This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473524088
Version 1.0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Richard Askwith 2016
Cover © Offside
Richard Askwith has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in paperback by Yellow Jersey Press in 2017
First published in hardback by Yellow Jersey Press in 2016
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Richard Askwith has been a journalist for more than 35 years, including 15 as Associate Editor of the Independent. A keen runner and a lifelong admirer of Emil Zátopek, he has written two previous books about running. His first, Feet in the Clouds, won Best New Writer at the British Sports Book Awards and the Bill Rollinson Prize for Landscape and Tradition. It was shortlisted for the William Hill and Boardman-Tasker prizes and was named by Runner’s World as one of the three best running books of all time. His 2014 book, Running Free, was shortlisted for the Thwaites-Wainwright Prize.
On the track, his running made him a legend; off it, his charisma and humanity made him a hero. No runner has generated myth like Emil Zátopek, the Czechoslovakian soldier who revolutionised distance running after World War II. The minutiae of his victories and training methods, the poignant details of his generosity and downfall – all have been endlessly repeated and reinvented, but the full truth never told.
Zátopek won five Olympic medals, set 18 world records, and went undefeated over 10,000 metres for six years. He redefined the boundaries of endurance, training in Army boots, in snow, in sand, in darkness. But his toughness was matched by a spirit of friendship and a joie de vivre that transcended the darkest days of the Cold War.
His triumphs put his country on the map, yet when Soviet tanks moved in to crush Czechoslovakia’s new freedoms in 1968, Zátopek paid a heavy price for his brave stance as a champion of ‘socialism with a human face’. Expelled from the Army, he was condemned to years of degrading manual labour, far from his home and his adored wife. Rehabilitated two decades later, he was a shadow of the man he had been – and the world had all but forgotten him.
Based on extensive research in the Czech Republic and with unparalleled access to Zátopek's family and friends, particularly his widow, fellow Olympian Dana Zátopková, Today We Die A Little evokes not just an extraordinary man but a glorious age of athletics and a dramatic period in European history. It strips away the myths to tell the complex and deeply moving story of the most inspiring Olympic hero of them all.
Feet in the Clouds: A Tale of Fell-Running
and Obsession
Running Free: A Runner’s Journey Back to Nature
ON A SUN-SCORCHED runway in Prague, a twin-engined Československé Aerolinie airliner is waiting for take-off from Ruzyně International Airport. More than a hundred young men and women, the finest athletes in the Communist state of Czechoslovakia, are bound for Helsinki, a seven-hour flight away, where the XVth Olympic Games will begin in nine days’ time. But there is a problem. The brightest and best of them all, Emil Zátopek, is absent.
The greatest runner of his generation – perhaps of all time – is missing from the flight that is due to take him to the Games that will define his sporting life. He is at the height of his powers: twenty-nine years old, a world record holder, a reigning Olympic champion who has lost only one of his last seventy races at his specialist distances, with his sights set on an unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated clean sweep of endurance running events.1
It is the most important journey of his life. And he is late.
At least, that is how it looks. Emil’s wife, Dana, knows better. A javelin thrower with Olympic ambitions of her own, she is on the plane already, weeping. She knows the real reason why Emil is not beside her. She knows that he is engaged in a high-stakes game of ‘chicken’ that could not just end his career but quite plausibly see him sent to a labour camp.
It is Thursday, 10 July 1952. The Iron Curtain that fell across Europe at the end of the Second World War has grown more oppressive in recent years, especially in Czechoslovakia. The Communists seized power there in 1948; a ruthless secret service, the Státní bezpečnost (StB), has helped them keep it. By 1950, show trials had begun. The most notorious, the Slánský trial, is still being prepared, but already scores of enemies of the revolution, real and imagined, have been executed. Tens of thousands are under surveillance by the StB. And now, with the Soviet Union preparing to take part in its first ever Olympic Games, the shadow of Stalin looms ever larger over Czechoslovak life – literally so in central Prague, where the world’s biggest statue of the Soviet dictator, eventually to be nearly thirty metres high (if you include the base), is under construction.
No one is immune from the obsessive and brutal enforcement of political conformity. Athletes of all kinds have been among those rounded up in the purges. You don’t have to be guilty of anything: just out of favour. It is less than eight months since the entire national ice hockey team was arrested, on the evening of its departure to London to defend its world title.2 Twelve players were condemned to camps for, supposedly, contemplating defection (and, in some cases, singing disrespectful songs); the combined total of their sentences was seventy-seven years and eight months.
