SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

Did the Introduction of Money Into an Amateur Sport Ruin It, or Were We Romanticizing the Starving, Penniless Runner?

The first four installments of Don’s book appeared in our last four issues.

OVEMBER 1979 MONEY

In the spring of 1976, while I was still, by profession, a sixth-grade teacher, I enjoyed a three-day weekend in Eugene that resulted in a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. News of my third-place finish in the Olympic Trials Marathon preceded my return to Spokane, and on Monday morning Loma Vista Elementary School was ablaze with excitement.

The enthusiasm of the kids snowballed with the enthusiasm of the teachers throughout the week, and on Friday the principal decided to direct all that energy into the first pep rally in the school’s history.

The kids, never having attended a pep rally before, filed into the gym as they had always been instructed to, quietly, with a minimum of disturbance. I stood in the hall at the rear of the gym, listening to the muffled sounds, wondering what kind of somber rally this was going to be.

After a few minutes, the principal stepped to the front, grinning. He realized that, after years of trying to calm this assembled mob, he was now living the disciplinarian’s dream. It was his duty to incite a riot. He grinned devilishly as he shouted to the throng, “Come on, what’s the matter? This is a pep rally. Let’s get excited!”

Startled, the kids didn’t respond at first. Then slowly, from somewhere, a chant began.

“We want Kardong. We want Kardong. We want Kardong.” It grew louder.

Ihave never been in the situation, but I know what a lynch mob sounds like. It sounds like this: “We want Kardong. We want Kardong! We want Kardong!”

In their first rally, the kids welcomed me onto the Olympic team with the kind of chant they had heard on the evening news and the Saturday monster movie.

“We want Kardong!”

I shivered and walked into the gym.

The eerie chant that greeted me that day will be etched in my mind forever, symbolizing as it does the high-spirited but threatening expectations of sports enthusiasts of any age. I would discover over and over again in the ensuing months that an Olympian is both encouraged and expected to live up to Olympic billing.

A second aspect of that pep rally has also stayed with me. After I walked into the gym and said a few words of thanks, the student-body president came up and handed me a gift. It was an old sock filled with coins, tied in a knot at the top. The money had been collected from the students to help send me to Montreal.

The gesture was genuine, and I appreciated it. But beyond that, the scene symbolized a set of beliefs and values about money and the Olympic Games, all of which continually force their way into my mind during these months preceding the Olympic Trials.

Somewhere in memory are scenes from a movie I once saw about a young Cuban marathoner who was sent by his town, at great sacrifice, to the St. Louis Olympic Games. Along the way he was cheated out of his money, and he ended up in Miami, broke and ashamed. To reconcile his loss, he ran the rest of the way to St. Louis, in street shoes, and got there just in time to enter the marathon, determined to win.

The Cuban was on his way to a clear victory in the race until an announcer mistakenly broadcast the news that someone else had won. Crestfallen, he dropped out, and though he discovered the error soon afterward, it was too late. He made a heroic attempt to regain his position, but finished out of the money.

So to speak.

I probably wouldn’t like the movie if I saw it now. The guy probably ran like an offensive tackle and wore black socks. But at the time it was as symbolic a picture as there could be. Money and society. Sacrifice and suffering. One man’s determination to be heroic in spite of the pitfalls of evil money.

lL used to take great pride in the monastic exercise of long-distance running, back before Charlie’s Angels and the president took a shine to the activity. If I was hassled by people as I ran, the experience simply reminded me of the depths of my heroism. If I was short on funds because I wanted to pursue an athletic fantasy, it simply strengthened my desire to succeed.

My teammates and I overstated our disdain for monetary rewards in those days, and we emphasized our ability to tolerate the meager but pure lifestyle that would allow us time to develop as runners.

On track trips we would receive five dollars each for dinner, then pool it to buy a loaf of bread and some sliced meat. We’d each make about four dollars on the deal and gloat over our gain.

At buffets we considered ourselves terrors. We knew the owner of any all-youcan-eat place would increase his buffet price in the week following our rampaging, gluttonous visit. We got triple our money’s worth, or so we thought.

Once, at the AAU cross-country championships in Philadelphia, my friend Brook and I arrived at the postrace buffet after most of the food had been eaten. All that was left was a little bread and some half-melted ice cream. Undaunted, Brook began spreading ice cream on bread, and we were soon able to enjoy homemade ice-cream sandwiches.

As mooching goes, Brook was one of the best. He has eaten more free meals at more dormitories around the country than anyone, ever. Once, to get a free lunch, he walked through a dormitory kitchen, past unquestioning cooks, servers, and assorted staff, innocently avoiding the meal-card puncher, who would have thrown him out. Another time he walked out of a cafeteria with an enormous serving bow! filled with raisins. One summer, to avoid paying rent, he stayed in the bushes behind a dormitory at Stanford, rolling his sleeping bag up every morning when the gardener woke him. His clothes were hung neatly on hangers in the branches around him.

“T don’t do those things anymore,” he admitted to me recently. “I saved some money, of course, but I really did things like that so I could tell stories about it later.”

Perhaps we weren’t that hard up. We had some money and we lived reasonably well. Still, we weren’t actually making money by running. We did sacrifice to continue, and there was a certain purity in that fact that we relished.

Things have changed dramatically since then. In the last few years, with the increase in running interest, the amount of money available to people associated with running has also increased. Whether it’s the shoe business, the clinic business, or the race business, the money is there. It’s possible to live comfortably as nothing more or less than a runner.

A college teammate of mine who had been out of the running scene for a few years was intrigued to listen to conversations at a prerace party recently.

“The predominant topic didn’t surprise me,” he said. “It was racing. But do you know what was second? Business. Everyone was talking about their stores or running gear.”

