds. So there was the weather and it depended on others: if the pacemaking is wrong then it can be virtually impossible. And it has this link that it was British. So I can understand why it caught the imagination.’

  Thirty years later, John Walker of New Zealand became the first man under 3 minutes 50 seconds. Walker in full flow was a magnificent sight – big, broad-shouldered, long mane of blond hair streaming out behind, with a necklace of beads bouncing atop the stark black Kiwi vest as he pounded the track into submission. Walker was a force of nature, which must make his current predicament even harder to bear. When Walker retired, after clocking up over 100 sub-4-minute miles during fifteen years at the top, he contracted Parkinson’s disease. Despite the aforementioned aberration behind Ovett in Düsseldorf, Walker was not a quitter on the track. Even Andy Norman was in awe of Walker’s combativity: ‘I’d always have Walker in a race,’ he said in the mid-eighties. Walker is not a quitter off the track, either. He still works on the stud farm he runs with his wife near Auckland, New Zealand, and in the summer of 2003 he travelled to London for the fiftieth anniversary of the Emsley Carr Mile.

  Walker does not harbour the slightest doubt about the pre-eminence of the mile. ‘It was very special, the mile, and it still is today. It’s quite amazing. I always regarded the world mile record as special. In fact, I’d put it higher than the Olympics, even though the Olympics is what you have to be judged by, your final career pinnacle. To be the world record-holder for the mile, and coming from an English-speaking country, was special. And to be a sub-3.50 miler was even more special. Everybody’s gone crazy on it again. It’s stood the test of time. To go through the fifties, sixties and seventies, then to die off through the eighties and nineties because of the 1500 metres, and now everybody is talking about the mile again. There have been many books written on the mile, and Bannister is still alive, and this anniversary is bringing it all back. It’s gone full circle.’ Walker was referring to the half-century of the first sub-4 in May 2004.

  It’s inevitable that the milers themselves should love the race. Ray Flynn called it the ‘magical distance’; Steve Scott agreed that it was ‘special’; Craig Masback virtually dictated a treatise on it. Because, apart from finishing third in the Golden Mile in 1979, Masback had another claim to fame: he was the second man to break 4 minutes on the Iffley Road track at Oxford, thirty-five years after Bannister had done it. Masback ran 3 minutes 59.6 seconds, a fifth of a second slower than Bannister. The first sub-4 ma
n was present to congratulate him.

  The second most famous doctor in mile running history, Thomas Wessinghage of Germany, was soon made aware of the significance of the distance in world athletics. ‘When I, as a 1500 metres runner, entered the international scene, I found that there was something special about the mile. I recall a situation in New York: they wanted to make a mile within the Millrose Games in the Madison Square Garden. Before the race there were no stands for the athletes, so I walked through the arena and there was an empty seat and I asked if that space was free. The gentleman next to the space said, “Yeah, you may take it.” So we talked and after two minutes he found out that I was running there. Then he asked what event and I said, “The mile.” He stood up and said, “The mile? I am very pleased to meet you here.” He shook my hand, he was really thrilled. So there is something special about the mile, always has been, and I was lucky to pick that distance.’

  For Sebastian Coe, growing up in Yorkshire, there was no question: ‘People at the club said, “You are going to be a miler,” and my dad always referred to me as that. Trevor Wright [club colleague and international predecessor] said, “You’re built like a miler. Don’t waste your time, because you are going to be a miler.” In Yorkshire it was a huge thing. We’d had Derek Ibbotson, we’d had Alan Simpson, who finished fourth in the [1964] Olympics, and outside of international runners we still had runners like Ken Wood and Chris Mason who were all good local miling talent. Of all the counties, the mile in Yorkshire has always meant a lot.’

  So it was on the South Coast, too. Despite all the other distances at which he excelled, Steve Ovett was a miler above all else. That three-year sequence of forty-five undefeated middle-distance races was eloquent testimony to that.

