While revealing in some respects, Bannister’s rendering of Elliott mostly underscored the mix of condescension and envy with which many Brits viewed their stereotypically untamed younger brothers from Down Under. Mature beyond his years at twenty-two, already a husband and father, Elliott might have been a natural-born runner, but it was a combination of will, brainpower, and rigorous training that brought him to Rome as a gold medal favorite. Far from a mindless creature, he was an aesthete who loved poetry and looked for the beauty in life. After an early high school career as a runner in Perth, he briefly abandoned the sport altogether, taking up the teenage pursuits of smoking and drinking beer, until he started a comeback under the tutelage of Cerutty, the brilliant but oddest of odd ducks. That Cerutty had been booted from a room in the Olympic Village because of his busybody ways was a surprise to no one. Even Elliott had a love-hate relationship with his iconoclastic coach, viewing him as equal parts guru and pest. Still, he believed deeply in the sixty-three-year-old goateed vegetarian and knew that without the program of careful diet, bodybuilding, swimming, and running up eight-story sand dunes, he would not be where he was now.
Elliott and Cerutty made a lasting impression wherever they went. In 1958 they had flown to California for a series of track meets and stayed at Cordner Nelson’s home in Stockton. Now, two years later, as the Nelsons sat in the stands of Stadio Olimpico for the 1500 final, they thought back to that unforgettable visit. The girls all developed huge crushes on the dashing Elliott, who could play the piano, read, and talk at the same time, but it was Cerutty who dominated the scene. “Cerutty was opinionated. He was saying a lot of things and always thought he was right,” Cord Nelson recalled. “Like no one else knew how to train an athlete. At our house he was talking about foot planting. How you put your foot down on the track when you run. How Paavo Nurmi [the great Finnish distance runner from the 1920s] ran heel first. He had Elliott run across our living room toes first. And after dinner, Mrs. Nelson served ice cream and got chewed out by Cerutty, who ranted about its unhealthiness. The next morning he and Elliott ate raw Quaker Oats with fruit and nuts, part of their training. We all started eating raw oats after they left.”
After his own raw oats breakfast on the morning of the Olympic final, Elliott, who was allowed to take a room outside the village with his wife, Anne, visited a Catholic cathedral, praying and easing his mind, then paced around before heading over to the track hours ahead of time. He and Cerutty consulted again, reaffirming the tactics they had decided upon the night before. Cerutty would be seated in the stands near the first turn, a fourth of the way around the track. Elliott was to look for him there on the last lap. If the coach waved his towel up and down, that meant someone was closing from behind. If he waved it in a circle, that meant Elliott had victory assured but was on pace to break the world record.
At the race’s start, Elliott, in white shorts and shirt with a gold and black diagonal stripe, lined up on the inside lane but was quickly passed by several runners and found himself boxed in near the middle of the pack. From the stands, it appeared that he was loping along easily, but in fact he felt tired and was worried about a heavy feeling in his legs. He was in fourth place after the first lap and stayed in that position the second time around. Then, after the first turn of the third lap, he glided easily to the front, running a few yards ahead of Michel Bernard of France and Hungary’s Istvan Rozsavolgyi. He coasted out front for a half lap before suddenly breaking away as though propelled by a booster rocket. As Neil Allen viewed it from the press section, “he struck unanswerably, struck with complete disregard for what was happening behind him among his courtiers.” Track experts knew Elliott was superb, but nonetheless they were awed by how gracefully he separated himself from an excellent field. It seemed to Roger Bannister that “no other athlete in Rome commanded such superiority over his rivals.” The American runner Jim Beatty, watching in the stands, thought it was “the most dramatic middle-distance burst” he had ever seen. Elliott’s hands seemed weightless, his body perfectly erect, his feet barely touching the ground.
Rounding into the bell lap, he felt the wind blowing into his face and worried about fading just as he approached the prearranged signal point.
