Feet of fire

Today We Die a Little! The Inimitable Emil Zatopek, the Greatest Olympic Runner of All Time. By Richard Askwith. Nation; 457 pages; $26.99. Yellow Jersey; £16.99.

FEW athletes are good enough to win an Olympic gold medal. Few people are brave enough to stand up to a tyrannical regime. Emil Zatopek did both. The “Czech Locomotive” was the greatest long-distance runner of his era, and arguably of all time. He won four golds and a silver at the 1948 and 1952 games in London and Helsinki, including the treble of the 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres and marathon at the latter—an achievement that has never been matched. The Helsinki marathon was his first ever race at that distance; he broke the Olympic record by six minutes.

But equally famous were Zatopek’s generosity and courage. In sport, that meant sharing training tips with whoever asked, pushing himself harder than anybody had before, and giving away one of his medals to an athlete he thought more deserving. Beyond running, he was known for welcoming travellers into his modest home in Prague, and publicly criticising the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 at great personal risk.

This was not, as Richard Askwith reveals in a new biography, “Today We Die a Little!”, the first time that he had resisted. Remarkably, Zatopek threatened to withdraw from the Helsinki games after the Communist Party had prevented the son of a political dissident from competing. Eventually, the party backed down, such was his importance to Czechoslovak propaganda. Mr Askwith says he can think of only one other world-famous athlete who risked the best years of his career by resisting a government: when Muhammad Ali, the great American boxer who died on June 3rd, refused to serve in the Vietnam war (see article). Ali was barred from competing; Zatopek was more fortunate.

Strangely, given the myths surrounding Zatopek, his defiance before Helsinki has been largely forgotten. It is one of many illuminating episodes that Mr Askwith has rescued from obscurity, while scrutinising popular tales. Yes, as a factory worker and then a soldier Zatopek used to train in army boots in the snow or on the spot, sprinting up to 32km (20 miles) a day. But probably not, as rumour had it, with his wife Dana, an Olympic javelin champion, on his back. He did indeed work in a uranium mine after his dismissal from the army in 1968. But as a labourer in exile, not a concentration-camp inmate.

Mr Askwith, who has written two other books about running, is best when describing Zatopek on the track: chatting with his rivals in various languages while jostling for the front, scrunching his face and flailing his arms (“like a man wrestling with an octopus”, according to a contemporary sportswriter) while accelerating for the finish. He is thorough, too, with his subject’s political life. Zatopek was not a hardcore dissident. He benefited from his working-class background, believed in communism, fulfilled his propagandist duties and added his name to public letters condemning political prisoners. He recanted his criticism of the regime in 1971 as a broken man, unable to find respectable employment.

Mr Askwith devotes much effort to defending his subject’s concessions to authority. A general willingness to yield to ruthless tyranny does not make Zatopek’s occasional acts of defiance any less courageous, he argues. Yet the author struggles to accept the fallibility of an Olympian hero, ultimately arguing that “it matters little how much of the Emil legend was real”. It is an odd conclusion to an otherwise rigorous account of someone who was not, as some believed, a saint—but, like Muhammad Ali, a great athlete and a good man.