Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Today We Die a Little! The Inimitable Emil Zátopek the Greatest Olympic Runner of All Time by Richar 'Today we die a little' – writing the story of Emil Zátopek. I think of Zátopek as the patron saint of runners. He didn’t just revolutionise his sport – he reinvented it. He rewrote the record books and redrew the boundaries of endurance, redefining the whole idea of what was humanly possible. No one else, before or since, has dominated distance running in a way that he did in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His achievements at the Helsinki Olympics will never be equalled. And he did all this with a crazy playfulness and generosity of spirit that made him perhaps the most loved Olympian of all time. The only comparable figure I can think of in 20th century sport is Muhammad Ali – yet Zátopek, unlike Ali, has barely been touched by biographers until now. Do you remember the first time you heard about him yourself? I can barely remember a time when I didn’t know about Zátopek. I think I may even have been dimly aware of him as a child, from seeing news reports about the Prague Spring. But it was when I took up running myself, in my early 20s, that the idea of him really started to resonate. The idea of the stoical soldier, toughening himself up physically and mentally through sheer self-discipline, without losing his wit or humanity, was an inspiring one. I saw him as a role model for self-improvement – which is ridiculous, I know, but many other runners felt the same. The fact that he was also a martyr to Communist repression (this was before the fall of the Berlin Wall), and that no one really knew what had happened to him, just added to the mystery and romance. When I set out to write about Zátopek, I assumed that everyone knew his story – and I was shocked to find that most people, or most people under 40, had never heard of him. Zátopek leads Alain Mimoun, Herbert Schade and Chris Chataway during the Olympic 5,000m in Helsinki. Photograph: CORR/AFP/Getty Images. What was he like to write about? You’d think Zátopek would be an easy person to write a book about. He had such an amazing, colourful, inspiring, haunting story: a man who won five Olympic medals, set 18 world records, redefined the limits of human endurance, became a global byword for sportsmanship and generosity – and was driven into lonely obscurity by the communists after standing up for “socialism with a human face”. The story tells itself. The author just has to write it down. Yet in some ways, he’s also a terribly difficult subject. He’s certainly an intimidating one: the greatest, most charismatic, most written-about runner the world has ever seen. Writing his biography feels like a huge responsibility. You feel presumptuous taking it on. Why do you think his name is less familiar now? It was all a long time ago. Emil was born in 1922 and died in 2000. Contemporaries who survive are in their 90s, and they’re growing fewer all the time. Inevitably, some memories are more reliable than others. I found Dana Zátopková, Emil’s widow, wonderfully alert and communicative, but even she struggled to be precise about detailed sequences of events from 60 or 70 years ago. Other eyewitnesses were much shakier.There’s also the question of how reliable the evidence was in the first place. Most people in the Czech Republic, and perhaps in athletics too, have a Zátopek story they can tell you. The question is: where did it come from? Did they witness it themselves, or did they just hear it – and if so, from whom? A lot of myths just get repeated again and again – for example, the story that Emil used to carry Dana on his back when he trained, or that it was in 1968 that he gave his gold medal to Ron Clarke, after the Prague Spring and the Mexico Olympics . I’ve read that last one repeatedly, in bestselling books and respected newspapers of record. But that doesn’t make it true. So did you find most of those legends were nonsense, then? No, I think the most surprising thing I learnt was that, despite all the embellishments, an amazing amount of the Zátopek legend actually is true. No, he didn’t regularly carry Dana on his back, but he did do so at least once (and another time he did a whole training session with a small girl on his back). No, he didn’t train in the 800m corridor at military academy – but he did train in the deep sand of the giant indoor riding school. No, he didn’t give a gold medal to Ron Clarke in 1968, but he did do so in 1966. No, he didn’t give up his bed to an Australian journalist the night before the 10,000 metres at the Helsinki Olympics. But he