“Time to give him a rev-up,” Cerutty muttered to a nearby radio reporter in the stands. Concerned that Elliott might not spot him in the crowd, the coach bolted from his seat, ran down the aisle, hopped a railing, and landed in the dry moat that separated the stands from the track. Cerutty had never been one for protocol and was willing to test any rule, break any barrier, to help a gifted runner. Here he was nearing the edge of the track, wildly waving not a towel but his yellow T-shirt in a wide circle. There was no way Elliott could miss it. “I got the circle signal and cut loose,” the runner said later. He increased the lead from 10 meters to 12 to 15 to 20. “It just seemed superhuman,” recalled Don Graham, the young copyboy for the Washington Post. “It was so beautiful to watch, you could hardly believe it.” To the Times of London, it was “as if he had donned some crown and was followed only by camp followers.”
The Australian writer E. W. Tipping, from his seat in the stands behind the crooner Bing Crosby, cast his gaze away from Elliott back to a commotion in the moat. “Two Italian policemen had pounced on Percy, and there was quite a brawl until [they] managed to push him back across the moat…And poor Percy we fear never did see his protégé breast the tape…He had to keep one eye on his stopwatch and one eye on Elliott and one eye on the cops. He didn’t care what they did to him after he got his signal across to Herb.”
Pulsing down the homestretch, Elliott finally struggled against fatigue. Dealing with pain is the unavoidable fate of a miler. The way Elliott saw it, “it’s when you stick to it that you show you’re the superior man.” He stuck to it now, running through the pain, his 3:35.6 shattering the old Olympic record set by Ireland’s Ron Delany in Melbourne in 1956 by nearly 6 seconds. The pace was so swift that five runners trailing far behind him also broke the old mark.
Tipping tapped out a column in the form of a letter to his two boys, Paul and Tony, “and all the other schoolboy Herb Elliott fans” in Australia. They were correct, he began. “He is the greatest runner of all. Greatest middle distance runner, anyway. There’s only one way to describe how he won the derby of the Olympics this afternoon. He won like Phar Lap”—the greatest racehorse in Australian history. After the race, Tipping noted, “Herb was cool, calm, and collected, as if he’d just finished one of those interclub miles we’ve seen him run at Olympic Park [in Melbourne] on a Saturday afternoon. But we noticed he had a good squint at the gold medal as soon as he stepped off the stand after the victory ceremony. A group of Australians sitting underneath a results board tried to start ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ but it petered out. Someone shouted ‘Coo-eee,’ the call of the Australian kangaroo.”
Much like the socialist commentators earlier in the Games who went wild over Czechoslovakia’s third-place finish in the eight-man heavyweight crew while virtually ignoring the stunning victory of the Germans, the French press now kissed off Elliott’s amazing performance to concentrate instead on the surprising second-place finish of their Michel Jazy. French medals were so few and far between in Rome that Jazy’s showing, punctuated by a burst nearly as strong as Elliott’s in the last lap, immediately became the stuff of Gallic legend. “Neither the French who were in Rome nor those who were in front of their TV screen will forget this extraordinary 1500 meter race, because Michel Jazy, the small typographer…achieved an historical feat,” wrote a columnist for Le Miroir des Sports. “Michel Jazy satisfied all who believed in him against all hope. As a result of a fantastic effort, he won the silver medal, destroying the French record in the process. The little guy was thus rewarded for the terrible sacrifices that he had made, the long and difficult training sessions that he had endured. With Michel Jazy, France also had her stadium god.” At last, Charles de Gaulle might no longer feel the need to do it all himself.
Cordner Nelson, who assigned himself the metric-mile coverage for Track & Field News, caught up with his former houseguest Elliott after the event “swigging an Italian beer.” Was it a modest act of rebellion against his coach’s strict diet? No, ice cream was far worse than beer. Cerutty had wanted a faster pace during the race, but that would have been counterproductive, Elliott said. “If it had been any faster, I could hardly have finished.” Having escaped the clutches of the Italian police, Cerutty was now mingling with the press corps, rejoicing in the victory. He felt giddy enough even to make fun of the great Roger Bannister. “Here is how you run,” he said to Bannister and then proceeded to waddle with what Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated called “all the grace of a spavined plow horse, a travesty of Bannister’s style.” The Brit replied dryly that he felt compelled to say he found himself hard to recognize in old Percy. So did everyone, it seemed, except the one with the gold medal, Herb Elliott.