This is no surprise to those who have been close to the sport recently, but it would amaze the majority of people in the country, people who still consider amateur sports to be full of amateurs.

I was talking with a man the other day about some of the money available, in a variety of forms, to amateur runners. When the extent of it sank in, he suddenly exclaimed, “But that totally destroys the Olympic ideal!”

“Not the Olympic ideal,” I responded, “only the amateur ideal!”

And as I train in these months before the Olympic Trials, the fact that I’m heavily into the running business does not really diminish the fact that I’m essentially, still, into running itself.

I’ve spent fifteen years of my life trying to perfect a talent I have for moving quickly over the earth’s surface. I’m still attuned to that activity itself, even though I’m earning a living because of it. There is a distinction between running for money and running for running’s own sake, of course, but the money has nothing to do with it. You feel the distinction at gut level.

We don’t lose respect for a professional athlete because he gets money for his sport. We lose respect for him if, and only if, he ceases to love his profession.

In my pre-Olympic training, I have kept sorting this out in my mind. I run thinking of runners who have failed because they are distracted by money, and I try to steer a course that remains committed to an Olympic ideal of athletic excellence, regardless of the money or lack of it. In this society, that isn’t easy.

About a month ago, a man came into my store and spoke with my partner about a sports extravaganza he was organizing. He wanted our store to be one of a hundred participating businesses, each of which would pay three hundred fifty dollars for a display in a large arena. Three professional athletes would be brought to town to shake hands and sign autographs for what he hoped would be twenty thousand participants. From a total budget of around one hundred thousand dollars, five thousand would go to the Olympic fund-raising organization.

When I heard about this I began seething. For days I ran distracted by the man’s scheme. Distracted by money.

He called back a week later. “Your partner says you have some reservations about the event,” he said.

I was calm, I think. “Yes, I do. I think that five thousand dollars to the Olympic fund represents a pretty low proportion of your total budget.”

“Well,” he replied, “I know it may seem like it, but you have to realize that our expenses are enormous. We had to pay Jim Zorn an extra three thousand dollars just to stick around for three extra hours.”

This was the wrong thing to tell me. It reminded me that while amateur purists, which I no longer am, are sitting around discussing how to prevent money from going to amateurs, the real rip-off of the sport is occurring at another level.

“Look at it from my perspective,” I told the man. “You’re paying three professional athletes, only one of whom is in an Olympic sport, five thousand dollars a day plus expenses. You’re paying a mere five thousand dollars out of your total budget to the Olympic fund. And not only are you asking me to show up for free, you’d actually like my store to pay three hundred fifty dollars for the privilege.”

“All right,” he said, after a pause, “we’d be glad to give you the booth space for nothing.”

There it was. A magnanimous concession from a representative of the business world to me, a representative of the Olympic world. I thought of the years of training I had put in and the months of hard training ahead. I thought of the thousands of runners who are still unable to afford the cost of pursuing their love, running, even while the money proliferates. I thought of that day four years ago when the mob yelled “We want Kardong!” and handed me a sock filled with money. I thought of the crust of bread, free booth space at a sports extravaganza, that had just fallen in front of me. I considered my own lost innocence.

“T’ll tell you what,” I replied. “I’ll be happy to show up for whatever Zorn is getting.”

The laughter on the other end of the line was deafening.

He thought I was kidding.

(JANUARY 1980) THE RUNNER CRUMBLES

After more than a week of feverish, blurred, coughing, snot-blowing incapacitation, I was finally back on my feet. Barely. It had been one nasty week of illness.

One week earlier I was telling myself that, through some mysterious process, the infection that was beginning to throttle my throat would soon be gone. I can run a hundred miles a week with relative ease, so there was no reason to think that a simple virus would frustrate my body’s ability to battle it.

I was mistaken.

During the first day of this disease, I thought that a good night’s sleep would bring me around. No. When I called in sick the second day, I made plans to run the following day. No way. The third day, weak and coughing, I bailed out of my training plans and went to bed early, determined to get a few miles in the fourth day. The fourth day I bundled up and ran a half mile before I turned around and ran home, wheezing and coughing and cursing.

By this time it was my cough-racked chest that bore the brunt of the infection’s attack on my body. I felt that a viral Rocky Balboa had been punching me in the lower middle part of my rib cage for fifteen rounds. Somewhere during the bout he must have scored a few hits on my face too, as evidenced by the nosebleed I suffered one night.

And then finally, after multiple attempts, I was back on my feet, feeling well enough to try running. I had been down for a count of eight. Eight long, miserable days.

The books all say that someone who runs as diligently as I do is addicted to running. If denied my daily fix, I would reveal the usual symptoms of narcotics withdrawal.

It is a tribute to the mean punch of that tiny, viral Rocky that I never once exhibited any such signs of addiction. Cold turkey from running was easy. Mentally I felt I should try to run, but physically I had no desire. None.

When I finally recovered, though, and got dressed for a ten-mile run, it did seem good to be back at it. To have beaten the flu bug. To be breathing more like my old self again, as they say.

And then I began running.

You wouldn’t think that in a week I could have forgotten how to run—which foot goes first, and which leg to use after the left. Which muscles to call into action in which order. Was it hamstring-quads-calf or quads-hamstring-calf? I had forgotten.

On top of that, there was very little muscle tone to rely on. I felt flabby, uncoordinated, tired, and out-of-place. If someone had seen me, I thought, they would have noticed the difference. One week of flu had made me a novice runner. Was this my condition only five months before the Olympic Trials?

The condition I was in, and the proximity to the 1980 Olympic Trials, brought back chilling memories of 1972 and my first attempt at making the Olympic team.

