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Marathon genius Zatopek, supported and humiliated by communism, was a sports superstar in an epoch before mass media attention and professional contracts By Frantisek Bouc and Christopher P. Winner The event, sponsored by track and field's governing body, the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), brought together a dozen or so runners near the stadium where the first Olympic marathon ended. The gathering was hardly stellar, but the already frail Zatopek, then 73, didn't seem to mind. Bemused by the fuss, he missed the start of the televised ceremonies at which the late head of the IAAF, Primo Nebiolo, presented the athletes with commemorative medals. Zatopek, meanwhile, scanned the buffet table. He was, as Soviet-era cycling champion Jan Vesely suggested anecdotally, the ambassador of an epoch in which major sports figures were imperfect, vulnerable and sometimes poor. He was a superstar before sports stardom went corporate. "I remember once I drove him from Berlin to Prague," Vesely told The Prague Post after Zatopek's death Nov. 22 at age 78. "He brought along two packs of cherries and a can of tinned fish. He even tucked in a drink. In Dresden, he wanted me to stop the car in front of some restaurant that looked more like a pub for retirees. For 1 DM he bought a huge amount of soup and ate it. He was like a drain." At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, the hungry little army captain known as "The Locomotive" ran all the Olympic distance races -- the 5-kilometer, the 10-kilometer and finally the 26-mile marathon, in which he had never competed, winning each in Olympic record time. That's about 60 kilometers in all. "Only a lunatic," wrote Rohit Mahajan, "is likely to attempt that again." In an age where many runners train for weeks before a major race, and months before a marathon, "the lunatic," who was 5-foot-8 (173 centimeters) and weighed 139 pounds (63 kilograms), accomplished his unprecedented sweep in eight days. "[Carl] Lewis' four track-and-field golds may be overcome," said three-time Olympic javelin champion Jan Zelezny, "but to win the 5k, 10k and marathon in one Olympics will never be attained again, I am absolutely sure of this." He is probably right. What may be most significant about Zatopek's legacy, however, is that it endures. He competed in a pre-mass media age for a country run by a communist government that loathed the West. He did not have television, coaches or endorsement contracts. Unlike U.S. sprinter Jesse Owens, who came to symbolize disdain for Nazi racism at the 1936 Berlin Games, Zatopek did not have a budding superpower to promote his records. And yet his death -- which will be commemorated at the National Theater on Dec. 6 -- stopped the Czech clock. "His results," President Vaclav Havel said simply, "made our country famous." Roger Bannister, the Briton who broke the four-minute mile barrier in 1954, called Zatopek "the greatest athlete of the postwar world." At the height of his popularity, Zatopek was probably better known among Westerners than the leaders of most Soviet-bloc nations. "The entire world knew Zatopek," said former discus champion Imrich Bugar. "You could go abroad, say where you were from, and they would not know. Until you added the word Zatopek." The deputy chairman of the Czech Olympic Committee, Jiri Vicha, recalled that "many times people thought our president was [Former Yugoslav Marshal Josef Broz] Tito, but everyone knew who Zatopek was." Zatopek provided what the depressed Czechoslovak population craved, a champion worthy of fable. It was said that, when he couldn't take time off from his army duties, he ran in his boots. Sometimes he ran at night with a flashlight. The rewards for victory, apart from promotions in the military, were dubious. Vesely speaks of a "vase or porcelain." He and Zatopek, though they competed in different sports, usually had to buy their own equipment. "We had jobs. We did sports in our free time," says Vesely. "The atmosphere was different then. People were living for sports." Self-taught runner Which is perhaps why the Helsinki Olympic marathon story has entered legend. Zatopek ran it on a lark. After retaining his 10k title, he realized "the marathon won't be for a long time yet, so I simply must do something until then." He entered and won the 5k. Afterward, only the marathon remained. "I went to the Olympic village to not lose time and to learn how one is actually supposed to run it," he told The Prague Post in an interview. He beat the favorite. In his prime, between 1948 and 1954, Zatopek won 38 consecutive 10k races. He finished sixth in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics marathon even though a hernia operation had interrupted his training. He was a self-taught runner whose unorthodox training methods -- which called for repeating short-distance runs to prepare for longer events -- are now recognized as groundbreaking. When he appeared at the Moscow Olympic Stadium in 1980, long after his retirement, Bugar says the crowd knew him. "[The announcer] did not have to say who he was, the people just began shouting his name." Zatopek's style was another matter. Prize-winning U.S. sportswriter Red Smith of The New York Times called him "the most frightful horror spectacle since Frankenstein." With his wiry frame and thinning blond hair, he looked ungainly, often seeming on the point of collapse. He jerked his arms up and down across his body like flailing pistons, tongue out, his face contorted in an agonized expression. "Onlookers thought at the beginning of his run, 'Poor man, he has no chance to finish the race,' but then he would surprise them all," said Vesely. Zatopek found such comments amusing. "I was not talented enough to run and smile at the same time," he said. Only politics undermined him. A decade after his 1958 retirement, Zatopek supported the reforms of the then-Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek, and denounced the August 1968 Soviet-led invasion. For that, he was dismissed from the army in 1970, expelled from the Communist Party and stripped of his title of Meritorious Master of Sports. The press was barred from writing about him. In July 1971, to the dismay of followers, some of whom claimed he was coerced, Zatopek publicly recanted. He said he hadn't meant to be "one of the wild ones" who had supported the Dubcek reforms. Zatopek's "rehabilitation" took five years. In 1976, he became an archivist at the State Sports Center in Prague. He rarely discussed that period, although he made an oblique reference to it in one of several interviews with The Prague Post. "The regime was very loyal toward sports champions," he said. "We were in many ways more