did give up his bed to an Australian coach (Percy Cerutty) a few nights before the race – and got in trouble for allowing a western “spy” into the Communist bloc’s Olympic village. And so it goes on. This extraordinary, magical man really did exist. There really was a poor carpenter’s son from Moravia, with no special athletic talent, who built himself up through sheer hard work and inventiveness to be the most famous athlete the world had seen. Zátopek in action Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images. There really was a runner who single-handedly redrew the boundaries of his sport – yet maintained a lightness of heart and a generosity of spirit that made the world feel a warmer place during the darkest days of the cold war. He really was almost pathologically generous – at one point a Prague campsite started redirecting campers it didn’t have room for to the Zátopeks’ house, knowing that Emil would always offer them hospitality. And he really did defy the Soviet tanks in Wenceslas Square in August 1968, briefly stopping a superpower’s invasion in its tracks. After that they broke him, of course. He spent years as an itinerant labourer, including a spell down a uranium mine, living in a caravan, far from his home and his beloved wife; and by the time he was rehabilitated he was a shadow of the man he had been. The story of the last years of his life is heartbreaking at times. Yet the one overwhelming fact that struck me again and again, wherever I went and whoever I spoke to, is that Emil Zátopek was loved . There was something child-like about him – he had an effect on people. “He lightened people’s lives,” was how one person put it. To me, that was the single most important thing about him. Do you think that Zátopek’s story has any relevance to the modern runner? Definitely. It’s not the training, though – fascinating though many runners find it. His innovations have been so thoroughly accepted, absorbed and developed that the details of what he did barely matter any more. Some runners still get obsessed by the numbers: did he do 80 fast 400m laps in a day or 100? How fast was each lap? How long were the recovery intervals? And so on. Those figures do exist – you’ll find some of them in my book. But I don’t think they really tell us much. A lot of his sessions were done without a stop-watch, over imprecisely measured distances – he did much of his training in the woods. A runner with more or less natural speed would derive a different degree of benefit from exactly replicating one of his sessions. And of course the kit was different, the tracks were different, the nutrition was different. There’s no comparison between what he did and what we can do. Credit: International Olympic Committee. What is still relevant, though, in my opinion, is his attitude. I don’t know if Emil ever really said, “A runner must run with dreams in his heart, not money in his pocket,” but it’s the sort of thing he could well have said, and it seems to me to be an incredibly timely message. But the ordinary runner might be also inspired by his sheer crazy commitment. Ultimately, we all know that you need to be a bit of a nutter to get the most out of yourself as a runner – and Emil was as bonkers as they come in that respect. It wasn’t just the running in heavy boots, the holding his breath until he passed out, the wearing three tracksuits at once while running through deep snow, the running in a bath full of laundry for two hours … It was also the philosophy: the idea that “Pain is a merciful thing – if it lasts without interruption, it dulls itself.” That was the secret of his success as a runner: he trained himself to be tough in mind as well as body. “When a person trains once, nothing happens,” he said. “When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times, he develops in ways more than physical. Is it raining? That doesn’t matter. Am I tired? That doesn’t matter either. Willpower becomes no longer a problem.” I’ve found the mere thought of Zátopek’s example an energising, inspiring one during several decades as a runner. As Ron Clarke said: it’s not what he did, it’s the way he did it. What’s your favourite piece of Zátopek wisdom? “When you can’t keep going, go faster.” It’s bonkers, but it’s also the secret of everything. Just say it to yourself the next time you feel that you can’t keep going. Zátopek receives a kiss from his wife after winning the gold medal in 1952. Photograph: PPP. The quote you use for the title of the book, is that apocryphal too? It’s something that Emil is supposed to have said on the starting line of the Olympic marathon in Melbourne in 1956. He may not