DARKNESS HAD fallen by the time Rafer Johnson and C. K. Yang got around to their final javelin throws. A full moon glowed above the stadium. C.K., his body chilled by the night air, wrapped his shoulders in a blanket. Rafer knelt patiently, chewing a wad of gum in rhythmic circles. The competition had been intense all of this second long day. First Yang had snatched the lead after the high hurdles, then Johnson had taken it back with the discus, then he had watched his margin shrink with the high jump. “That was the kind of day it was. Dramatic, going back and forth,” recalled Don Graham. “What was fabulous about it was that it lasts two days, and both guys were on top of their games, pushing each other.” The javelin, the penultimate event, was usually Johnson’s safety cushion, where he amassed enough points to withstand any charge in the closing 1500-meter run. He tried to relax, to turn off his mind and just perform, but he could not stop himself from brooding about the situation. His approach on the final effort was too slow, he felt sluggish, and his distance was the shortest of his three throws. He would have to settle for just under 230 feet, still 6 feet better than Yang, but not enough to make him feel comfortable.
Here came the 1500, and Johnson was now leading Yang by only 67 points. As fate would have it, they were scheduled to run in the same heat, the last one. Fluent in the arcane scoring system of the decathlon, both men swiftly calculated that if Yang won by 10 seconds or more, the gold medal was his. This was far from an improbable task. C.K.’s best time in the event was 4:36.9, while Johnson’s best was nearly 13 seconds slower.
In the front row of the stands near the 330-meter mark sat Ducky Drake. The UCLA coach’s words had always been crucial to Johnson. It was a letter from Ducky that had reassured Rafer and inspired him on the way to his groundbreaking victory in Moscow two years earlier: “Remember you’re the champion. You’re the one they have to beat, so let them worry. Go about your work with a quiet confidence that cannot be shaken.”
Johnson’s confidence was not shaken now, but he needed more advice, so he approached his coach at the edge of the stands. How should he run this most important race of his life? Drake had already thought it through. “The key thing is that when C.K. tries to pull away—and he will try—you have to stay with him. At some point C.K. will look back to see where you are, and you have to be there. If he opens up, you have to go with him. You cannot let him build that yardage.”
Easier for Drake to say than for Johnson to do, but still it was a sound plan, perhaps the only plan that could save him. Rafer nodded in agreement and walked back toward the track. About halfway there, he turned and saw none other than C.K. approaching the same spot at the edge of the stands. Ducky, after all, was his coach too.
“Ducky said to me, ‘C.K., you run as fast as you can. Rafer cannot keep up with you!’” Yang later recalled.
At that moment, Drake was like a master chess player competing against himself. He saw the whole board and was making the best moves for both sides.
But C.K. was not convinced. He trained with Rafer every day. He knew how competitive his old teammate was. Even if Yang was so much better at this distance, he felt uneasy. What if he tried to pull away and got a cramp like he did at the Trials in Oregon?
It was twenty minutes after nine by the time they approached the starting line. “The pressure was on. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more pressure than I felt starting that race,” Johnson recalled. “Most times I compete, and it’s like I have a little bit of control. In that event, it wasn’t like I lost control, but I was so excited and felt the pressure so much that it’s like I’m going to lose my breath. Like I couldn’t breathe. You don’t really have trouble breathing; it’s not like you’re going to faint. But breathing becomes a chore. And it was a chore for me to breathe before that race. So I knew it was going to be tough. This is pressure time.”
There were four other runners in the race, but they were inconsequential, like ghosts, not there. All that mattered were Johnson and Yang; all eyes in the stadium were trained on them. After a late workout, Pete Newell and some of his players on the American basketball team took seats near Ducky Drake to watch the climax. They became totally engaged in what Newell called the “greatest single sports event I’ve ever seen.” Most of the Tigerbelles were there, too, rooting hard for Johnson. Lucinda Williams said she and her teammates had crushes on Rafer, their captain. “But he was too focused to look at anybody. He was the greatest, greater than Cassius. He was such a gracious man.” The darkening night and the nip in the air, a sense of autumn coming, something ending, added to the tension. As the race got under way, Tex Maule jotted down the impressionistic scene: “His strong, cold face impassive, the big man pounded steadily through the dank chill of the Roman night. Two steps in front of him, Formosa’s Chuan-Kwang Yang moved easily. In the gap between them lay the Olympic decathlon championship.”
