This is about one of the greatest Olympians of the Modern Games. No, it's not Jesse Owens, who broke five records in forty-five minutes. It's not Usain Bolt, the greatest human sprinter in the history of the planet. No current Olympian shares such perfection, such ridiculous luck, as that of Emil Zatopek.
If you've never heard the name, you probably shouldn't be surprised. He didn't do much when he competed, except BREAK WORLD RECORDS OVER AND OVER.
You could probably expect something like that from a guy who looked like this:
| thehindu.com |
So he's like, "Okay."
And that's how he started running. In between races, he devised a practice regimen called "interval training", which is a widely used method today. But at the time, people, being shortsighted little jerks, laughed at him, called him an idiot and asked why he trained like a sprinter.
Then he broke some Czech records, like the 2000m, the 3000m and the 5k. Two years later, he was chosen to run in the European Championships, where he placed fifth in the 5k, breaking his own record. This is when people started calling him a genius and conveniently forgot how "stupid" his interval training was.
As if rubbing it in everyone's faces, Zatopek went to the Olympics in London (1948) and won his second-ever 10k race. He only got a silver in the 5k.
Shortly after all this, he decided to break some world records. Like the 10k. And the 10k again. Then the 5k. And for some reason, he took the 20k record twice, in 1951.
At this point, he thought it was about time to participate in the Olympics again. (That's right; the Olympics weren't held four years after London because they were supposed to, but because Zatopek chose for this to happen.) So he competed.
And he won.
He took the 5k Olympic record, followed a day or two later by the 10k record. Then, Zatopek's ambitions grew.
"Why not a marathon?" he thought. He'd never run one before, but, it being the Olympics, Emil thought it was high time to start.
His competition was pretty tough the day he entered the event. Jim Peters, the world record-holder at the time, was competing, and he wasn't about to let a first-timer like Zatopek take the race.
Peters assumed Zatopek knew how to run a marathon. But that's where Peters was wrong. While running, Zatopek refused water from the volunteers handing out the little cups and didn't want to take any of the replenishing fruit slices, because he thought he would have to pay for them.
Emil freaking Zatopek ran an entire marathon without taking a drink because he thought he would have to pay for it.
During this race, Zatopek kept up pretty well with the leader, Peters of course, but for one specific reason: he had a question to ask.
Emil: "Hey, is this pace too fast?"
Jim, derisively: "Nope, too slow."
In Czechoslovakia, there was no such thing as sarcasm. This would probably explain why Zatopek proceeded to take off and finish the race with an Olympic-record time, while Peters never actually finished.
In this one Olympics, Emil Zatopek took on the three longest races in the Games and won all of them within a week. He didn't just win, he completely dominated. He didn't just medal, he destroyed the dreams of anyone else in the races.
But this isn't even the end of Zatopek's endeavors. Though he failed to defend his medal in his third and final Olympics in 1956 (he got sixth place, ultimately losing to one of his rivals, Alain Mimoun), he did have an excuse: he had just gotten out of the hospital.
Six weeks before the Olympics, Zatopek had the delightful gift of a hernia. It eventually caused another groin injury and stopped him from training just before he was supposed to compete.
But he did compete, and although he didn't win, he put on a pretty fantastic showing, considering his own crotch was his downfall.
While most of us refuse to leave our beds in the morning, Emil Zatopek had a running career for nearly twenty years. While our grandparents sat listening to their radios, this formally-untrained athlete was breaking record after record thousands of miles away.
While he was running, he always looked on the verge of tears and death which made him the brunt of many jokes. In response to the remarks about his facial expressions, Zatopek said, "It's not gymnastics or ice skating, you know."
Once Zatopek started winning races, spectators became less interested in his face and more interested in the shiny medals around his neck.
He won Olympic gold in the marathon the first time he EVER ran that distance, and he never stopped improving.
The wobbly, goofy run of Zatopek managed to beat out his formally-trained competitors, and with pain etched onto his countenance, he made his mark on running history forever.
In the words of Larry Snyder (he's a track coach), "He does everything wrong but win."
No comments:
Post a Comment