The Perfect Mile

Very early on he recognised that he had a gift for running. He was never very good in the sprint, but if the game was to run around the block twice, he always won. In eighth grade, when Wes was in his early teens, the high-school coach came down to evaluate which kids were good at which sports. That was how a small town developed its athletes. The coach threw out a football to see who threw or kicked it the furthest, threw out a basketball to see who made a couple of jump shots. Then he told Santee and the other twenty kids in his class to run to the grain elevator. Within a few hundred yards Santee was all alone and knew he had the others whipped. This was ‘duck soup’ he said to himself as he ran to the grain elevator and back and took a shower before the others had returned. Most walked half the distance.

When a new kid named Jack Brown, who was rumoured to be quite a runner, arrived in town, the townspeople urged Santee to race him. The first day of his freshman year, Santee joined Brown at the starting line of the half-mile track used for horse races and almost lapped him by the finish. It felt good to be better than everybody else at something. What had started as a combination of fun – running to chase mice or the tractor – and a means to escape his father’s clutches had now become a way to excel. Each race he won bolstered his pride.

J. Allen Murray was there to help him on this path. Murray was Ashland’s high-school track and field coach (as well as history teacher and basketball/football coach). He believed Santee could be the next Glenn Cunningham, the most famous United States middle-distance runner and a Kansas native. The problem was that Santee barely had enough time for classes, let alone running, because his father wanted him home to work. Murray told Wes that if he didn’t have time to train, he should just continue to run everywhere he went. That was fine with Santee.

Finally the time came for his first track meet. Scheduled for a Saturday, the meet was delayed until Monday because of a thunderstorm. Unfortunately, Santee worked on Mondays, and he knew his father would object to losing an afternoon of his free labour. Murray told him he would take care of it. The next evening he walked up the steps to the Santees’ house. He had invited himself to dinner. Wes’s father normally greeted visitors with a .22-calibre pistol and an offer of five minutes to get off his property. This time David Santee at least pushed open the door, but his hospitality ended there. Through dinner and dessert, Coach Murray explained to Wes’s parents why they should allow their son to attend the meet – how it was good for the boy to be challenged in competition. David Santee didn’t utter a word the entire evening: not a yes, not a no. Murray left without an answer, and Wes disappeared into the fields afterwards. Alone in the dark, he clawed at the dirt and grass, wondering how he would ever get out of this place. If he hadn’t learned to hate his father before this night, he did so now.

The next day Coach Murray told him to get up early on Monday to do his chores; he would pick him up at seven o’clock. Santee rose at four, hauled feed, milked the cows, and did everything required of him before his coach arrived. David Santee was working in the fields and thought his son had simply left for school. It was the first time Wes had left the county, and although he was the youngest in the mile race, unaware of competition tactics and scared after having disobeyed his father, he placed third. He was awarded a red ribbon and could barely stand still with the excitement. But then he had to go home. When he entered the house, his father was sitting at the table. From the grim look on his face he obviously knew that Wes had gone to the meet.

‘I won third place,’ Wes said with sheepish excitement.

‘If you have time to miss school and do all this’ – his father bit off each word – ‘then you have time to get all the rest of the ploughing done.’

For some eighteen hours, Wes Santee sat on the tractor, ploughing miles of fields without a break for lunch, and certainly not for school. His throat burned from thirst, his spine ached from the jarring movements of the tractor on uneven terrain, and his hands were rubbed raw from gripping the wheel. Working from dawn until ten o’clock at night, Wes finished two days of ploughing in one. As a man who spent most of his youth labouring on the farm, he would remember that day as the hardest he had ever endured. When he finally returned to school, Murray asked if he was all right. Santee nodded. Murray then asked him if he wanted to go to the next meet in Mead, Kansas. Santee said yes.

After Wes left, Murray called the ranch to say one thing to Santee’s father: ‘I want you to bring your truck in and haul some kids to Mead.’ David Santee didn’t reply, but the tone in Coach Murray’s voice made him understand that he didn’t have a choice in the matter. Like most bullies, David Santee folded when someone finally stood up to him. The next week he showed up on time with his truck, and though it angered him that his son was wasting time that would be better spent on the ranch, he never got in the way of Wes’s running again.

Over the next four years, Wes Santee scorched around tracks throughout Kansas. He won two state mile championships, broke Glenn Cunningham’s state high-school record, became the favourite son of Ashland, and was targeted by college track recruiters from coast to coast. He had found his way out, and now there was nothing that could stand in his way. He trained as much as possible, studied hard to keep his grades up, and decided not to let things get too far with his high-school girlfriend because recruiters were not interested in athletes with wives or children. Shutting himself down with her was not easy, but he had to get out of Ashland.