In the year prior to that, I was in my final chapter of college life. I had run some successful races, finishing near the top of the national ladder several times, but also running more than my share of mediocre races. Graduation from college brought the usual flux of confusion as to future plans.

Should I continue running competitively, even though I had no reason to consider myself anything more than a better-than-average runner? Should I try for a spot on the Olympic team, a spot I had no good reason to believe I could reach? Or should I start doing whatever it was I was going to do for a living? Teaching? Graduate school? Or what?

Somewhere, while I was trying to decide, I read an interview with Frank Shorter, who was then on the upward spiral of a running career that would bring him the Olympic gold medal. He described being at a similar crossroads in his life a few years earlier, and told how he had decided to put all his energy into his training. “I didn’t want to quit,” he was quoted as saying, “and have to tell myself for the rest of my life, “Well, maybe I could have been. . ””

The quote hit home. I made up my mind to take the next year off from everything but running. To organize my life around a systematic, insufferably dedicated training program and see what would happen. If an undistracted immersion in running didn’t bring results, nothing would.

So I began my golden year. I was living in California, where I had plenty of good weather and training opportunities. I didn’t work. I ate, ran, and rested.

In the morning I’d get up about eleven and head out for ten miles. Upon returning, I’d eat a big breakfast, then I’d shower and eat a big lunch.

In the afternoon I’d sit down in an enormous bean-bag chair and read for an hour or two, then I’d put in another ten-mile run or a hard track workout and wander home to watch reruns of Dragnet on television before dinner.

After dinner I’d read a little more, peruse a few Zap Comix and discuss their significance with my roommates (“What does it all mean, Mr. Natural?’”), then settle down for The Tonight Show. At 1:00 a.m. it was time for bed.

The next morning at eleven the cycle began again. And with slight modifications and embellishments it went on day after day after glorious, self-indulgent day.

My mileage increased from the ninety miles per week of my college days to over a hundred and forty. It was hard-core training, but I seemed to be tolerating it and getting stronger.

The long-range goal was, of course, the Olympic Trials, but in the meantime I took what came along, including indoor running and my first marathon. One weekend they occurred within twelve hours of each other, as I ran my fastest indoor two-mile Saturday night and my first marathon the next morning. I was showing great promise but little sense.

That was also the winter I qualified for my first U.S. team, to compete indoors against the U.S.S.R. in the three-mile. I ended up rooming with miler Bruce Fischer from Syracuse, who was also on his first U.S. team. After getting our team uniforms, we strutted around in front of the mirror in U.S. colors, acting like ten-year-olds wearing adult clothes, giggling self-consciously.

Everything was on schedule for an Olympic berth. It was early in the year, Thad not yet begun speed training, and yet I was running better than ever. I had made a U.S. team and had had my first intoxicating taste of international competition. After the U.S.-U.S.S.R. indoor, I got back to a schedule of high mileage and moderate track work and began looking toward the Olympic Trials.

A month later, competing in my first outdoor race, I ran tired. The sluggishness was due, I was sure, to the heavy training I was doing. When I lightened up and began to peak, the quickness would return.

It didn’t. On successive weekends I raced slower and slower. After one especially bad mile race in Modesto, I decided that something might physically be wrong. I went to see the doctor.

“You have mono,” he pronounced, after testing.

I sat stunned.

Eight years later the effect of those three words—you have mono—is almost as strong as it was in 1972. As I sat in the doctor’s office, I tried to relate to the news as I felt one should always relate to life’s great practical jokes. I became detached, analytical, philosophical.

“Life is unfair. But that’s not cause for despair,’ I mumbled in my mind. “Whoever’s testing you is watching now. Relax. That’s the way it goes.” I searched

for the right line. “Imagine you’re a character in a book. Enjoy the irony.” I groped for truth in sayings I remembered from the locker-room wall. “Champions are gracious and humble. Lock your lockers!”

Something worked. One of those lines I spoke to myself, or a combination of them, or the fact that I really did appreciate the irony of having spent a year training for nothing, kept me cool. I decided to ride out the illness and enter the Olympic Trials anyway.

I remember now how I felt, after two weeks of infected incarceration in my house, when I first took to the streets again. I felt just how I felt after my recent eight-day battle with the flu. For two weeks I ran five miles a day, relearning how to run, searching for lost muscle tone, begging for a return of fitness.

The results in the Olympic Trials were predictable. I ran two mediocre races, finishing well out of third place, well off the Olympic team. It was an exercise in humility and how quickly one can fall from fitness to fatness.

When I hear any of the great runners, jumpers, or throwers of this country, someone people believe has a great chance for an Olympic gold medal, make the comment that their first concern is making the U.S. team, I now realize that they’re not spouting false modesty. Rather, they’re revealing a realistic appreciation of the fickle cards dealt by Lady Luck.

This time, in 1980, I’ll recover from my illness in time to return to top form. But as I train with Olympic hopes, the specter of a drastic reversal in my conditioning and a fall from competitive fitness runs beside me. A carefully constructed training program is balanced precariously when one considers the chances of running amok with luck.

A rock lies in wait to turn an ankle. A car driver forgets to look to the right as a runner approaches. A muscle in action begins to pull. Billions of viral Rockys look for a body to punch.

It’s all part of the Olympic game. Years of training. Hours of dreaming. And knowing it can all come down to an unfortunate, untimely, unbelievable stroke of bad luck.

(FEBRUARY 1980) SPEEDY GOES TO THE OLYMPICS—ALONE

I was reassured, as I sat watching the Winter Olympics on TV, to be continually reminded that Sammy Davis, Jr., and his good friend Speedy Alka-Seltzer would be attending the Olympic Games. I smiled as I watched them board the plane, bound for Moscow, and heard Speedy’s uplifting voice. I was reassured to know that our country really would be represented at the 1980 Olympic Games.