have used those exact words, but he certainly said something along those lines. He was still recovering from a very recent hernia operation. He was way off peak fitness and in any case he was well past his best. The temperature was somewhere between 30 and 35 degrees. He knew that he could expect nothing from the race ahead except extreme physical agony. Yet he embraced it with a cheerful, friendly graveyard humour that seems to me to come close to capturing the essence of his nobility. Do you think he has a natural heir at the moment? Someone who fits that mould, however differently they may now train/race? I can’t think of anyone now running who compares to him. His nearest modern equivalent was Haile Gebrselassie – who managed to combine being an incredible runner with an infectiously cheerful, generous personality. And there have been plenty of others, such as Paula Radcliffe, who have looked to Zátopek as a role model. But there are so many differences between then and now. Zátopek put it well, towards the end of his life: “Today, the athlete is not an athlete. He’s the centre of a team – doctors, scientists, coaches and so on. Sometimes I ran like a mad dog, but it was very simple. It was out of myself.” He seems to have been rather obsessed with 400m reps. Didn’t you ever wonder if he could have mixed it up a bit? Yes, definitely. Apart from anything else, you wonder how he stuck at it. Didn’t he ever get bored? Perhaps there was a part of his personality that found the endless repetition reassuring. And it’s also worth bearing in mind that, for much of his career, he was under huge political pressure to keep winning. I don’t think he was exaggerating when he said that sometimes he ran in fear of being sent to prison if he lost. So he probably didn’t dare try anything that felt like easing off. Having said which, he did sometimes mix things up a bit: long slow runs in the mountains with Dana, messing around in the woods with a child on his back, jogging on the spot in a bath full of washing. He just doesn’t seem to have counted that kind of running – running without intensity and pain – as proper training. Today We Die a Little : The Rise and Fall of Emil Zátopek , Olympic Legend by Richard Askwith is published by Vintage Publishing. Buy for £13.59 at the Guardian bookshop. The Greatest Distance Runner of All Time – Emil Zatopek Part 3: The Socialist Who Fought With Anti-Authoritarian Zeal. It was July, 1952. The Czech national team had already departed for Helsinki, Finland to take part in the Olympic Games. But their most famous team member, Emil Zátopek , was not on the plane. His wife, Dana, was an emotional wreck, wondering what was happening with her husband? Was he in trouble? Was he in prison? Zátopek was actually at the airport and ready to head for the Games when he learned that a teammate, Stanislav Jungwirth, was denied the credentials to leave Czechoslovakia. According to the book, Today We Die a Little!: The Inimitable Emil Zátopek, the Greatest Olympic Runner of All Time, Jungwirth’s father was in prison for political offenses, and so the Czech powers that be thought the father’s son would a flight risk. According to the books’ author, Richard Askwith, In the post-war period, with the growing tensions of the Cold War, the socialist Czech government was highly sensitive to criticism and fearful of defections; in fact, they had arrested the entire ice hockey team – the reigning world champions – before they departed for a tournament in London as players were said to be singing disrespectful songs, and worse, contemplating defection. But Zátopek was outraged, and would not stand for this level of authoritarian heavy handedness, particularly in regards to a teammate. Zátopek was actually a member of the government, an officer in the Czech Army. But he also had an independent streak, one that grew wider and brighter as his global fame as a track phenomenon grew. He gambled that his name and reputation were bigger than the collective pride of the Czech government by informing the authorities that he too would not fly to Helsinki and participate in the Olympics if Jungwirth was forced to remain in Czechoslovakia. Askwith stated that Jungwirth pleaded with Zátopek to go to Helsinki, not wanting to be the reason that Czechoslovakia’s greatest athlete did not go to the Olympics. And yet, Zátopek insisted. 