By those standards, the problem with Stanislav Jungwirth, Emil’s teammate and a future 1,500m world record holder, is a trivial one.3 Stanislav himself is not in trouble. It is Emil’s response to the problem that is potentially catastrophic. Stanislav’s father is in prison for political offences – and that, the Party has decided, makes it inappropriate for Jungwirth junior to travel abroad, except to other Eastern Bloc countries. It is a modest restriction; unless, like Jungwirth, you are an Olympic athlete who has spent the past four years dreaming of Helsinki.
News of Jungwirth’s exclusion emerged the evening before the athletes were due to fly, when they turned up at the Ministry of Sport to collect their travel documents. Jungwirth was devastated to find that there were none for him, but quickly accepted that making a scene would only make matters worse. But Emil was incandescent. ‘No way,’ he told the officials. ‘If Standa does not go, nor will I.’ Then he stormed out, leaving his paperwork behind him.
The next day, on the morning of the flight, Jungwirth implores Zátopek to calm down. Emil insists on standing his ground. He gives Jungwirth his team outfit and tells him to return it to the Ministry when he returns his own. Then he goes off to train alone at Prague’s Strahov stadium.
The stand-off continues for days, by which time the plane has long since left without Zátopek. Dana is inconsolable: the stress causes her to lose her voice. It is barely a decade since her own father was taken away by the Gestapo during the German occupation; he ended up in Dachau. Now her husband seems to have condemned himself to a comparable fate.
In Helsinki, Western journalists are told that Zátopek has tonsillitis.4
More than sixty years later, on a wet Wednesday evening in January, I am sitting in an aeroplane on that same runway. It is a Wizz Air flight this time, delayed for well over an hour by one of those inscrutable problems to which budget flights are prey. Our destination is London Luton, and the passengers, far from being Olympic athletes, are mostly price-conscious tourists. But my head is full of thoughts of Olympic glory in Helsinki.
I have spent the past few days visiting Zátopek’s old haunts and talking to people who knew him; the highlight was a long morning of memories, laughter and slivovice (plum brandy) with Dana herself. Now, on the homeward journey, I have just reached the end of my second Zátopek biography of the week and am wondering which one to begin afresh. They are all the reading matter I have, and today there have been many hours to kill.
The engine starts to hum with pre-take-off half-life. The air crew perform their safety drill, and I note with pleasure that I recognise several words. Maybe that teach-yourself-Czech audio programme is starting to work. Then I find myself thinking about the Jungwirth incident. I wonder if the puddled runway I can see through the window bears any resemblance to the view that Dana saw as she scanned the asphalt fretfully through an aeroplane window in the summer of 1952, wondering if Emil would appear.
Then a startling thought occurs to me. That incident with Jungwirth – where is it?
I check and double-check, but it isn’t there: not in either of the biographies.5 As I write, they are the only lives of Zátopek available in the English language. Yet neither even mentions that stand-off on the eve of the Helsinki Games. Nowhere. Not a word.
The incident’s absence is not just curious. It is revealing. In both cases, there are good reasons for the omission. One of the books was written in English; the other is a translation from Czech. One can be assumed to have left out the episode because it was not widely known in the West; the other because, under Communism, it was unmentionable. Yet it happened. Indeed, it is arguably one of the more significant episodes not just in Zátopek’s life but in the history of sport. If that seems a bold claim, consider what it involved. First, the stature of the main protagonist: Emil Zátopek, a colossus of athletics who from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s bestrode his discipline as no other runner has ever done. Three of his Olympic golds were won at the same Games, in the space of eight days, in a distance-running grand slam that remains unique. He set eighteen world records, won five Olympic medals and, in the words of one otherwise staid official Olympic Games report, ‘completely upset all previous notions of the limits of human endurance’.6 He did so by pioneering approaches to training that had hitherto been unthinkable, and that remain the basis of most serious distance-running training today. And he achieved all this with a grace and generosity of spirit that transcended sport.
For those too young to remember, this last point is easily overlooked. Zátopek was celebrated, globally, not just as an astounding athlete but as a shining ideal. This was a man from a small country, a simple soldier of austere habits, who achieved sporting heights few had dreamed of through a simple formula: the cheerful acceptance and mastery of pain. This was the man who, it was said, trained in army boots, in the snow, or jogged on the spot while on sentry duty, or ran carrying his wife on his back; a man whose training sessions were so intense that experts considered them all but suicidal. This was an athlete who was not just fast but heroically tough. A hard man, but also a man of infectious warmth and humour. A man who never gave up, never complained, and never forgot that, in words that will always be associated with his name: ‘Great is the victory, but greater still is the friendship.’7
His fellow Olympians worshipped him.8 The Englishman Gordon Pirie praised his ‘magnificent character’; the Frenchman Alain Mimoun called him ‘a saint’; Fred Wilt, the American, called him ‘perhaps the most humble, friendly and popular athlete in modern times’; Ron Clarke, the Australian, said: ‘There is not, and never was, a greater man than Emil Zátopek.’