“They’re going to Lake Placid, not Moscow,” I was told flatly, unsympathetically, when I revealed the good news to a friend of mine.

“Oh, no,” I countered. “If it was the Winter Olympics they’d say so. You heard them: ‘Alka-Seltzer is going to the 1980 Olympic Games.’”

Thus I held on to hope, while the Soviet government continued to ignore President Carter’s deadline for exiting Afghanistan.

At this point I have a confession to make. My life does not revolve around the Olympic Games. In looking over some of the articles I’ve written in this Olympic series for Running Times, I realize that I’ve sometimes given that impression.

That impression is poetic license, a prerequisite for the kind of article I’ve been asked to do. A way of increasing the interest of the reader in the ongoing challenge to make the Olympic team. A method of focusing my own thoughts on what I’m writing.

That impression is false. I can live without a hug from Misha the bear. I really can.

In the past few weeks I’ve been approached by friends and well-wishers who want to know what I think about the boycott. Whatever answer I give, they invariably put on a face of grave mourning and then ask, “What are you going to do now?”

Well, dear friends, here’s what I’m going to do now: Get up in the morning, tun, eat, listen to the radio, go to work, eat lunch, run, watch TV, and go to bed. Go to movies, plays, concerts, games, exhibitions, discos, and races. Ski, swim, tun, golf, hike, read, and sleep. Work and play. Run and rest. Sit in a nice steamy hot tub with my friends. And so on.

A lot goes on in life.

I was in Florida a few weeks ago for the Gasparilla Distance Classic, and as I sat at dinner the evening before the race, in walked Ed Ayres, Running Times’s editor-in-chief. Perry White to me. Ed is the one who first suggested this Olympic series to me. He’s the one who decided the Olympics was a sufficient excuse to allow a former Olympic marathoner like myself to write convoluted, self-indulgent pieces like this one. Ed gets the same phone call every month (“Ed, it’s going to be a little late again”). He always responds with infinite patience.

“What do I do now?” I asked him in feigned exasperation.

“What do you mean?” he responded.

“You hired me to do an Olympic series, and now there aren’t going to be any Olympics. I’m out of a job!”

He leaned back in his chair, exuding wisdom. “Well, I disagree,” he began. “As I see it, there are several interesting approaches to the situation. . . 2” And on he went.

After a minute or two I broke in, “But, Ed, I had this great article all ready. You see I got on this flight to Denver and Dylan got on the plane. Bob Dylan! I had the whole article planned.”

Ed smiled. He knows me pretty well by now, and he knew the boycott wouldn’t end the Olympic series I was writing.

And now, by convincing you that life goes on without the Olympics, I’m giving the impression that I’m not especially interested in them, and that the boycott is a minor issue in my estimation. That’s not true either.

I’ve had this dream, this infatuation, this inebriation with the Olympics for many years. For at least the last ten years I’ve been an Olympic hopeful and have worked for a lifestyle that would make Olympic participation a possibility.

After one successful try in 1976, I was convinced I had an opportunity to win a medal in 1980. Much of what I’ve been doing has been predicated on that. All of my training for the last year has been woven around the Olympics, focused on that goal.

Thad a chance. A chance, however slim, is worth nurturing.

In my article last month I spoke of a bout I had just had with the flu, an illness that seemed to set my training back twenty years. I described my Olympic bid in 1972, when I was running better than ever until mononucleosis knocked me down a few weeks before the trials. I was philosophical about the role that illness and injury play in the Olympics and about years of work that dissolve in the presence of bad luck.

And as I sat watching the Winter Olympics between Alka-Seltzer commercial breaks, I heard Dick Button bemoan the fact, for the umpteenth time, that Tai Babalonia and Randy Gardner were out of the pairs figure skating because of Randy’s pulled groin muscle.

“Sure they moan about that,” said a friend of mine. “But who’s moaning about the way the government pulled the groin of every potential competitor in the summer Olympics?”

I love that phrase. Pulled their groins.. .

In fact, a lot of people were bemoaning the boycott. I had spent several days writing a statement for FootNotes magazine against the boycott, but in doing so I felt helpless. Like a vegetarian addressing the Cattlemen’s Association. Like a Quaker addressing the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Like the President of the United States addressing a group of militant Iranian students. My argument seemed wasted—or worse, maybe I was wrong.

The argument goes around and around.

Politics and sport don’t mix. Politics and sport have always mixed. The boycott would be ineffective. The boycott would hit the Russians where it hurts, in their national pride. Afghanistan is no different from Vietnam. An Olympic boycott would have no impact on Soviet actions in Afghanistan. A boycott would show the world where we stand. Sport should not be a weapon of national political systems. It always has been. And on and on.

One thing left me especially bitter, though, and seemed to cut through the arguments of both sides.

For as long as I can remember, for as long as I’ve been paying attention, the U.S. Government has denied any responsibility for amateur sport. No financial subsidies in the country, said Congress, because sport is not government business. Even people who felt slighted by this governmental indifference seemed able to justify it by arguing that at least it left our athletic system free of political interference.

When President Carter put a grain embargo in effect, he agreed to pay farmers over two billion dollars for the grain originally bound for the U.S.S.R. When President Carter declared the Olympic boycott, he offered nothing to either Olympic athletes or national sports-governing bodies by way of compensation, except for a pitiful “alternate Olympics.”

While grain farmers can go back to work, accepting subsidies even while the price of a bushel of their produce has risen from $4.02 to $4.25, amateur athletes can ready themselves for the time when once again they will be ignored by their government. They can train in obscurity, make financial sacrifices, and hope that their government doesn’t need them for another political statement in 1984.