  There were others who could never get a handle on it. Some middle-distance ‘greats’ set 1500 metres world records, or won the Olympic title, but never broke the mile record – Otto Pelzer of Germany, Luigi Beccali of Italy and Kipchoge Keino of Kenya. Saïd Aouita, who held five world records consecutively, but never the mile, used to refer to it as the ‘English distance’, and so it was. And when Coe and Ovett finished with it at the end of 1981, it was even more English than ever. For, despite their success at 800 metres, with Ovett as Olympic champion and Coe as world record-holder, their true métier was the mile. They were inheritors of the Great Tradition, and their individual talents would extend that tradition.

  Ovett had been dragged from his record shyness by Coe’s triple world-record feats in 1979. On either side of that little mid-season distraction in Moscow in 1980, he had broken the world records for the mile and the 1500 metres. Without a championship to beguile them in 1981, the two Brits set about their record-breaking chase again. The summer season can stretch to between four and five months, from May to September in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly Europe, which is where most top athletics is played out. But in the annals of the mile, nine days in 1981 stand out. In that brief period, Coe and Ovett swapped the world mile record three times.

  But, inevitably, that wasn’t all. They went wild, winning races across the globe. Coe went from backwaters such as RAF Cosford, in rural south-west Staffordshire, where an aircraft hangar housed Britain’s only 200-metre indoor track, to the splendour of Rome’s Olympic Stadium, starting his competitive year in mid-February and ending it in early September. Ovett began in Antrim in Northern Ireland in mid-May and ended in a future Olympic venue, Sydney, Australia, in mid-October. Coe was unbeaten, including winning a Universities 400 metres title. Ovett lost narrowly twice, once by default, and once to Sydney Maree, who had his obligatory single great race of the season.

  Both men agree that 1981 was their halcyon year. Everything went right. Coe was commuting between Loughborough, where he was doing postgraduate studies, and London, where he was living in Granny Coe’s house in Fulham. Ovett and Rachel Waller were having a great time, scouring the antique shops and stalls in Brighton, setting up home prior to their marriage later that year. Both men had made their indelible marks on history. They were Olympic champions. They were famous throughout the world. There were no championships to distract them. They could go out and enjoy themselves.

  Almost incidentally – ‘I didn’t think I was in that kind of shape’ – Coe broke the world indoor 800 metres record at Cosford, with 1 minute 46 seconds on 11 February. In late May, Ovett flew into a beleaguered Belfast at the eleventh hour and rescued the recently minted UK National Championships (as opposed to the AAAs) by winning the 1500 metres at the Antrim Forum. ‘I would not like to see the Championships disintegrate, especially as they are in Northern Ireland,’ said Ovett.

  In fact, both sides of the terrorist divide, Unionists and Nationalists, had made it clear that international sport was exempt from sectarian targeting. Nevertheless, persuading mainland Brits to go to the northern six counties, either to compete or to report, was not easy. As sports journalists, we went on several occasions during the eighties, and had the time of our lives. The pubs and clubs were livelier and friendlier than anything I ever experienced anywhere else in Britain or Ireland. It was as if the population had decided, after years of bombings and shootings, that they might as well enjoy themselves while they could.

  The preliminaries over, the pair then got down to business. In a year of extraordinary performances, Coe’s first international race was sublime. At the culmination of a particularly onerous Olympic decathlon, an Italian colleague once remarked to me, ‘This medal should be heavy gold.’ Coe’s performance in Florence on 10 June deserved that sort of recognition. Any world record is out of the ordinary. That is its function. But to run 1 minute 41.73 seconds for 800 metres was something else again.

  Billy Konchellah of Kenya, who would go on to win two world titles at 800 metres, served his apprenticeship at the feat (sic) of a master craftsman. Konchellah raced through the first lap in 49.7 seconds, with Coe right behind. When Coe had done that sort of time in Prague in 1978, it had seemed like a suicide mission, and he duly suffered the consequences. In athletics terminology, he ‘died’ in the straight. Three more years of conditioning and an Olympic title had honed his resistance. The world record would be the victim this time.