Ordinary athletics fans were scarcely less enthusiastic. The Helsinki Olympics were supposed to be the Games of the Cold War, with two separate athletes’ villages embodying humanity’s bitter and terrifying ideological division. Zátopek did more than anyone to turn them, by sheer force of personality, into the Games of Reconciliation, where athletes and spectators of all nations came together and celebrated their common humanity. They did so largely through celebrating him: his genius, his tenacity, his life-affirming exuberance.
Yet it almost never happened. Just over a week before the opening ceremony, after four years of unimaginably intense preparation, knowing that he was poised to make sporting history and would never get a better chance to do so, Emil Zátopek risked losing it all. He had worked all his life for this moment and now, for the sake of a friend, he was prepared to throw it all away.
I can think of only one other example of an athlete of such stature gambling so much – and, in doing so, showing moral greatness to match his physical gifts. That was when Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the US armed forces in 1967, during the Vietnam War. Like Zátopek, Ali was not just a talented athlete but one of breathtaking, sport-redefining genius – and huge personal charisma. Like Zátopek in 1952, Ali was at his physical peak when he took his stand. In taking it, he risked not just punishment and disgrace but also, most painfully, the loss of the best years of his sporting life. Ali took his gamble and, in sporting terms, lost. By the time he had won his appeal against his conviction for draft evasion and was allowed back into the ring, in 1971, his best years were behind him.
Zátopek’s gamble came off; but it was no less a reckless one for that, and it is arguable that he paid a heavy price for it later, in 1968, when he, like Ali, defied a super-power and lost. If it hadn’t worked – if the Communist authorities had called his bluff and condemned him to hard labour in the uranium mines instead of caving in at the last minute and sending him, with Jungwirth, to Helsinki – then he too would have forfeited his golden years: the years of miraculous achievement on which his claim to sporting immortality is founded. But whereas Ali’s sacrifice is central to his legend, and is celebrated in countless books, films and documentaries, Zátopek’s stand is forgotten; or, more accurately, lost – like the plan for ‘exemplary punishment of Captain Zátopek’ that was drawn up by officials as Zátopek and Jungwirth were taking off for Helsinki on a later plane, then hastily destroyed when news came back that Zátopek had just won his third gold medal.
How could that happen? As the Wizz Air plane finally heaves itself into the night sky, the riddle preys on my mind. How can a moment like that – a landmark in the history of sporting heroism – slip from collective memory?
In one sense, it hasn’t. Most hard-core Zátopek fans are aware of it. But that just makes the paradox more perplexing. How can an event be both known and unknown? The answer, when I arrive at it, surprises me. Zátopek’s whole life is both known and unknown, and for the same reason.
He was, for two decades in the mid-twentieth century, the most celebrated sportsman on earth. Even now, he remains exceptionally honoured, with his own statue (one of only four) outside the official Olympic museum in Lausanne. Runner’s World named him the greatest runner of all time – over any distance – as recently as 2013. Yet the facts of his life as a human being are obscured, not just by barriers of time, language and ideology but, above all, by myth.
Every running enthusiast over a certain age knows something about Zátopek – or thinks they do. But much of it is no more than hearsay: legends and half-truths endlessly recycled and re-embroidered. Many of the most famous tales are simply false. Even those of us who idolise him – who see him, as I do, as a kind of patron saint of running – are liable to find, on closer inspection, that we know far less about him than we think.
Those who knew him best grow older and fewer in number each year. Old memories play tricks; as do the everyday habits of dissembling and concealment that four decades of Communist tyranny ingrained into most Czechoslovak lives, including Zátopek’s. Primary sources, including official ones, cannot be assumed to be trustworthy; some tell outright lies. The rest is a sea of biographical confusion, in which solid facts can barely be discerned from the froth of rumour in which they float. So the truth dissolves, slowly. The legends persist: wonderful in their way but insubstantial, because they can be endlessly reinvented.
The bare facts of Zátopek’s running are preserved in official archives. But the real worth of his victories is lost on all but his oldest admirers. As for his records: his fastest time for 10,000m would have earned him twenty-fourth place in the 2012 Olympics.9 Times and trophies quickly lose their power to excite. It is the human side of Zátopek’s story that is still capable of brightening and energising lives, six decades after his prime and a decade and a half after his death. That is the story that matters. And that, despite all the millions of words that have been written about him, is slipping away.