In dealing with all this, I find myself retreating to sarcasm. I was asked recently what I thought about an alternate Olympics.

“Well,” I replied, “I’d only favor such a thing on two conditions. First, the U.S. should not participate if England is involved, unless they get their troops out of Northern Ireland. Second, the participants in such a competition should all be politicians. Carter against Brezhnev, Thatcher against Gandhi, et cetera.”

But then life goes on. All those Misha souvenirs will find a home somewhere, if only in the L.A. dump. Maybe they’ll become like Edsels, or pet rocks. Wonderful absurdity.

In the meantime, while all this has been going on, a cycle has been completed here in Spokane. Crocuses and tulips have begun to push up through thawed patches of earth. I heard birds singing the other morning when I got up to run. As I laced up my running shoes, I wondered whether I needed gloves anymore. The nasty spell of winter had been broken.

As [headed down the road to arun along the river, the problems of the Olympics seemed to melt away, and a musical jingle pranced its way through my mind.

“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief it is. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz…”

Thank God for spring and the relief of long, slow distance.

(MARCH 1980) SPRING 1980

There is no subtlety to spring. It leaps from nowhere, surprising us even though we’ve learned to expect it at the same time every year. Suddenly, we wake up and realize that a robin is singing

outside the window. We can’t remember when the robins left, and we’re not exactly sure where they’ve been. All we know is that they’re back. Spring has arrived.

The surprises are continual. As I headed out for a twenty-mile run last Sunday, I noticed that the crocuses next door were almost ready to bloom. They looked as if they’d been up for a long time, and yet this was the first time I’d seen them. This was embarrassing, since I’d been watching for them daily.

The line, “Black earth becoming yellow crocus is unmitigated hocus-pocus,” words of poet Piet Hein, floated to mind as I ran down toward the river.

The day before had featured the kind of weather people around here insist on calling unusual, even though there is no weather more typical at this time of year. During my morning run, the gray skies turned to rain, then to brilliant sunshine, aided by a strong wind out of the southwest. At night the wind was still blowing, but a nearly full moon promised unprecipitative conditions for my evening run. Nevertheless, it began snowing after thirty minutes and had piled nearly an inch on the ground by the time I returned. Fortunately, I had at least avoided scheduling a run for that afternoon, when the hailstorm hit.

The Sunday I noticed the crocuses, though, was a day of bright skies and gentle breezes, just a few degrees away from being truly warm. It was the type of day that lives in optimistic memories as “typical” of spring.

The snow that had fallen the night before had melted, leaving no trace, and the change in the weather was so complete that it was hard to believe the previous day’s conditions had existed at all. It was as if Saturday’s bizarre combination of wind, snow, rain, hail, and sun were the final throes of Mother Nature’s exorcism. The devil of winter had finally departed, leaving spring warm and peaceful.

As I ran next to the river, the smell of pine trees warmed by the sun was another surprise to the senses. I made a mental note to record this as the olfactory equivalent of robins and crocuses. It was the first spring smell I had noticed.

It’s nearly impossible to feel emotionally down on that kind of day. As I ran along, I felt lighter and more relaxed than I had in days. A week-long sluggishness seemed to lift, and I began to think I would complete the twenty miles without any fatigue at all.

In the last few weeks I had been feeling better and better about my conditioning, and as I ran along I was reassured to think back on the previous week’s total mileage and intensity. It had been exactly the kind of pre-Olympic Trials training I wanted to pursue. If anything was going to put me on the Olympic team again, the kind of program I was on was the key. All the elements of successful training had been falling neatly into place.

But as I ran along, the inevitable good feelings of spring were interrupted by the realization that, at least in terms of the Olympics, this training was wasted. U.S. athletes would not be competing in Moscow.

I can live without the Olympics. I’m not happy about the boycott, but P’ll survive.

On the other hand, perhaps influenced by the inevitable optimism of the season, people keep telling me these days that the U.S. will have its team in Moscow after all. Somehow, absurdly, this keeps me hoping.

“T can feel it in my guts,” a friend told me a while ago. “We’re going to the Olympics.”

“How do you figure?” I asked. “Carter can’t change his mind now. He’s backed into a corner.”

“T know that,” he responded. “But I still think we’ll go. Something will happen.”

“Ts there any reason to believe that?” I asked in amazement.

“T can feel it in my guts,” he replied.

Maybe he’s right, I thought, as I ran along. Maybe there’ll be a dramatic change in Soviet intentions and actions in Afghanistan. Maybe the wild daisies won’t grow this year.

I looked over to woods on the left, where in a few weeks the yellow daisies would ignite the forest floor with splashes of color. They’d be there all right.

It’s hard these days to know just how to relate to the Olympics. Are they a dead issue, or should I hold on to the notion that something may happen?

Tread the other day that Bill Rodgers finally gave up on his Olympic dream and was putting all his eggs in the Boston Marathon basket. Certainly a reasonable thing to do, considering the position he’s in. Boston means much more to him for many reasons, and with the politicians tinkering with the Olympics, who could question his decision?

But I was on the phone with a friend recently, and the subject of Frank Shorter came up.

“Frank’s running at Buffalo,” he told me.

“What?” I said. “What for? He doesn’t know something we don’t, does he?”

“T don’t think so,” he said. “But you know how lucky Frank is. He’! probably be the only athlete to show up in Buffalo just as the Russians leave Afghanistan.”

And so it goes. As I ran along, well into that twenty-miler on the first day of spring, the climate and season seemed out of place with the unhopeful signs on the Olympic horizon.