When Bill Easton, the University of Kansas track and field coach, offered him a scholarship in 1949, Santee accepted. Over the previous two years Easton had won his confidence, probably because he was everything Santee’s father was not: he wore a coat and tie, spoke intelligently, won friends easily, and backed up his words with action. Under Easton’s guidance and encouragement, the KU track team had become one of the country’s best.

The summer before he left for college, Wes had his last confrontation with his father. While he dug yet another six-foot-deep hole in the hard ground for the soon-to-arrive electricity poles, his father started pounding on his back with his fists because he was digging too slowly. That was it. The 17-year-old, his shirt soaked with sweat and hands blistered from the work, stormed back to the house, informed his mother he was leaving, and said goodbye to Henry and Ina May. In the stable, he saddled Bess, the horse his father had given him, and put a halter on a second mare, which Wes had yet to name (a local farmer had given her to Wes in exchange for breaking some horses). He then led his two horses towards the front gate, a cloud of dust from their hooves trailing behind them.

Suddenly, his father appeared from behind the barn and blocked his way. ‘You’re not taking that horse anywhere,’ he said, gesturing towards Bess.

Sensing the coiled violence in the rigid way his father stood in front of him, Wes grimly said ‘Okay’ and unstrapped his saddle from Bess. He then threw it over the other horse, which had never been ridden before, and led her through the gate, leaving his father without a goodbye. When he was two hundred yards away, Santee carefully hoisted himself up on the horse and rode into town. He stayed with a friend who owned the local ice plant and had once told him that he could stay with him if things ever got too bad at the ranch. Santee lived there until college began.

In Lawrence, Santee fell under the protection of Bill Easton. The coach invited the youth, who had almost nothing with him but the clothes on his back, to stay at his house until his dormitory was ready. Santee might have been bold-talking and powerful, but he needed someone to care for him. The first morning, over a breakfast of bacon and eggs, Easton told Santee that he needed to set a good example and help lead the team. Easton spoke to him like an equal, and Santee listened.

Coach Murray had given him the opportunity to run; Coach Easton showed Santee how to turn his raw talent as a runner into greatness. It had little to do with changing his short, clipped stride, which had become ingrained in his youth while running along plough furrows and through pastures where a long stride would have been dangerous on the uneven terrain. Santee did not bring his arms back in a normal long arc, nor drive to the extreme with his kicking foot like most distance runners. Instead he had the quick arm swing and knee action of a sprinter. But with his native speed, coordination, long legs, strong shoulders, and ability to relax, he was able to sustain this sprinter style over long distances. Easton was convinced that reshaping his stride into a more classical motion would do more harm than good, so he taught Santee to harness his power through training, pace judgement, and focus. Soon enough, seniors on his team were struggling to keep up with him in practice and competition.

Led by Santee, the freshman squad won the Big Seven cross-country and indoor championships – the league that comprised the biggest and best colleges in sport in the Midwest, namely Kansas State, Iowa State, University of Missouri, University of Colorado, University of Nebraska and University of Oklahoma alongside University of Kansas. Santee set the national collegiate two-mile record in 9:21.6 and began to win headlines as the ‘long-legged loper’ who would ‘play havoc’ with most, if not all, of Glenn Cunningham’s records by the time he was finished. In the spring of 1951, at the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championships, he took seventeen seconds off the 5,000m record in the junior division, and the next day he placed second in the senior division. By the end of his freshman year, his mile time hovered in the four-minute teens (4:15, 4:16, 4:17). That summer he earned a spot on an AAU-sponsored tour to Japan and found himself running in Osaka, Sapporo, and Tokyo. There he met the American half-miler Mai Whitfield who had won two gold medals at the 1948 Olympic Games. While some athletes were hesitant to share a hotel room with the black track star, Santee gladly jumped at the opportunity. Whitfield taught the young miler to make sure to keep his toes pointed straight ahead when striding, so as not to lose even a quarter inch of distance with each stride. He also explained to Wes that a miler had the time and physical reserves to make only one offensive and one defensive move in the course of a race. When Santee returned to Kansas in August, he felt certain he was ready for more international competition. He announced to local reporters, ‘I want to make the Olympic team and go to Helsinki, Finland.’