Yet the reality of Emil Zátopek’s life – the scarcely believable tale of his rise, fall and unfinished rehabilitation – is too important to be allowed to vanish. He was not just an Olympic immortal: he was a magnificent, if flawed, human being, who lit up the post-war world with the warmth of his personality during some of the chilliest chapters of modern history. His story was one of tragedy as well as glory, and his struggles were intricately interwoven with the troubled history of Europe itself. He was also, as the French writer Pierre Magnan pointed out, ‘a man who ran like us’ – an athlete who had to labour for his achievements as painfully as the rest of us do.10 In the words of the great coach Percy Cerutty, who considered him ‘the most epoch-shattering athlete of this age’, he ‘earned, and won for himself, every inch of a very hard road’.11 Yet such was the greatness of Zátopek’s heart that he found time even in the heat of his most agonising battles to relate to his rivals as fellow human beings; to make gestures of friendship and sportsmanship and playfulness that echo through the ages. He was magnificent in his running, but more magnificent still in his instinctive use of running as a medium for friendship. If ever an athlete’s life was worthy of being preserved in print, it is his.
By the time I notice the orange lights of Luton through the aeroplane window, scattered like broken beads across the cold blackness below, I have made a resolution. I will not let his story dissolve any further. I will return to Emil Zátopek’s homeland and try, as tirelessly as he used to train, to discover and record his true story. It is a daunting challenge. It was all a long time ago – in a faraway country of which I, like most Westerners, know little. Much of the truth was concealed even then. But I must try, whatever the difficulties – because he deserves it.
Contemplating the task ahead, I feel an ache of apprehension deep in my stomach: the kind of fear you feel just before beginning a long-distance race. I feel, in short, a little like one of the forty-five men who stood with Emil Zátopek on the starting line of the Olympic marathon in Melbourne on 1 December 1956. It was one of those oven-hot days when marathon-running seems not just foolhardy but dangerous. Emil was past his best by then and, to make things worse, was not fully fit and was still recovering from injury. He looked around with a grim smile.
‘Men,’ he said, ‘today we die a little.’12
Then, still smiling, he began to run.
LET US START at the summit: the golden minutes for which all his previous struggles can be seen as preparation, and from which all that followed might be seen as a descent. It is around 5.50 p.m., on 27 July 1952. The streets of Helsinki’s Töölö district are buzzing, the pavements packed with excited spectators, chattering and cheering.
Some have been there all afternoon, revelling in the party atmosphere and the chance to see history made. The weather has been kind: still but not stifling. In the Olympic stadium, off Hammarskjöldintie, 68,700 people are buzzing too, their attention focused not on the track – where the 4 x 400m relay has recently finished – but on a huge electronic scoreboard which is providing periodic updates on the times and positions of the leading runners in the final event of the XVth Olympic Games: the marathon. The latest (and last) bulletin indicates that, with just over two kilometres to go, he is two and a quarter minutes ahead of his nearest rival.
For the next nine minutes or so, only those lucky enough to have good vantage points in the street really know what is going on. The rest fall back on rumour and imagination. But there does not seem to be a single person watching, in the stadium or out on the streets, who hopes for any outcome other than this: that Emil Zátopek should keep going for a few more minutes, all the way to the end.
The unanimity is startling. Sixty-nine different nations have sent athletes to the Games, and most have sent spectators too, although the majority of those watching are Finnish. Yet somehow everyone wants the Czechoslovak to win.
The unanimity is all the more startling when you consider the context. The world is divided, dangerously so, by an ideological iron curtain, still quite new, that stretches from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Two super-powers, one led by an increasingly deranged Josef Stalin, glower at one another across it. Helsinki has taken the unusual step of providing the 4,955 competing athletes with two distinct Olympic villages to reflect this divide: one for the Communist bloc and the other for the rest. George Orwell’s line about sport being ‘war minus the shooting’ has rarely felt more apt.
Yet somehow, after two weeks of competition, it is ending with this: sports lovers of countless races, creeds and political convictions coming together in one joyous family, to celebrate the achievements and personality of a single extraordinary athlete.
It is not all Zátopek’s doing. There have been gestures of goodwill from other athletes whose youthful instinct to fraternise has proved too strong for the ideological taboos that are supposed to restrain them. But somehow Zátopek has come to embody the idea that these Games are a celebration of our common humanity. Rumours about him have been slipping out all fortnight, not just about his sensational racing and insane training routines but also about his warmth, his sportsmanship, his spontaneous generosity. He is said to have given up his bed, the night before one of his big races, to a visiting Australian with nowhere to sleep. He gave his socks to his English rival Gordon Pirie. He shares his training secrets with anyone who cares to ask. His gregariousness has prompted him to learn half a dozen languages – some say more.
His public utterances have a wit that belies Western stereotypes of robotic Communist drones. On the track, he radiates decency and charm. He talks to rivals, offers pats of encouragement, takes his turn in the lead even when it is not in his interests to do so.