The warmth, the first flowers, the green buds, the pleasant smells all pointed to a renewal of things unseen for months. The increased daylight hours meant a departure from night running. Unsubtle spring was crying for rebirth and enlightenment, while the Olympic spirit seemed to be heading for a winter engulfed in darkness.

Running that day, I realized how out of tune the season was with the Olympic situation. I wanted to believe that the painful wrenchings of the past few months in the Olympic arena were like the weather conditions of the previous day. Like Saturday’s wind, rain, hail, and snow, perhaps the Olympics’ recent throes were actually the birth pangs of a better day. But deep down I doubted even that.

Somewhere in my head a memory jostled loose and rose to mind. It was in Montreal in 1976, in the main stadium. The Olympic flame, symbol of the Olympic spirit, had been ignited in Greece, beamed by satellite to Ottawa, rekindled, and delivered by relay runners to Montreal. There it burned, watching over the Games.

During a violent rainstorm, what to many Olympic aficionados must have seemed a religious catastrophe occurred as the flame sputtered out.

When the storm was over, while people speculated on what should be done to preserve the sanctity of the Olympic symbol, an official was hoisted to the level of the cauldron, where he flicked his BiC and got the flame going again.

Was it that easy to rekindle the sacred flame? I wonder these days, with all the talk of an alternate Olympics, whether the official with his lighter in Montreal wasn’t a good symbol for the emotional sensitivity of those who seek to set up the alternate Games.

The image of the flame in Montreal stuck with me as I ran along the river. The story of the drowned Olympic fire did not end with the BiC flick.

Somewhere beneath the stadium, in a room safe from the rain, another flame, also ignited by the original from Greece, was kept burning, just in case. Someone had obviously been thinking ahead. The BiC flame was extinguished and the torch relighted with the real flame. The Games went on.

Concern for the “sanctity” of the Olympic torch may certainly be considered compulsive, unnecessary, or just plain silly. But the symbolic importance of people protecting the flame should not be overlooked, especially during spring days of compelling optimism.

lended my twenty-miler exhausted, but inspired by the notion of rebirth and the return of light. My hope these days is that the Olympic spirit, an ideal that is seldom achieved but that should be constantly pursued, is protected from the prevailing climate of Olympic cynicism. Whatever the outcome of the current storm over the political implications of international athletic competition, we may hope that when it’s over, someone from somewhere will relight the flame, with the fervor of a religious zealot who will not let a holy thing die.

(APRIL 1980) OFF THE TRACK

Thad not especially relished this trip I was on, and now, frustrated by a cancelled flight in trying to reach Colorado Springs, I stared, fuming, out the picture windows at the jets landing at Stapleton Airport in Denver. Outside, nature itself was fuming, trying to ignite a storm in the sky.

It was to be a weekend of difficult decisions and indecipherable omens. As I stood watching the late-afternoon sky, I tried to decide whether to go on a run

from the airport, with all the confusion that entailed, or take my chances as a wait-listed passenger on the next flight to Colorado Springs.

If I made the next flight, I would arrive almost as originally scheduled and run when I got there. If I didn’t get on, though, I would have to wait, and possibly wait again, and maybe again, and in the waiting process my afternoon run would have dissolved.

Idecided to take my chances at waiting anyway, and wandered to the ice-cream shop to kill a few minutes and cool my temper before heading to the gate.

No matter how often I fly, I never seem to remember air travel’s ability to be inconsistent and enigmatic. The flight from Spokane to Colorado Springs is a short two-step affair, and I was convinced I could fly there, make my opinion known to the U.S. Olympic Committee delegates who were gathering to vote on the boycott, and fly home without missing a beat. Or a workout.

Thus, when Rocky Mountain Airlines cancelled the flight from Denver to Colorado Springs, it was more than an inconvenience. It was a break in my schedule, a threat to my training, and a further insult to my aspirations. No matter that there was no one to blame nor any explanation for the cancelled flight. Somewhere, I felt, someone was manipulating things.

I headed to the gate and handed the man my ticket. He added my name to a wait-list that was longer than the runway. Discouraged, I nevertheless decided to give patience a chance. I waited.

Fifteen minutes before flight time, the announcement was made that, due to a late-arriving plane, the flight I was waiting to board would also be late. Now I was waiting for a plane that might be really late. My opportunity to get a run in was disappearing. Frustrated and fuming again, I headed back to the other concourse.

If nothing else, I decided, I would run ten miles that day.

There is something unnerving about trying to change clothes in an airport rest room. The stall is never quite big enough. There’s no seat cover to sit on, only the horseshoe lid. There’s no clean place to step barefooted as you’re changing shoes and socks. And all that inconvenience costs a dime.

Worst of all, though, being a paranoid at heart, I kept imagining that someone with a police badge would burst in on me in the middle of things and scream, “All right, pervert, what’s going on in here?”

As I sat awkwardly trying to get my shoes and socks on, I imagined the words I would say to the man who would certainly show up soon to make the arrest. “T’m an Olympic contender!” I would scream back. “How dare you burst in when my pants are down!”

Avoiding that embarrassment, I left the men’s room, checked my clothes into a locker, and stared out at the wind-choked clouds. It hadn’t rained yet, but an hour of running would give time for anything to happen. If I got caught in a rainstorm, the ensuing chills I developed would not have the luxury of a hot shower. I decided to chance it anyway.

Out the door and running, I began to feel better. I headed away from the airport toward open space, found some railroad tracks with a dirt access road, and was soon striding along in relative comfort.

Though I felt my decision to run then rather than wait for another flight had been correct, [had misgivings. The information was unclear and the evidence conflicting. The decision had, in the final analysis, been more emotion than reason.