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. Zatopek addresses crowds during the Prague Spring of 1968, which was brutally repressed by Soviet. Photos: Marathon man. Somehow, Zátopek’s gamble pays off. Jungwirth is given his papers so he and Zátopek can take off for Helsinki. But the risk was significant. Zátopek could have lost his job in the military or even worse, his freedom. Perhaps less personally impactful, but more relevant to the world of sports, Zátopek would have lost a chance at glory – which as it turns out was the singular greatest Olympics for a single track and field athlete. Zatopek won the 10,000 meter and 5,000 meter competitions, as well as the marathon within an 8-day period. No one had ever done that before. No one since. This was at the time, an extreme act of political defiance. Up to that point, Captain Zátopek was an officer who essentially did as the military instructed him. As Askwith writes, “thanks to his fame and achievements, he was an irresistible instrument of Party propaganda: a one-man solution to the problem of national morale. Proclaiming the Party line – often in speeches that had been written for him – became as crucial a part of his duties as winning races.” In fact after Helsinki, he would continue to toe the Party Line. But there were limits. Many years after the Zátopek’s Olympic swan song at the 1956 Melbourne Games and his retirement from international competition, Zatopek was still a very popular personality. Today We Die a Little : Emil Zátopek, Olympic Legend to Cold War Hero. Emil 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 personal price for his brave defence of ‘socialism with a human face’. Rehabilitated two decades later, he was a shadow of the man he had been – and the world had all but forgotten him. Today We Die A Little strips away the myths to tell the complex and deeply moving story of the most inspiring Olympic hero of them all. Today We Die A Little: Emil Zátopek, Olympic Legend to Cold War Hero (2016) Today We Die A Little is my attempt to tell the full, extraordinary story of my lifelong hero – the man Runner’s World named in 2013 as the greatest runner, over any distance, of all time. No runner has spawned so many legends as Emil Zátopek, the Czechoslovak soldier who in the decade following the Second World War revolutionised distance-running. He won five Olympic medals (including gold in his first attempt at a marathon), set 18 world records, and went undefeated over 10,000 metres for six years. In doing so, he redefined the boundaries of human endurance. His training sessions defied belief, many of them performed in Army boots, in snow, in sand, in darkness – even, some said, with his wife on his back. His toughness was matched by a spirit of generous friendship that transcended nationality and politics in the darkest days of the Cold War. His warm heart and eccentric joie de vivre charmed the world. He dropped one of his gold medals in a swimming pool; another, famously, he gave away. In the Prague Spring of 1968, Zátopek was an energetic champion of “socialism with a human face”. When Soviet tanks moved in to crush Czechoslovakia’s new freedoms, he paid a high price. Expelled from the Army and stripped of his role in sport, he was condemned to years of hard and degrading manual labour, far from his home and his adored wife. By the time he was fully 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, interviews with people across the world who knew him, and some wonderful support and encouragement from Emil’s widow, fellow Olympian Dana Zátopková, Today We Die A Little is an attempt to get beyond the usual myths and anecdotes and discover the real man behind the legend. It has been a challenging book to research and write. I have discovered that my hero had flaws as well as wonderful human qualities. There was tragedy in his life as well as joy and glory. Yet the true, complex, occasionally heart-breaking story of Emil Zátopek is if anything even more exhilarating than the generally accepted comic-book version. No one has ever understood or embodied the romance of running so life-enhancingly as Emil did, and with so much top-level sport now hopelessly corrupted by the cold, cash-driven, win-at-all-costs mentality, the story of his brave, generous-spirited life is as inspiring and relevant as it has ever been. I just hope that I have done him justice… What they’re saying: “A wonderfully in-depth and often emotionally charged piece of writing” – Athletics Weekly. “An astonishing achievement… There are few writers as adept at capturing so lyrically the utter and incomprehensible strangeness of distance running… A joy to read.” – Literary Review. “Before Mo Farah and Paula Radcliffe, there was Emil Zátopek – a Czechoslovakian soldier turned long-distance runner turned Cold War victim. His four Olympic golds, 18 world records and Communist party career are all laid bare in this