Yet somehow he has also found the steel not just to win but to win emphatically – some would say majestically. In the past eight days he has already won two Olympic golds, achieving the elusive distance-running double of winning both the 5,000 and the 10,000m. And now he is minutes away from completing a treble which everyone watching must realise will almost certainly never be achieved again – assuming that it can be achieved even once.
That is the history the crowds have come to witness. It is the biggest challenge of Zátopek’s life, and it seems as though most of the world is holding its breath, willing him to succeed.
The odd thing is, the man who has elicited this unprecedented groundswell of goodwill is not some godlike being who skims over the ground with easy grace. He is small and a little ungainly. He has wide shoulders, a furrowed brow and an insect-like way of sticking out his elbows, especially the right one. A receding hairline makes him look older than his twenty-nine years.
As for his running style, he makes such a meal of it that people have been commenting on it for years: the way he grimaces as he runs, rolls his head, sticks out his tongue, claws at the air, clutches at his chest with his left hand, sometimes even seeming to swing his shoulders as he runs. Sportswriters love him for this, as it provides an excuse for some enjoyable phrase-making: ‘He runs like a man who has just been stabbed in the heart’; ‘… as if there was a scorpion in each shoe’; ‘… as if tortured by internal demons’; ‘… as if he might be having a fit’; ‘… like a man wrestling with an octopus on a conveyor belt’.13 He is used to such criticisms, and has often laughed them off: ‘I am not talented enough to run and smile at the same time.’
Those who understand such matters will point to the contrasting smoothness of his movements below the waist: the metronomic efficiency of his short, fast strides. None the less, it is hard to see how his upper writhings can be helping him. In fact, if appearances were all, he would be a laughing stock: an early precursor of such celebrated Olympic no-hopers as Eddie the Eagle and Eric the Eel.
But over the past week he has shown beyond all possible doubt that appearances are not everything. He is living, thrilling proof that what really matters is what is inside: the blazing spirit that allows a man, flesh and blood like the rest of us, to challenge the accepted limits of human aspiration.
This is, by the way, the first time he has ever run a marathon.
If that seems improbable now, it seemed improbable then. That’s not to say no one expected him to be leading at this stage. His admirers believe that anything is possible where Emil is concerned. But there is something awe-inspiring about the fact that he is even trying. The audacity of the man: that is part of his greatness.
A flame of fresh information blows its way up Vauhtitie, and then round the corner into Hammarskjöldintie, gathering in intensity as it spreads. Zátopek is still leading; his lead is growing; he is almost in the stadium; he is coming.
Then, behind the flame, comes the roar of cheering – and, beyond that, the man himself.
Step by painful step, he drives himself forward to the stadium tunnel, vanishes, and then, to a longed-for fanfare of trumpets, emerges inside the arena, leaning almost forty-five degrees as he turns on to the track to minimise loss of momentum. The eruption of sound threatens to blow the skeletal runner off his feet. Nearly 70,000 people are standing, ecstatic, bellowing their approval; and the roar finally resolves itself into a chant in spine-chilling unison: ‘Zá-to-pek! Zá-to-pek! Zá-to-pek!’
His grimacing face looks more agonised than ever. His sodden red vest clings to the outside of his shorts. His eyes seem glazed; his jaw is clenched. He looks tired: tired and empty as death. Every step seems a struggle – not in the sportswriters’ sense but in a real, palpably excruciating way. You can almost feel the jarring in his battered legs as his thinly shod feet pound against the track. His whole body seems to be crying out: when will this stop? Yet not for one moment does he relax his rhythm.
The number of Czechoslovaks in the stadium can be counted in dozens. Yet each spectator is urging Emil Zátopek on with the fervour we usually reserve for our own most cherished national heroes. Among them is Hannes Kolehmainen, one of the great Finnish founding fathers of modern distance running, and – although perhaps cheering with a shade less enthusiasm than most – the British marathon world record holder and pre-race favourite, Jim Peters, who was brought back to the stadium in the press coach after dropping out with six miles to go.