Johnson ran the first two laps with determination. “I stuck to him like a shadow, dogging his footsteps stride for stride.” Midway through the race, C.K. picked up the pace, but Rafer stayed with him, moving his position from Yang’s inside shoulder to his right shoulder. He wanted to be fully visible when C.K. turned around. Just as Coach Drake had predicted, C.K. did indeed turn around. And he was stunned to see Rafer at his right shoulder, running faster than he anticipated. Not only that, “he looked like he was smiling or something,” Yang recalled.
Johnson was smiling, but it was pure acting. “I figured he was expecting to look back and see me dragging, with my head down, looking as though I were ready to die. That’s what he thought he would see, and I just wanted to be sure to let him know that this was going to be different. I didn’t feel any different. I could have had my head down and dragging because I was feeling that kind of fatigue and pressure, but I didn’t want to show him that. So I smiled as big a smile as I could get.”
By the final lap, troublesome memories of Oregon seeped into Yang’s head. He worried that he might cramp again. But how could he shake the big guy? He felt he had no choice but to steel himself for one more acceleration, one final push to break into the clear. It seemed to work for a short time, but then Yang felt his body weakening. Coming around the turn, he looked back again, and there was Johnson, clinging, only three yards behind.
Johnson tried not to think about the clock, or how fast the pace was, or the pain in his legs. He was “struggling so hard,” noted Neil Allen, “that we in the stands could almost feel his pain.” But he kept telling himself that he had one crucial advantage over C.K. “My huge advantage was this was the last time I was going to do this. It didn’t matter. This was the last time. And C.K., he had several more times; this was not his last race. I probably made that to my advantage more than it properly was. I kept saying to myself, ‘I don’t have to do this again! I don’t have to do this again!’ That was one of the positive things that was going through my mind, and just carrying that thought, to me, was very helpful. It wasn’t anything I spoke or verbalized to anyone, but just to myself. I said, ‘This is it. Just this one more time. I can do this one as good as I’ve done it.’ You
sort of talk yourself into feelings sometimes that you use in the most positive way, and that was definitely what I was doing. I would never run the fifteen hundred again. Never. Never. More important, I would never run it at the end of doing nine other events. ‘You don’t have to do this again. And you don’t have to do the decathlon, either.’”
Tex Maule called it “the tensest five minutes of the entire Games. And it grew and grew until it seemed like a thin high sound in the stadium.” Down the homestretch, Yang was bobbing and struggling, Johnson was moving mechanically, sheer will propelling him forward. They crossed the line only 1.2 seconds apart, Yang at 4:48.5, Johnson at 4:49.7. It was Johnson’s best time ever. Yang had finished ahead but knew he had lost. A few steps after finishing, Rafer caught up to C.K., his close friend and tenacious foe. He felt at once jubilant and sad. “I never in my whole life but that once competed against someone where I had a little bit of ambivalence about beating him,” he would explain later. “I mean, I wanted to win. I didn’t want to lose to him, and I wanted to beat him and all that, but I just had ambivalence. I was exhilarated that I won and totally depressed that C.K. lost. I had both feelings.”
As they came to a stop, Rafer put his head on C.K.’s shoulder. Yang bent down to catch his breath, and Johnson bent with him, hands on knees, as officials and photographers rushed toward them in the artificial light of the stadium. Johnson straightened and walked around, arms akimbo, smiling and shaking hands with well-wishers, utterly out of breath. Yang slipped over to a bench and put his head in his hands in despair. He had wanted to win and thought he would win. But Rafer Johnson was still a god to him, and a friend, and he would have other chances. (Yang in fact would go on to set the world record in 1963.) He got up, jacket around his shoulders, head bowed, and found a Taiwanese official who hugged him and patted him on the back.
Rome 1960 Page 31
