Running the triple crown

The story of the Czechoslovak runner Emil Zátopek is a tale from athletics’ age of innocence. Without the aid of qualified coaches, state-of-the-art equipment or ‘performance-enhancing’ drugs, Emil Zátopek set no fewer than 18 world records over distances between 5,000 and 30,000 metres with a style memorably described as that of ‘a man wrestling with an octopus on a conveyor belt’: all eccentricity above the waist, all efficiency below it. Brought up in poverty, he ate when he could and what he could, and treated beer as a prototype isotonic drink.

His sporting career was set in the brief period of dominance of his specialist events enjoyed by runners from behind the Iron Curtain, an interregnum which lay between the era of the Flying Finns and the decades when the mantle of the so-called ‘kings of distance’ passed to runners from the Maghreb, Kenya and Ethiopia.