‘Zá-to-pek! Zá-to-pek!’ Emil could not slow down his rhythm if he wanted to. There may never before have been a moment when people from so many different nations have come together in such a joyous celebration of sporting achievement. One of them, Juan Antonio Samaranch, a future president of the International Olympic Committee, will still be talking about it half a century later: ‘At that moment, I understood what the Olympic spirit means.’14 But for a British journalist, J. Armour Milne, even that is not enough: ‘All of us shared the common conviction that we were witnessing the greatest happening in athletics history.’15
As he crosses the line, the gaunt runner can just manage a smile: curiously boyish in its transparent relief. He waves away the photographers, hobbles off the track, sits on the ground and removes his shoes from his bloodied feet. For a moment he seems overwhelmed, oblivious to the fact that he has not only achieved an all but impossible third gold but also slashed more than six minutes off the Olympic record – the third record he has broken in eight days. Then he is back on his feet, shuffling towards the stands to be kissed tenderly on the mouth by the gold medal winner in the women’s javelin – who also happens to be his wife. Someone gives him an apple, which he gobbles greedily. Then he waits at the finishing line to offer congratulations and slices of orange to his fellow runners, the first of whom arrives more than two and a half minutes behind the winner – and five of whom have, like Zátopek, broken the previous Olympic record.
Minutes later, the Jamaican 4 x 400m relay team, who not long before set their own Olympic record, pick Zátopek up and chair him around the stadium on a lap of honour without parallel in Olympic history. And then, some time afterwards, Zátopek is standing on the winner’s rostrum, listening to the Czechoslovak national anthem being played in his honour for the third time in eight days.
The final notes melt into applause. Zátopek congratulates his fellow medallists and then embarks on a weary, joyful lap of honour. He can hear tens of thousands of Finns calling him by their own special name for him, ‘Satu-Pekka’ – except that this time they are chanting ‘Näkemiin, Satu-Pekka’. He has taught himself enough Finnish to know what this means. They are saying goodbye.
And Emil Zátopek, basking in the world’s adulation after pulling off the greatest feat in the history of distance running, feels suddenly overwhelmingly sad, because—16
But to understand that, you need to know how Emil got there.
LET US START again, at the beginning, in Kopřivnice, a small industrial town on what is now the eastern edge of the Czech Republic.
Back then, in 1922, it was Czechoslovakia – bang in the middle of it; four years earlier it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Those who lived in the town thought of themselves as Moravians. They still do.
It’s quieter today than it was then. Twentieth-century Kopřivnice was dominated by the factory of central Europe’s premier car manufacturer, Tatra, which generated employment, pollution and noise in increasing measures as the century progressed (but has since declined).17
František and Anežka Zátopek came here in 1922, drawn by the factory’s magnetism from the nearby village of Zašová.18 They were in their early forties, with four children to feed – Jaroš, Marie, František junior (Franta) and Bohumil (Bohuš) – and barely enough money to do so. (Their eldest daughter, Ludmila – born out of wedlock and referred to, if at all, as an ‘aunt’ – was married and living in Brno; their first son, Josef, had died in an ice-skating accident at the age of ten.) František, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, was a founder member of a housing co-operative, with whom he built a semi-detached house on the northern edge of town: one of four such houses at the bottom of 1 Května Street (‘1 May Street’). Each had a decent-sized patch of land for livestock and fruit trees.
Perhaps it seemed like a time for new beginnings. Czechoslovakia itself was new, created from the ruins of the First World War in a spirit of democratic idealism. Its founding fathers believed passionately in national self-determination and social inclusion. The economy seemed healthy, and if the hard-pressed Moravian working classes had yet to feel the benefits, there was at least hope for the future.
The Zátopek children had barely settled in when Anežka gave birth to her seventh child, Emil Ferdinand, on a bed in the corner of the kitchen that doubled up as František’s workshop.19 It was 19 September 1922. An eighth, Jiří, would follow two years later.
The extra mouths strained the family finances. Anežka had long since given up her old job as a labourer in the brick factory. František earned what he could at the Tatra factory – wood was still an important component of cars’ bodywork – and topped up his wages with private commissions, making furniture. This kept him busy but didn’t make him rich. There was food on the table, but not always much, and Emil grew up with a yearning for a full stomach that never quite left him. Czech families traditionally celebrate Christmas by dining on carp. The Zátopeks made do with cheap smoked fish, while a present might be no more than a piece of fruit picked from the garden and wrapped.
Emil, writing about his childhood in later life, made light of the poverty. The way he told it, the overcrowded house was a place of cheerful chaos. Names were muddled up; children queued for breakfast ‘like a factory canteen’; soap stung their eyes as they filed past their mother for the weekly wash. But he never entirely forgot the hunger and insecurity, and his adult worldview would reflect this.
As often happens in large families, not all the siblings were close, emotionally or in age. Jiří was Emil’s nearest ally. But weight of numbers left the younger brothers little choice but to be, at least, gregarious. Emil grew used to living in a group, mostly among people bigger, stronger and more dominant than him.
Surviving grandchildren and friends remember the Zátopek household as a stable, loving, disciplined one. Anežka was known for her skill with herbal remedies, and for her compassion for the sick: ‘limitlessly loving’ was how one former neighbour remembered her.20 One grandchild – Jiří’s daughter Dana – spoke fondly of the special hiding place where, when funds permitted, Anežka kept chocolate treats for small visitors. ‘She was so kind,’ Dana told me. ‘She was always working, always smiling, always trying to look after her children.’