In his second, or sophomore, year this ‘sinewy-legged human jet’, as one reporter described Santee, proved that he was on his way. Some began to compare him to Emil Zatopek, the Czech star who ran everything from the mile to the marathon at world-class levels. This was the level of enthusiasm Santee generated on and off the track. He loved racing in front of large crowds and never tired. His talent just barely outmeasured his confidence. On a flight to one meet, a Kansas Jayhawks team-mate held out a newspaper article to show Wes. ‘Look what it says here … [Santee’s college competitor] Billy [Herd] hasn’t been beaten in any kind of a race for almost two years. That includes relay carries … He’s gobbled up some pretty good boys too, Wes.’

Santee stretched his boots out into the aisle. ‘Yeah, he’s a good boy. But he hasn’t tried to digest me yet.’

In two-mile races during his sophomore year, Santee lapped his competitors. In cross-country meets he was slipping into his sweats before other runners had finished. During the indoor season he set record after record in the mile, leading his team to a host of dual meet victories. It was almost too easy. On campus he ran from class to class, and professors set their watches by the precise time at which he started his training sessions.

In April 1952 at the Drake University Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, one of the year’s most important outdoor track meets, Santee anchored the four-mile relay for his team. When the baton was passed to him, Georgetown’s Joe LaPierre was some sixty yards ahead. Santee blazed three 62-second quarter-miles, yet had trouble gaining ground because LaPierre was running brilliantly himself. As Santee sped into the first turn of the last lap, Easton yelled out, ‘He’s wilting in the sun!’ Santee was finally gaining. Stride after stride he closed the gap. When he burst through the tape yards ahead of LaPierre, setting a national collegiate mile record in 4:06.8, Wes Santee had officially arrived. ‘Santee’s not human,’ said the Georgetown coach. The Des Moines Register quipped, ‘Santee stuck out above every other athlete like the Aleutian Islands into the Bering Sea.’ The national papers picked up the best quote, from the Drake coach: ‘Santee is the greatest prospect for the four-minute mile America has yet produced. He not only has the physical qualifications, but the mental and spiritual as well.’

But first Santee turned his sights to the Olympics. As holder of national titles in the 1,500m and the 5,000m, he by right qualified for the American trial in each. In mid-June he went to California with Easton to spend a week training. They decided together that he should participate in both trials. ‘I just want to make the Olympic team,’ he told his coach. ‘Time or race isn’t important.’ On 27 June, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Santee placed second in the 5,000m trial, guaranteeing a trip to Helsinki. That night he dined on his customary steak and potato dinner and enjoyed quiet conversation with Easton back at the hotel. The next day, braving one of the coldest June days in Los Angeles history, he readied himself for the 1,500m trial in front of forty-two thousand spectators. Santee looked around for Easton, but couldn’t find him. A whistle was blown, the race called, and Santee approached the starting line alongside milers Bob McMillen and Warren Druetzler, both of whom he was sure he could beat. In the programme listing the qualifiers for the 3.40 p.m. race, Santee was predicted to ‘win as he pleases – he has all year’. He was revved to go.

Suddenly, two AAU officials grabbed his arm and shuffled him off the track before he could protest. ‘Wes, they’re not going to let you run,’ one official said.

‘What do you mean?’ Santee asked, shrugging off their hold on him. ‘What’s going on?’

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Easton running across the field. Though wearing a jacket, tie, and dress shoes, he was moving fast.

The race starter called, ‘Runners to your mark!’ and then the gun fired. Santee watched helplessly as the trial started without him.

Easton finally made it to his side. ‘Wes, I’m sorry. We’ve been in a meeting for over an hour and they’re saying you’re not good enough to run both races, and they won’t let you drop out of the 5,000 to run the 1,500.’

This wasn’t right. Only the previous week he had run the third fastest 1,500m time in AAU history: 3:49.3. It was the fastest time by an American in years. Santee welled with anger, and with balled fists looked ready to act out his frustration.

Easton pulled him to one side. The coach had the stocky build of a wrestler, and even then, in his late forties with a fleshy, oval face, he looked capable of stopping this tall athlete if necessary. His voice was calm. ‘They told me you were only 19 [sic] – not good enough to run the 5,000 against Zatopek followed up with the 1,500.I told them we don’t particularly want to run the 5,000; we want to run the 1,500. Their only response was, “You qualified for that, and you have to stay with it.”’

There was nothing to be done. Easton knew that no Olympic rule forbade an athlete from participating in two events. If he qualified, he qualified. Those were the rules, but the AAU ran the show, and if a rule interfered with what the AAU wanted, its leader either ignored the rule or changed it. This was the first time, yet unfortunately not the last, that the AAU would stand in Santee’s way. Yes, he was off to Helsinki to race in the 5,000m, but his best chance of coming home with a medal was in the 1,500m.

