Australia and the Olympic Games Edwin Flack and the Marathon Focus

The First Games Athens 1896 Performances

Edwin Flack and the Marathon

Focus:

 Read the account of the Marathon and assess Flack’s attitude and performance. Was it in the spirit of the first modern Olympic Games?  Why did Flack become a public hero?

The irrepressible George Robertson, a man of charm and inﬂuence, had persuaded the ambassador to send along his personal butler, VW Delves‐Broughton,to be Flack’s aide. By great coincidence Delves‐Broughton was also an Old Boy of Melbourne Grammar, which he had attended during a period when his father was master of the Melbourne Mint.

Fittingly, Flack wore his old school running vest: dark blue, with a white mitre on the chest.“ On the morning of the race, Thursday 9 April, a service was held at the Marathon church, during which special prayers were offered for a Greek victory and a number of runners took the sacrament. Around 2.00 p.m. a field of twenty‐five assembled at the start of the marathon, all but four of them Greeks; the foreigners were the placegetters in the 1500 ‐ Flack, Blake and Lermusiaux ‐ and the Hungarian Gyula Kellner. Under a blazing sun, lined up according to places drawn in a lottery, they endured a speech by the army major whose job it was to start the race; he took a long time to explain the rules about not taking short cuts or accepting lifts, and finally fired his pistol.

Focusing just then on Flack, as the runners cantered away backed by an odd caravan of attendants, the image that comes to mind has a distinct Ripping Yarns flavour. There he was, a tall and angular ﬁgure among so many smaller, swarthier ones, with his chest encased in his old school vest and his head protected by a small tasseled cap, attended by the faithful Delves‐Broughton, pedalling a pushbike and looking thoroughly incongruous in a bowler hat. Some ofthe other attendants rode bicycles and a few were on horseback, and further behind came a phalanx of carriages carrying doctors and medical equipment. After his two earlier wins, Flack was seen as the man to beat: “They were all in a mortal funk of me,” he wrote later. His plan was not to force the pace, but to stay with the leading Greeks until about 4 kilometres from home, when he would apply whatever pressure he could muster. The Frenchman cleared out to an early lead in the ﬁrst uphill stages of the race, and Flack remained in sixth place for 7 or 8 kilometres. At the 10‐kilometre mark he was second, with Lermusiaux far out of sight in front, and at 20 kilometres three foreigners led: Lermusiaux three minutes ahead of Flack, with Blake another 50 metres back.

Flack gained some ground over the next 10 kilometres, drank some water on the run, and passed Lermusiaux; behind him, Blake dropped out. Mean‐ time, the Greek champion was displaying almost nonchalant conﬁdence; jogging easily past an inn near the village of Pikermi, he demanded a glass of wine, downed it, asked about the runners ahead of him, and announced that he was sure to pass them. The news that Flack was leading, conveyed to the stadium by a cyclist during the pole vault, was received with some outrage by the huge crowd. The messenger was abused, threatened and lucky to escape unscathed.