TRYING HARDER

The death of Emil Zatopek last November continues to exert a profound effect. A few nights ago I once again watched Volume VII (the use of Roman numerals on a series symbolized by a Greek discus thrower doesn’t even seem incongruous) of Bud Greenspan’s nine-part documentary The Olympiad: Greatest Moments, which was released in time for the 1996 Olympic Games by the then-fledgling DreamWorks.

Volume VII contains two documentaries: “The Soviets” and “East Europeans.”

The “East Europeans” documentary is shorter than “The Soviets,” as befitting a conglomeration of countries that were subservient to Moscow and that served as protection to its western boundaries against the evil Western Powers during the Cold War. “East Europeans” features athletes such as the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci and Hungary’s three-time gold medal boxer Laslo Papp.

It also contains a segment on Emil and Dana (pronounced Donna) Zatopek.

Whenever I feel lackluster or that I’m not performing up to par, I fire up the VCR and watch Emil and Dana come walking toward the camera in their little garden in Prague, where they were filmed many years ago. They walk toward the camera very much aware that they are walking toward a camera and not spending a quiet afternoon in the peace of their garden. They are already middle-aged. Emil is bald, and Dana has very bad teeth and is aware of it; she speaks with an effort to keep her mouth closed. Their clothes are the antipathy of fashionable, more befitting a 1950s lower-middle-class couple in the American Midwest.

Yet they are noble and filled with life. Even on the fading film stock, there is a glow to them.

The film is a little confusing in that it was obviously filmed by a Czech film crew because Emil is speaking in Czech, yet the film has been overdubbed so that he is speaking to this audience in English, one of a half-dozen languages he mastered.

Emil speaks of the joy and purity of sport, and then the documentary veers off to take us through the highlights of his Olympic career: a gold in the 10,000 meters in the 1948 London Games and a silver in the 5,000 meters with his heroic sprint down the final straight in a vain attempt to catch the Belgian Reiff; then the 10,000-meter and 5,000-meter gold medal performances at the 1952 Helsinki Games, followed by the gold in the marathon. The documentary does not go to Melbourne in 1956, where he placed sixth in the marathon, following a hernia operation. Nor does it deal with his forced labor at a uranium mine after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The tape devotes a little time to Dana’s gold medal in the javelin in the 1952 Games, and she later comments on Emil’s generosity in giving one of his gold medals to Ron Clarke of Australia (who never won Olympic gold, despite his holding virtually every world record from 5,000 meters to 20 miles); she claims that she has hidden his other gold medals because if it were up to Emil, he’d give them all away. Ron Clarke is then interviewed concerning the gift of gold, which Emil handed to him before he boarded his plane, Clarke never guessing what the little package contained.

The whole segment is less than 10 minutes—about the amount of time it took Emil to cover a couple of miles in his one-hour track run world record.

There are marvelous little snatches:

• Emil embracing Alain Mimoun, following yet another second place for the little Algerian behind Emil at an Olympic final.
• Emil smiling in appreciation and weariness instead of his typical grimacing as he crosses the finish line at the 1952 Olympic Marathon, as though to say, “Man, am I glad that’s done . . .”
• Emil chattering a mile-a-minute to the press after he sits down following the marathon gold.

In each instance Emil is filled with life, which he exudes like a lamp burning in a cave.

Emil Zatopek was a man who had a little talent in running, which he polished by what today we would consider extremely hard work. His track workouts (sixty 400-meter repeats with a 200-meter jog between) were staggering. So were the results: for several years no other runner could touch him in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters—he went undefeated.

Burdened with a limited education, he read widely and taught himself six languages. He could talk on politics and physiology with equal ease and clarity.

Literally stripped of his fame by the Soviet invaders, he determined to do the best job he could digging for uranium many meters underground.

He emerged into the daylight smiling and speaking of the nobility of man.

They don’t make men like Emil anymore.

People today are generally taught to wallow in the wake of little injustices done to them, to look for excuses to underperform, to assign blame for failures and for failure to try. The radio psychologist Dr. Joy Brown, frustrated by the timbre of a series of callers looking to blame everyone else but themselves for their poor choices in life, put it simply: “We’ve become a nation of crybabies and busybodies.”

We want to be recognized for merely existing, a by-product of the mania for bestowing self-esteem like pollen on a spring wind.

And this cultural mind-set has infected running.

We demand recognition for doing something we should be doing for its own sake, because it is natural and good. We demand recognition even if we train haphazardly and race halfheartedly. We strive not to be the best we can be but merely to be. That’s enough. We’ll get by doing as little as we can and then demand some recognition for it.

And in the process we cheat ourselves. We never move far enough ahead in our training to hit that overdrive gear in our running, where the reality of a hard asphalt surface beneath our feet is negated, and we are floating, running strong and free like the human animal whose divine design infuses all of us. A result of our understriving is that we never earn admission to that special place in our running where the joy of effortless movement resides.

We elevate our egos at the expense of our spirits. We orbit rather than dive to the calm eye of the center, and therefore we drift and scan the horizon for someone to rescue us so that we can then damn them for not rescuing us the way we wanted to be rescued.

We lower our goals while we raise our heads to be patted.

We lust for cheap brass medals, while Emil Zatopek joyfully gives away his gold.

We look at Emil, and we are humbled.

We look at Emil, and we are inspired.

Emil occasionally lost a race, but he never failed.

Isn’t it time that we, long-distance runners, become children of Emil?

—Rich Benyo