I tried to find some rational support for my choice, but I had little luck there. I seemed more at ease with reading the omens. It was a good omen, certainly, that thunderstorms in the surrounding areas were avoiding the region where I ran. God was protecting me. A bad omen, though, that the wind was blowing strongly in my face. Like Captain Ahab, I was fighting a head wind. Was this a metaphor for my goal that weekend of turning the USOC against the boycott? Was I pursuing an evil purpose, an unnatural force of destruction?

Suddenly a jackrabbit darted across the tracks ahead of me. Four rabbit’s feet. That was obviously good. A half mile later, though, a magpie flew along next to me, white tail feather flashing. Nasty, flesh-eating bird. A bad omen.

Entering a railroad tunnel further on, I was weighing the pros and cons of the boycott issue, trying to decide how to deal with the ambiguities and present a clear picture to the USOC delegates. As I ran, just when things were darkest, another omen surfaced in the form of light . . . at the end of the tunnel. There was no particular light in my mind, however, as the Olympic question remained hazy. I looked toward the light at the end of the tunnel again and noticed a railroad signal—red. Bad omen.

A red light at the end of the tunnel. Who could sort that one out?

And so it went throughout the run, with one symbol conflicting with the next. Perhaps the only clear sign all day was that I was able to return safely to the airport only minutes before the wind-brewing sky began blizzarding in white anger.

I decided to face the rest of the trip dressed in the red training suit I had run in. Removing my good clothes from the locker, I headed to the check-in desk. I had been guaranteed a seat on the 8:00 p.M. flight.

I called ahead to friends in Colorado Springs and left a message that I’d be in on the next plane. Twenty minutes later the flight was cancelled.

As I stood waiting for further information at the airline desk, two men dressed in military garb made the announcement that they were renting a car. Anyone who wanted to cash in their tickets and drive to Colorado Springs could join them. The girl at the airline desk let it be known she would try to get us on another flight if we wanted. Another decision to be made on insufficient data, but I was getting used to it.

I was soon on my way, by car, to my destination.

My traveling companions were all military men, past or present. In the back seat on the driver’s side was a private in the Air Force. He was returning from a month-long vacation in his home state of Florida, and when he talked, he did so in the slowest drawl possible, with frequent stutters.

Next to him was a commander in the Air Force, a black man who spoke intently of unimaginable atrocious foods. As the guest of various families around the world, he had eaten virtually everything that moved: snakes, birds, dogs, large insects, and of course everyone’s favorite, monkeys. His descriptions were detailed enough to encourage me to stare out the window at the swirling snow, trying not to listen.

On his right was a salesman of some sort, who shared joyously in the others’ tales of life in Korea, which the private described as “A land of s-s-s-sliding doors, h-h-h-heated f-f-f-floors, and s-s-s-s-s-s-slanted whores.” Everyone seemed to think that was hilarious.

I sat in the front and joined very little in the conversation. Surprisingly, during an hour-and-a-half of driving, no one asked me who I was, where I was from, or why I was going to Colorado Springs. A man in a red suit owes some sort of explanation, wouldn’t you think?

The final member of our group was the driver, a commander in the Naval Reserve. I was surprised that the Navy needed forces in the middle of Colorado, but I didn’t ask for an explanation. I still wonder.

He was, though, the perfect man for the driver’s seat. No Captain Ahab, he was as cool as the weather, piloting our Chevy through the snow and ice, unruffled when our windshield wipers stopped working, and quiet as the hum of the heater while our visibility shrank, and shrank, and shrank.

I sat staring ahead, looking for whatever mines might lie in our path.

“Whe-whe-when I g-g-g-get in t-t-tonight . . .” the private began.

“T love the way he talks,” the monkey-eating commander giggled.

“T-L-I-I am g-g-g-g-going to t-t-t-tell my s-s-s-s-s-s-sergeant that I-I-I-I rode to C-C-Colorado S-S-Springs with t-t-t-two c-c-c-c-commanders, and he-he-he’ Il j-just sh-sh-sh . . .”

“Look out on your left!” I shouted to our driver.

A camper had overturned on the road ahead, in our lane. Responding calmly to the danger, the naval commander turned to avoid it. The car began fishtailing on what turned out to be a sheet of ice.

We swerved once to the right and once to the left. At that point, I thought we were going to come out of the slide, but instead we kept turning all the way around, and I saw myself staring at two lanes of approaching traffic, as the commander spoke what might have been the last words spoken by anyone on that vessel.

“Hang on men,” he said, cool to the end. “I think we’re going down.”

In my last thoughts before we turned into the ditch, thoughts that might have been my last, two themes emerged, instantaneous and complete.

One was the realization that the situation I was in was serious. I had slipped icily off the road before, years ago, but then it had been fun. This time, the thought that struck me was that I would soon, very likely, be in big trouble. Maybe dead. T experienced a calm, peaceful fear.

The other thought was that after all this trouble, indecision, misdirection, and confusion in trying to communicate my thoughts and feelings to the USOC delegates, I was instead going to die in a car with a bunch of imbeciles who probably thought the boycott was the best idea since roast monkey.

And thus our car headed for the brink.

I did not die. I believe we came close. But as it turned out, we didn’t even get hurt. We were able to push the car back onto the road and continue on our way.

When I got to Colorado Springs I was exhausted. I told of my adventures to a few friends, was briefed on the latest developments in the boycott, and went to bed.

The next morning I watched delegates from roller skating, baseball, tennis, the YMCA, the CYO, and others in the process of deciding the future of my sport. The decision must have been difficult—I’ ve grappled with the complexities of the boycott myself—and yet somehow the final vote seemed to come easily.

I had had trouble deciphering the meaning behind the ominous forces that stormed in Denver the day before, but there was no confusion as to the force controlling the vote in Colorado Springs. For better or worse, the force was presidential, and only a few delegates chose to sail against the wind.