definitive account” – Shortlist. “Reminds us of the pain and the glory behind every victory and the power of sport to bring people together and make history.” – Martina Navratilova , nine-time Wimbledon champion. “A tale from athletics’ age of innocence… He was a sporting hero not just for his time but for all time” – Spectator. “A fine work. It is rare to find a biography better researched than this one” – Letsrun.com. “A warm, honest and moving account of one of the greatest sportsmen of all time. Richard brings to life both the epic triumphs [and] the difficulties and complexities of Zátopek’s role in Communist Czechoslovakia.” Adharanand Finn , author of Running with the Kenyans and The Way of the Runner. “Sport book of the year… A fascinating tale, showing all sides of Zátopek, injecting humanity and humour into a dramatic life ” – Matt Butler “i” “Terrific” – Huw Richards, Guardian. “A portrait of a fine but flawed human being” – Nick Pitt, Sunday Times – Best Sports Books of 2016. “Worth reading, and not just for diehard athletics fans or Cold War buffs” – Outside. “A tremendous read” – Irish Times. “A powerful look at one of the greatest Olympic champions of all time… Riveting… Zátopek had a great heart — he was not just an iconic athlete; he was a peacemaker.” – Bill Rodgers , Olympic runner and four-times winner of the New York and Boston Marathons. “Of all the new non-fiction books with Olympic connections, this is the finest and most inspiring” – The National. Other background: Read my article in The Independent summing up Emil Zátopek’s story here. Read my account of writing the book on the Waterstones blog here. Read an interview about the book on the Guardian running blog here. Read a review of the book on my favourite US running blog here. Audio and video: Hear me discuss Today We Die A Little with Dotun Adebayo on Radio 5 Live’s Up All Night here (from 2:35) Or hear a shorter interview on Newstalk Radio’s Moncrieff Show here. Or find Radio Prague’s interview with me here. And there’s a big Connect Run Club interview with me here. Awards: Today We Die A Little has been short-listed for the Cross Sports Book Awards in the Biography of the Year category and was long listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. Purchase: Buy Today We Die A Little on Amazon.co.uk: click. Buy the US edition of Today We Die A Little on Amazon.com: click here. Buy the Czech edition of Today We Die A Little on kozmas.cz: click here. Looking for Czech translation services? I recommend: Petr Bráník. Looking for accommodation in Prague? I recommend: Pension Atelier 12. Today We Die a Little!: The Inimitable Emil Zátopek the Greatest Olympic Runner of All Time by Richard Askwith. Named Sports Biography of the Year in 2020, a gripping tale of an eccentric countess who thrillingly defied the Nazis in the world’s most dangerous horse race. Today We Die A Little : acclaimed biography of Emil Zátopek. The definitive portrait of the much-loved Czech, widely seen as the greatest endurance runner of all time, and his epic struggles on and off the track. Feet in the Clouds : the classic tale of fell-running and obsession. Still inspiring sporting dreams after all these years, the cult classic that won the author Best New Writer prize in 2005’s British Sports Book Awards. People Power : a radical proposal to remake the UK parliament to fit the populist age. A short, timely manifesto – in Biteback Publishing’s popular ‘Provocations’ series – for reclaiming parliament for the people it claims to represent. Running Free : memoir of a runner’s journey back to nature. A very personal celebration of the joys of running as nature intended, in the countryside, free from the anxieties of today’s ‘always-on’ materialist culture. The Lost Village : a search for a forgotten rural England. A hauntingly evocative journey through rural England, hearing the voices of the marginalised, unfashionable villagers who remember what life in ‘their’ countryside used to be like. Apology. I spend a lot of time writing. When I’m not writing, I like to spend as much time as I possibly can outdoors. I hardly ever use social media (although I am on Twitter at @richardaskwith ). I rarely get round to updating this site. Sorry if that’s frustrating, but if I did try to make the site more interesting, I’d never finish my next book… Agent. I am represented by Victoria Hobbs at A.M. Heath, 6 Warwick Court, Holborn, London WC1R 5DJ; tel: +44 (0) 207 242 2811; email: [email protected]. Signed copies. If you would like to buy a signed copy of any of my books, send me an email here and I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try.