František was more intimidating: a man of firm principle whose efforts to instil discipline in his children once caused Anežka to burn the leather belt with which he had just thrashed one of them. (He subsequently used his wooden carpenter’s ruler.) But he also had a kindly, twinkling side, tweaking noses in jest or inviting small children to light his long pipe and sip the froth on his beer. Emil was devoted to him. The grandchildren knew him as ‘beardy grandpa’ – even when his beard had become a mere moustache – so Anežka, logically, was ‘beardy grandma’. The couple’s greatest pleasure was to gather the whole family round to sing Moravian folk songs. Emil continued to sing them all his life.
The garden was scarcely less packed than the house, with goats, hens and geese jostling for space among trees and beehives. Children were expected to do their bit for animal husbandry, and would get into trouble for failing to do so. Emil once allowed the goats to get stuck in the clay of a nearby brick-making site (‘It was Bohuš’s idea’ was his excuse), and he was beaten at least once for helping himself to fruit. But the world beyond was, or seemed, a benign place. There were streets and fields to play in; they could swim in the River Lubina (notwithstanding the raw sewage that flowed into it a mile upstream); and the foothills of the Beskyd Mountains were near enough for occasional hiking adventures.
The children were discouraged from taking part in sport, especially the new craze of football: the risk of wearing out shoes and clothes was too great, while any spare energy would be better spent, in Mr Zátopek’s view, working in the smallholding. They played anyway – ‘with more passion than those who were allowed to’, according to Emil, who often played football barefoot.21 But they knew where their priorities were supposed to lie, and in one crunch match, against a tough team of older boys from the local German school, Emil deserted the team shortly after half-time when the sounding of the Tatra factory hooter reminded him that he had forgotten to feed the bees. His best friend, Jaromír Konůpka, who was captain of the team (‘I owned the football,’ Konůpka explained), didn’t speak to him for a week.
But Mr Zátopek had a point. As the hopeful 1920s faded into the grim 1930s, home-grown food became a vital part of the family’s subsistence. The Great Depression sucked the life from Europe’s economy, and Kopřivnice did not escape. Tatra workers who kept their jobs faced lower wages, and less job security. For a long time, Emil’s brother Jaroš couldn’t find work at all. When he finally did, his clumsiness as a driver resulted in an accident and a ruinous damages claim; in despair, he took his own life. Emil was about seven at the time; and the terrible event became another subject that was never referred to in the Zátopek household. The family was no less scarred as a result.22 Anežka’s response was to become even more solicitous – some would say fussy – about her surviving sons’ welfare. František took the more practical step of joining Czechoslovakia’s fledgling Communist Party.
This didn’t prevent him from being an upstanding member of the community. The Party was more concerned with opposing fascism than with active subversion in those days, and most of its 60,000 members did no more than pay their subscriptions. František was secretary of the local federation of allotment holders and breeders of rabbits and small farm animals; later, he would be chairman of the Kopřivnice Beekeeping Association. Politically, he was more of a trade unionist than a revolutionary: he had been active in the bitter struggle to establish an eight-hour working day at Tatra but was otherwise best known for collecting union fees from fellow workers.23 He was not allowed to do this at the factory but had to tramp from home to home instead. Emil often accompanied him.
František also took his children to meetings of the Federation of Proletarian Education (FPT) – later superseded by the slightly less radical Workers’ Association of Physical Education (DTJ). These offered opportunities for physical education for workers’ children, usually in a specially kitted-out room in the Amerika pub, where Emil became adept at gymnastic tricks such as somersaults and headstands.
But that was about the limit of his early sporting prowess. He was energetic – ‘the biggest fidget in the class’, according to one schoolfriend – and enjoyed running around, a trait which at least one teacher exploited by using him as an errand boy.24 But he was puny and uncoordinated: by conventional measures of masculinity, he was a weakling – especially after a neglected bout of appendicitis, when he was eight, necessitated an extended stay in hospital. In football, he just ran around, enthusiastically but uselessly. He didn’t get into fights, except occasionally with Jiří, while his tactic of screaming loud and early to escape his father’s beatings earned him the nickname ‘Emil the cry-baby’.25
Early photographs show a small, plump-cheeked boy, with large ears and narrow shoulders combining to make his head look unusually wide. There is nothing athletic about his appearance: just an intent, curious, slightly anxious expression, as if he were trying to understand something. But one school picture, taken when Emil was six, has an interesting detail. Emil, sitting cross-legged in the front row, is the only child without shoes – although his friends have arranged their legs in such a way as to conceal, almost, Emil’s bare feet.26
You would never have put him down as a future Olympian. Yet somehow, even then, he seems to have had an air of being special. Jiří, speaking two years after Emil’s death, claimed, without resentment, that Emil was his parents’ favourite. ‘Emil was the smartest one. If someone did something wrong, it had to be investigated. But if it turned out that it was Emil who did it, everything was all right.’27 Jiří’s son – also called Jiří – proudly drew my attention to the family tradition that Emil was never stung by bees. ‘When my grandfather wanted something taken out of a hive, he didn’t need special clothing. He just got Emil to do it.’