privileged than others in this country." Emil Zatopek was born on Sept. 19, 1922, one of eight children, in the town of Koprivnice, in north Moravia. In his teens he worked as an apprentice for a shoe firm in Uherske Hradiste, south Moravia. His career began almost by chance, when he participated in a student run at 19. "There was little time left to do anything during the week," Zatopek recalled in an interview with The Prague Post. "So the teacher organized a cross-country run for his students every Sunday morning. Although I didn't want to run, there was no excuse for not doing it." He joined a local sports club and excelled in longer distances. "It was just a case of recovery. I recovered very fast and I liked it. I preferred the 1,500-meter and I became better every year." As World War II raged in Europe, canceling the Olympics, Zatopek took national records in the 2k, 3k and 5k events. In 1946, he finished fifth in his first major race, the 5k at the Oslo European Championships. Later that year in Berlin, he won a 5k while racing for the Allied Forces. "I was the only one who represented Czechoslovakia and nobody had ever heard of me. I remember how I managed to leave the group one lap behind when I finished," he recalled. "From that moment on, people started to know me. I had to be careful." But Dana Ingrova, a javelin champion, would soon notice. She met her future husband in 1948 at a meet where she set a national javelin record with a throw of 40 meters (132 feet). "When I broke the national record, that gave me the green light for the Olympic Games in London. Emil came to congratulate me. I felt flattered because he was well-known at the club," Zatopkova said. Two days later, Zatopek set a new national record in the 3,000 and this time it was Dana who congratulated Emil. Fate, it seemed, had brought them together. They were born on the same day, the same month, the same year. "Emil's mother told me on the wedding that he was four hours older than me," Zatopkova reminisced. "I don't know if that is true, but it meant a lot to her as it was a family tradition that the man had to be older than his wife." Together, they traveled to the London Olympics. "I was an ordinary girl from a village in Moravia," Zatopkova said. "It was my first time in a plane, the first time outside the borders of the country and the first time in London. I was thrilled and could hardly believe that it happened to me." Zatopek won gold in the 10k, while Belgium's Gaston Reiff edged him in the 5k. Ingrova placed seventh in the javelin. But Zatopek won Ingrova's heart. "I proposed to her in London and she said 'yes.' We bought our wedding rings in Piccadilly Circus and got married a couple of months later." The marriage would last 52 years. Four years later in Helsinki, the couple was golden, with Zatopek's three medals and Dana's javelin title. She won with a toss of 50 meters (165 feet) -- the last Olympic record before wood javelins gave way to metal ones. Learning the marathon Stories of the Helsinki marathon are legion. Zatopek actually approached favorite Jim Peters of England at the starting line. "I actually didn't know him personally, but I knew that he was the favorite and that he would be wearing the 12 tag on his jersey. I was determined to follow him on the route." At 5 kilometers, Zatopek asked Peters about the pace. Zatopek's incessant talking finally induced a miffed Peters to shift away. He would later drop out. "When I lost my guide, I tried to maintain the pace we'd set," Zatopek recalled. "At the end, I was completely alone so I talked with journalists alongside the road in order to find out how my opponents were doing." That Zatopek was running at all was a triumph of sorts. In 1951, fellow runner Stanislav Jungwirth was drafted and told he could train and compete only in Soviet bloc countries. Zatopek resisted, insisting that Jungwirth be allowed to travel to the Helsinki Games. "A day before our departure we were being given our tickets," he recalled. "The officials were calling us name by name. When they called my name, I asked, 'And what about Jungwirth?' I was told that he would go later. But I insisted that he either went before me or with me, otherwise I would stay in Prague." The Czechoslovak team left without Zatopek. Eventually, officials let both athletes go to Helsinki. But Zatopek was warned that he'd be punished. "I just didn't think about it when I was running. But the successes helped me. After my marathon victory, the Czechoslovak Army's chief-of-staff found my proposed exemplary punishment on his desk. When he read about my achievement, he asked his secretary whether there were two Emil Zatopeks. She said that I was the only one, and he tore up the proposal and threw it in the trash." The silent past Zatopek's second encounter with political trouble was graver. Before his rehabilitation, his support for Dubcek resulted in labor for a Prague sanitation department as a gas station attendant and in a uranium mine. The regime may have broken him. He publicly disagreed with the Charter 77 dissident group and also backed the Soviet-led 1984 boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics. At the same time, Zatopek never mentioned the Order of the White Lion, a national honor bestowed on him by Havel in October 1998, well after the Velvet Revolution. As the childless Olympic couple grew older, they began grooming young talent. Among their proteges was high-jumper Milena Rezkova, who went to the Mexico Games in 1968 under Zatopek's tutelage. Both husband and wife rued the changes in the athletic world. "Nowadays they [sponsors] invest millions of crowns in their athletes. In our days, we didn't get a penny," Zatopkova said. "The people who invited you from abroad were responsible for your flight and $2 in pocket money a day. There were no sponsors whatsoever. We just had to earn our money with side jobs." Drugs were unheard of, at least for them. "We didn't use steroids -- we drank coffee," she said. In recent months, as Zatopek grew increasingly ill, the Sydney Olympics provided a welcome break. He was released from the hospital to watch the track and field competitions at home. "I was glad to see how he revived, especially when watching the 5,000 and 10,000 runs," Zatopkova said weeks before her husband's death. "But he wasn't as sharp as in the past ... He didn't count rounds and didn't follow the time as he would do in the past." Upon hearing of his death, Milan Jirasek, the head of the Czech Olympic Committee, said younger generations knew of his achievements. "The legend," he concluded, "does not disappear." -- With Jana Janovska, Petr Kaspar and wire reports The writers may be reached at news@praguepost.cz |
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