The three weeks between the trial and the opening ceremony in Helsinki was a whirlwind. Santee nearly died on a flight from Los Angeles to St Louis when the plane carrying America’s Olympic athletes went into a tailspin and passengers were thrown from their seats. When the plane finally righted itself, the preacher and polevaulter Bob Richards walked down the aisle asking for confessions. After a long layover in St Louis, they arrived in New York. Santee participated in the national TV show Blind Date, hosted by Arlene Francis, as well as the first Olympic telethon with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. He ran in an exhibition three-quarter-mile race on Randall’s Island and set a new American record of 2:58.3, not to mention leaving the Olympic 1,500m qualifiers far behind. The effort was born of frustration: to show the AAU officials his speed and prove their decision wrong. After a flurry of press interviews, he flew from New York to Newfoundland, then to London and, finally, to Helsinki. By the time Santee arrived in Finland he was a jumble of excitement, jet lag, hope, aggravation, patriotism, fear, and confusion – a very different cocktail of emotions from what he needed to perform at his best.

But there he was at the opening ceremony, right in the middle of it all and wanting to prove he deserved to stand side by side with the best runners in the world. When the ceremony ended, the 5,870 athletes from sixty-seven nations filed out of the stadium, soaked and cold. Santee had only a few more days to pull himself together for his qualifying round. His legs had never failed him before, and no matter the obstacle or his state of mind, he expected them to see him through once again.

3 (#ulink_46dced30-dc4a-593d-8aa3-0ddcd97e383d)

To be great, one does not have to be mad, but definitely it helps.

Percy Cerutty, Australian athletics coach

All was quiet in Kapyla, the Olympic village in a forest of pine trees twenty miles outside Helsinki. John Landy and three of his four room-mates – Les Perry, Don Macmillan, and Bob Prentice – lay in their iron-framed beds. The Arctic twilight crept in around the edges of the window, the sheets were as coarse as burlap, and the piles of track clothes and shoes reeked, but the Australians were resting easily, exhausted from being thousands of miles from home and trying to prepare for the most important athletics competition of their lives. In the days before an Olympian’s event, he felt as if he were looking over the edge of a cliff; the nerves, upset stomach, and general unease took a lot out of an athlete. The anticipation was almost as trying as the event itself. Sleep was the only relief on offer, if one could finally fall asleep.

‘Wake up! Wake up! You don’t need all this sleep!’ Percy Cerutty yelled as he burst into the room, swinging the door wide open and switching on the lights.

‘Bloody hell, Percy!’ groaned one of his athletes. ‘Thanks for waking us.’

‘You blokes don’t need all this sleep,’ their coach shouted back. At 57, Cerutty was a whirling dervish, a short, fit man with a flowing white mane of hair, goatee, toffee-coloured face, blue eyes, and the kind of voice that could wake the dead when raised. It was often raised.

‘All what sleep?’ his athletes retorted.

‘Ah, you’re hiding in here. You’re avoiding reality!’ Cerutty bounced around the floor, kicking up little wakes of cement dust. ‘The world is gathered here just outside that doorway, and all you fellas can think of is sleep. Sleep won’t get you anywhere.’ He was really getting going now. When Cerutty started a rant, he went on for a while. They had to stop him.

It might have been a single voice, but it was their collective annoyance that finally said, ‘Look, shut the hell up, Percy. It’s all right for you to wander around grandstanding, but we’re the ones who have to run. You’ve been carrying on non-stop since we got here, when all we’re trying to do is prepare to race. You’re supposed to be here to help us.’ Les Perry had to face the mighty Emil Zatopek; Bob Prentice would run a marathon; and Macmillan and Landy would toe the line with the greatest field of middle-distance runners in Olympic history. Cerutty had chosen to crash with his protégés, whether they liked it or not. They had been patient with him, but now he would have to excuse them for finally taking a stand against his antics.

After the athletes had joined him in London on 20 June (as an unofficial, non-sponsored coach, Cerutty had had to pay his own way and could afford the journey from Australia only by slow boat) for a series of pre-Olympic races, Cerutty had provoked incident after incident. They knew he needed to attract attention to promote his coaching techniques, but at what cost? Prancing around Motspur Park wearing only a pair of white shorts, he’d heckled other runners. At White City he had walked up to Roger Bannister, close enough to feel his breath, and said, ‘So, you’re Bannister … We’ve come to do you.’ He had showboated to the journalists, too. ‘Others can run faster,’ he’d boasted, ‘but none can run harder than I.’ He was dragged off screaming from one meet because he wouldn’t leave the track. On arriving in Helsinki, Cerutty had made a beeline to visit Paavo Nurmi without an invitation, and he had stayed so late with Zatopek that the Czech runner was forced to offer his bed to the Australian coach and sleep in the woods himself. His athletes were used to him, but couldn’t he have left his eccentricities in Australia? This was the Olympics. Enough was enough.