Young Jiří – a big, moustachioed, bear-like man of middle age who lives in the neighbouring village of Štramberk – seemed to glow with affection when he talked about his uncle. It would not be the last time I would notice such animation in those who were sharing memories of Emil with me.
Milan Špaček, a classmate who became a champion skier, spoke laughingly about Emil’s reckless streak. He once saw him rescued from drowning, after braving a water-filled gravel pit without having learnt to swim. Later, Emil proved better than anyone at swimming underwater: ‘He could hold his breath longer, and he was not so afraid of drowning as the rest of us.’28
Jaromír Konůpka, a retired draughtsman who re mained close to Emil all his life, also laughed at the thought of his friend’s recklessness. He particularly enjoyed the memory of a school expedition to the Beskyds when Emil was thirteen. The pupils stayed in a hostel on Bílý Kříž, but were kept awake by the snoring of a much older boy, Pepa Štefků. Around dawn, Emil decided to solve the problem by – for some reason – emptying an entire jar of salt into Pepa’s mouth. Pepa woke up and leapt out of bed in fury. Emil, wearing only his underpants, jumped out of the window in the nick of time; Pepa pursued him via the door. ‘He had found a big stick and was shouting that he would “kill that bastard”. First they ran around the meadow, then we saw them in the forest …’ Konůpka genuinely seemed to think that murder had been a possibility – but Emil had the stamina to escape unscathed.
Konůpka said that the key to Emil’s youthful character could be found in a single statement: ‘I don’t want to do it, but if I have to, then I’m going to show you!’ Passed over at the age of ten for a starring clown’s role in the DTJ’s Christmas play, The Circus Comes to Town, Emil stole the show by giving the gymnastics performance of a lifetime in his bit part as a monkey. Another time, forced to do algebra against his will (‘Please, sir, why are we learning such drivel as a+b squared when we are never going to need it in life?’), Emil saved face by swotting up furiously and confusing the teacher by coming top in a test for which he had originally refused to study.
Then there was the ‘essay strike’, which Emil organised at the municipal school, to which he had progressed at the age of eleven. The class were told to write on the theme: ‘Komu se nelení, tomu se zelení ’ (literally, ‘He who is not lazy, gets the greens’). Emil declared the subject ‘stupid’ and, perhaps inspired by his father’s political activities, persuaded around half the class to refuse to write it. The protest lasted several days. The inevitable climbdown was followed, ignominiously, by a Saturday spent writing the essay anyway. Emil exacted partial revenge by writing an enormously long one – five large pages of tiny script – which took his teacher the best part of Sunday to mark. Perhaps the last laugh was hers, though, because the proverb’s message stayed with him for the rest of his life.
But there was more to the young Emil than mere stubbornness: there was also a startling independence of thought – a sense that things didn’t necessarily have to be as they were. Notwithstanding the view of one of his teachers, Ladislav Buček, that: ‘You’ll never amount to anything in life’, Emil seemed to feel that almost anything might be possible. Naturally left -handed, he taught himself to be right-handed – and if that could be changed, what couldn’t? One much-repeated tale describes how he allowed a mosquito to bite him on the hand. Instead of brushing it off, he watched it closely, observing how it sucked up his blood.29 He wanted to learn. On another occasion, he is said to have stolen a wooden cup from a miserly stall-keeper at the market: not because he wanted it but because he wanted to see if he could evade the old man’s obsessive security measures. Ota Pavel, the author and journalist who later became Emil’s good friend, claimed that the young Zátopek’s defining characteristic was that ‘he tried everything differently’.
Emil’s parents cherished hopes that he, perhaps alone among their children, might find a future beyond the Tatra factory. František thought that Emil could become a teacher, although it was far from clear how the fees for training college could be paid. Education had been in short supply when he and Anežka were growing up. Anežka had been taken out of school early so that she could be sent out to work. (The local priest was bribed to falsify her birth certificate.) But now, in the new Czechoslovakia, it was not unrealistic to dream that a bright, poor child might use education as an escape route to better things, and Kopřivnice was as good a place as any to do so.