Flashes of Panic

(I wrote this in an airport yesterday…)

I plowed through two books on vacation which turned out to be more alike than I’d expected. Duel in the Sun, by John Brant, tells the story of the 1982 Boston Marathon, when Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley ran “in each others’ pockets” for the last nine miles of the race in a duel so hard-run that Salazar wound up in the hospital and neither ran as well again. The Perfect Distance, by Pat Butcher, is a British book about the early-80s rivalry between Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe which led to numerous world records, three Olympic gold medals and more lesser medals than bear thinking about.

I first discovered Brant when I was working at RW and he was a senior writer there. He also writes fairly regularly for Outdoor Life and Men’s Health, but I remember him for writing the stark and striking articles about the California high school cross-country team built largely from migrant workers’ children, or the explanation of the crisis in public school P.E. and its connection with childhood obesity rates. Duel in the Sun grew out of an RW article, but it doesn’t read like a magazine piece. Brant interweaves narrations of the race day, the race weekend, along with both athletes’ histories and their lives after the marathon. Salazar, who came to Boston as the two-time defending NYCM champion, struggled for the next decade with health problems that curtailed his training; Beardsley, who suffered a career-ending injury within months, slid into an illicit addiction to prescription painkillers after a farm-machinery accident.

Both are still active in the sport, Salazar as a coach (I spoke to him briefly in New York in February about one of his athletes, Adam Goucher,) and Beardsley as a speaker and overwhelmingly nice guy. 2007 will be the 25th anniversary of the “Duel in the Sun,” and you can bet much noise will be made at the marathon; they make a point of bringing back the champions celebrating five-year anniversaries of their wins.

Brant never mentions the actual result, though he mentions the winning margin, two seconds, and quotes both athletes saying, “As far as I’m concerned, there were two winners.” You need to check the cover to see which one is wearing the laurel wreath (Salazar.)

Butcher follows this example in The Perfect Distance, emphasizing the rivalry itself over the results. Unlike the one-day clash between the favored Salazar and the outsider Beardsley, the Ovett/Coe rivalry spread over half a dozen years—though, as Butcher often laments, the pair only raced each other seven times in eight years, and four of those races were Olympic finals. Coe and Ovett ushered in the era of professionalism in track, of rabbited record attempts, and perfected the art of “ducking”—that is, avoiding showdown races which might change them from two Number Ones to a One and a Two.

They also, by Butcher’s account, by themselves managed to hold Western interest in the Moscow Olympics (where Ovett won Coe’s specialty, the 800m, and Coe won Ovett’s, the 1500m,) and launched a golden age of middle-distance running in England. The heyday of the rivalry, between the Moscow and Los Angeles Games, is where the book crackles—Coe’s nine-day tear of three world records, for example, or Ovett’s “backwater” races and week-on-week record trading. Butcher is the track correspondent for the Financial Times, among others, and he’s a resourceful and determined reporter. He includes interviews with significant rivals, and outlines past rivalries between milers, even to the point of interviewing the great Swedes, Arne Andersson and Gunder Hägg, who ran thirty-five match races during the Second World War (Sweden was neutral) and lowered the mile world record from 4:06.4 to 4:01.4.

What’s less easy to follow is Butcher’s bouncing back and forth between Coe and Ovett in the early parts of the story, comparing their development so closely that at times it’s difficult to tell which athlete he’s telling us about. Also unlike Brant, Butcher is unafraid to make himself a character in the story—and, as a correspondent at the time, he was—sometimes simply to disclose his own biases and potential agendas, but sometimes simply waving at us as if to say, “I was there!” Brant is so unobtrusive that when he mentions Salazar meeting a reporter for an interview on the Nike campus, we almost forget that the reporter must have been Brant himself. (Butcher also slips by naming Salazar as the Boston champion in the year of Rosie Ruiz, when that was actually a Bill Rodgers year.)

Duel in the Sun, I think, should be required reading for anyone who follows marathoning. The Perfect Distance (which we got, I think, by ordering it from amazon.co.uk, though it appears to be available through the mothership nowadays,) will make entertaining reading mainly for hardcore track geeks like myself.