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.
Landy enjoyed a comfortable childhood. His family lived in a gracious, five-bedroom house in East Malvern, an upmarket suburb a few miles south-east of Melbourne, a city of one and a half million born during the Gold Rush. The Landy family dated back to the mid-nineteenth-century influx of immigrants from England and Ireland. Along with his two brothers and two sisters, John was loved and supported by his parents, who were neither too strict nor too lenient. His father, a disciplined man, well respected in the community, was a successful accountant and served on the Melbourne Cricket Club board. His mother had a great interest in history and literature. The children attended private schools and were urged to pursue their own interests. They holidayed in Dromana, a seaside town outside Melbourne. If one asked about the Landy family, the response was that they were ‘good people’.
The young John Landy was more interested in butterfly collecting than in running. When he was 10 years old, he met a local beetle specialist who introduced him to entomology. With three other local kids, Landy often rode his bike twenty miles into the bush to chase after butterflies with a net and a pair of fast legs. At home he would carefully secure his latest find on a mounting board and add the creature’s taxonomic classification for identification.
Only