In the week preceding the vote, delegates had been individually called by representatives of the White House, Olympic donors like Sears pledged to withhold contributions, and the President himself threatened travel restrictions and financial retribution if the vote went against his position. Somewhere in the midst of all that, the boycott issues themselves became unimportant and the final vote inevitable.

When Robert Kane, president of the USOC, was asked at the press conference after the vote whether he felt the White House had exerted undue or underhanded pressure on the delegates, he smiled and blushed like an embarrassed schoolboy, searched for words, and finally turned the question over to USOC executive director Don Miller, who, Kane told reporters, was “paid to answer questions like that.”

A few people laughed. I felt more at home with embarrassment.

The vote seemed to come, as I said, too easily. It was over. It was time to go home. The decision had been made, and it seemed the easiest decision of the weekend.

Icaught a plane out the next morning to Denver and transferred to the Spokane flight. The weather was clear, the scenery was spectacular, and the service was

flawless. We even arrived a few minutes ahead of schedule. That day, it seemed, we were sailing with, not against, the wind.

(MAY 1980) THE SUNDAY REVIEW

I’m sitting here with the Sunday paper. May 25, 1980. On page B4, near the end of the sports section, three remnants of absurd reality stare at me with heartless nonchalance. Without conscience, without tact, and without mercy, they exist on the printed page as the tattered remains of my Olympic dreams.

Sometimes I can stare back at them with equal nonchalance. Sometimes I smile at the irony. Strangely, they do not upset me.

“Sandoval Takes Marathon Trial” is one remnant, a headline in the middle of the page. The article describes how Tony Sandoval won the Olympic Trials Marathon the day before. He is incorrectly described as having been my roommate at Stanford. Though we both attended Stanford, and though we have become good friends over the years, we were not in college at the same time.

The article touches on the situation that has become the benchmark of people’s understanding of the relationship between us: the 1976 Trials in Eugene, when we ran close together for over twenty miles, often right next to each other, vying for the third spot on the Olympic team. At somewhere around twenty-three miles I overtook him and went on to capture third.

I crossed the finish line joyously, though my jubilance was touched with the disappointment I saw in Tony’s eyes later. It was a bittersweet day.

A scriptwriter’s eye would certainly have chosen that day as the beginning scene of the four-year story of Tony Sandoval’s quest for a spot on the 1980 Olympic team. The writer might be accused of creating too pat an ending in having Tony win the next Olympic Trials, but otherwise the story would have been good fiction.

I’m not certain how I would have written myself into the story, but as the would-be writer of my own Olympic story, I have been more concerned with my own quest for an Olympic berth.

For four years now, and more intensely in the last twelve months, I’ve been trying to direct my energies toward the Olympic Trials and Olympic Games. I felt I had a decent chance at performing well in both. At the very least, I thought I would experience the intense excitement of a marathon race in Buffalo, even if the result were the bitter reward of an unsuccessful challenge.

Instead, having heard the marathon results on the telephone Saturday, and then reading them secondhand in the newspaper, I find I have been written out of the Olympic Trials marathon script completely.

A race that was the heart of my plans for four years ended up as an article in the Sunday paper. I read about it as any other sports fan might—as an observer.

A larger headline, above and to the left, signals the reason: “Japanese Go Along.” The article, describing the decision of the Japanese Olympic Committee to support a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, is remnant two of the absurd story of my Olympic quest.

A year ago, in defining the obstacles I might face in making the U.S. Olympic team, I never thought to consider a boycott. As it turned out, politics has become the insurmountable obstacle to every American Olympic hopeful.

I wrote earlier of the possible dangers facing anyone with Olympic aspirations: “A rock lies in wait to turn an ankle. A car driver forgets to look to the right as a runner approaches. A muscle in action begins to pull. Billions of viral Rockys look for a body to punch.” Conspicuously missing from the litany is the obstacle that has become the biggest of all. Rewriting the list now, I would add, “Hundreds of Soviet tanks roll toward a country to subjugate.”

If someone had told me a year ago that I’d better be concerned with the possibility of an Olympic boycott, the suggestion would have seemed ludicrous. Now, with the events of the past six months behind us, the ludicrousness seems to lie in not having foreseen the possibility ahead of time.

The juxtaposition of Sandoval’s victory with the report of the latest news in the Olympic boycott makes curious reading indeed. What should have been an athletic achievement with exciting future possibilities is instead a story without an ending. Will Sandoval win a gold medal? The scriptwriter leaves us hanging like an unwitting audience at a theater-of-the-absurd performance. We’ve been dangling on the edge of our seats in expectation, the hero has made it to step one in magnificent fashion, we’re ready for the final act when, suddenly, the curtain closes. End of performance.

Reading this at home, I am mystified by Sandy’s comment on his victory: “This is great. Four years ago was heartbreaking.” I see no hint of a letdown in his words. No clue that this win might be an even bigger heartbreak than his 1976 loss. There is only the exhilaration of victory, which is, perhaps, as it should be.

Reading this, I feel a certain heartbreak of my own, though, realizing I’ll never know if my friend might have won a medal in the 1980 Olympic Games.

The last chapter in my own quest for a spot on the Olympic team should have been written as a participant in the Olympic Trials Marathon in Buffalo. Instead, my interest in running that race began to wane as the likelihood of a boycott grew. When the boycott was finalized in Colorado Springs, I lost interest entirely.

I maintained an interest in competing in other races, possibly the ten thousand meters at the Track and Field Trials in Eugene. I was training well, with some setbacks, when Mother Nature had the final absurd comment on my aspirations. She blew her top.