While Cerutty scrambled about the room, Landy and the others shielded their eyes from the light. Earlier that evening, Landy had scaled the fence surrounding the Olympic training arena to get in some extra training, so he was particularly tired. Compared to Don Macmillan, the miler in the bed next to him, who had long legs and a powerful chest, Landy was small. His 150lb were stretched over a narrow five-foot-eleven-inch frame, and with his quiet voice, soft brown eyes, and shag of curly hair, he hardly stood out in a room. Yet he had a strong presence. In part it was because of his intelligence, which was lively, well rounded, and quick. He also possessed a deep and infectious laugh. But mostly it was an intangible quality that people noticed, a feeling that Landy possessed a reservoir of calm, uncompromising will. In conversation with him, one immediately had the sense that he would be a rock in a storm, and that a friendship with him would endure.

Although Landy had been last on the list to make the Australian team, an honour that earned him a chance to compete but not the funds to make the trip, he had done very well in the six weeks since leaving Melbourne. In London he had placed second in the British AAA championship mile race – a surprise to himself and everybody else in the White City stadium. He’d followed that race with meets in Belfast, Glasgow, Middlesbrough, and another in London. Back home in Australia the press began to pay attention, commenting on his ‘paralyzing burst’ and how many experts ‘had not seen a runner over the last fifteen years with such relaxation, smoothness, and style’. He had even set a new two-mile record with a time of 8:54, a feat that resulted in his inclusion in the 5,000m heats on top of the 1,500m. It also improved the odds posted on him to bring back a medal. Now he just needed some sleep.

Landy and his three friends knew they owed their presence in Helsinki mainly to Cerutty, this madcap little man with his strange ideas about pushing oneself to the limit. After all, they were Cerutty’s gang. Unfortunately, enlightenment came at a cost.

To develop four Australian distance runners to Olympic standards had taken more than a sleep-deprivation regime. Unlike Finland, Australia wasn’t a country known for investing either attention or dollars in athletics. The six state amateur athletic associations ran perpetually in the red. Training methods were years behind European and American advances. Some Australians even thought too much exercise was bad for one’s health. As an athlete from the 1950s put it, ‘Runners were oddities; long-distance runners were very peculiar people; and those who ran the marathon were crazy.’ The country had a long tradition in track and field, but it was marked by neglect, a focus on gambling in professional foot races, lackadaisical training, a dearth of talent, and very little international success. Spectators and athletes alike had to pay at the gate, yet the expense of running meets consistently fell short of revenues. In promoter’s jargon, the sport ‘didn’t sell’.

Facilities for training and events were lacking as well. Australia, nearly the size of the continental United States, had only two standard athletics fields. One of those was in Melbourne, Landy’s hometown, but as Joseph Galli, a cigar-chomping, omnipresent athletics reporter of the time, wrote, ‘Olympic Park [was] a depressing shambles – lank grass covers the earth banking, dressing rooms are dirty and primitive, and the burnt-out stand remains as mute testimony of the unwillingness of Government and civic leaders to give amateur athletes the small, permanent stadium they need for the future.’ The track itself was a disaster; runners would have posted better times circling a potholed city block through rush-hour traffic.

This is not to say that Australia cared little for sport in general: among sport-crazed nations, it reached the height of bedlam. Early in their history, Australians had imported the English love of sport, and over the years had taken it to an entirely different level. It has been noted that for every thirty words in the Australian language, one has to do with sport. In the early 1950s a Saturday Evening Post correspondent explained how the country’s sports heroes were accorded a respect greater than that given to ‘ministers of State or Gospel’, and their fans were among the world’s most avid. Total attendance in the minor rounds of Australian football matches typically reached over two million spectators. And when one of their great athletes died, he or she was accorded all the trappings of a state funeral. On the international stage Australians couldn’t claim military might, economic superiority, cultural influence, political power, or historical greatness, but they could make their country known in the sporting arena. Success there fostered pride that was wanting in a nation built by convicts and gold prospectors. In cricket and football, tennis and swimming, Australians were respected, but in athletics much less so. And in distance running, not at all.

Young men such as John Landy needed to be convinced to take up running seriously, for most it was just something one played at. Born on 12 April 1930, Landy showed early promise by winning the sprint race at Malvern Grammar School’s annual sports meeting. When his proud father Gordon, who had been a fine footballer in his day, turned to his wife Elva and said that one day John would be a ‘world champion’, she laughed. He was only 6.