  As soon as Konchellah began to flag, shortly into the second lap, Coe whisked past, and just kept sprinting, right to the line. His margin of victory over Dragan Zivotic of Yugoslavia, a world-class athlete, was five and a half seconds, or around forty metres. In a race of only 800 metres! It was the greatest margin of victory ever in a two-lap world-record run. And this was Coe’s fifth world record, itself a record number for a British athlete.

  There was only a minor gripe about the run, which came at the end of a night straight out of commedia dell’arte. Earlier in the evening, Carl Lewis had won the 100 metres in what was originally announced as a world record of 9.92 seconds. After Lewis had cavorted around the track a couple of times, and the applause had finally died down, it was discovered that the timing equipment was faulty, and it was switched off, with the American’s mark being modified to a pedestrian 10.13 seconds. The photo-finish equipment also failed, and officials had to rely on something called Digicron photocells. These project laser beams across the track, which, when broken by the passage of an athlete, record times down to a thousandth of a second. Coe’s times read 1 minute 41.724 seconds and 1 minute 41.727 seconds, while the mandatory three watches (manual timers) read 1 minute 41.6 seconds (twice) and 1 minute 41.7 seconds.

  Dave Cocksedge, Ovett’s pal in his teenage years, has been an enthusiastic guardian of the memory of that evening. As recently as December 1996, he wrote in Athletics Weekly, ‘It’s a great shame that Coe’s run should be marred by confusion and official incompetence; and it’s a mystery why the manual return of 1.41.6 was not forwarded for ratification. Photocell read-outs often placed by the finish line are provided as a guide for spectators. They are not official.’ No one doubts that Coe shattered the world record, but the debate about the actual time became more heated when Joaquím
Cruz of Brazil – who would beat Coe in the 1984 Olympic 800 metres final – ran 1 minute 41.77 seconds in a fully authenticated run in Cologne after the Los Angeles Games.

  Ovett’s next race was touched by even more farce, not something readily associated with the home of Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch. In the land of the midnight sun, someone drew the blinds on the man calling the 1500 metres lap times to Ovett and company in Oslo on 26 June. The athletes, particularly Ovett as the main man, should have realised something was wrong when Tom Byers of the USA – who had a reputation as a fast front-runner – was getting further and further ahead. What had happened was that the man on the watch was calling out Byers’ splits instead of those of the chasing pack. By the time Ovett realised what was going on, with one lap to go, it was too late. But only just: Ovett ran a final lap of 52.3 seconds, which would not have disgraced an 800 metres race. He failed to catch Byers by a stride, and walked off the track laughing at his own stupidity.

  Excellence is contagious. Five years after the disappointment of a single bronze medal for Britain at the Montreal Olympics, the national team won a semi-final of the European Cup for the first time. This was the heyday of Soviet and East German strength, yet Britain prevailed in Helsinki, with Coe winning the 800 and Ovett the 1500 metres easily. A week later, 11 July, they were back on world-record track in Oslo. It is difficult at this distance (in time) to appreciate that every time Coe and Ovett stepped onto a track, a world record was a distinct possibility. We were getting blasé, but we wanted more. And it did go on and on and on.

  Coe ran 800 metres in 1 minute 44.6 seconds. Only he and Mike Boit (marginally) had beaten that time in 1979. But this was in a 1000 metres race, and Coe was en route to knocking a second off his world record of the previous year at the same venue. He recorded 2 minutes 12.18 seconds, a time comparable to his 800 metres record in Florence. And there was no question about timing equipment here. Later that evening, Ovett won what John Walker called ‘the greatest mile race of all. I should know, I seem to have run in most of them.’ It wasn’t a record, but it was a closely competitive race, which Ovett won in 3 minutes 49.25 seconds. That was his third time under 3.50. Walker and Coe, and now José-Luis Gonzalez of Spain and Steve Scott of the USA, in the wake of Ovett, had done it once each. In all, eight men ran under 3 minutes 52.5 seconds that night. Hence the unqualified appraisal of Walker, who had recorded his second best time – 3 minutes 50.26 seconds.