Athletics: Lovelock enigma continues

Jack Lovelock's meticulous diaries show that his Olympic campaign 'was one of the best-planned in New Zealand sporting history'. Photo / Supplied

When Jack Lovelock, the blond-haired wisp from Crushington, baulked just slightly with 300m to go in the 1936 Olympic 1500m final, he threw his most feared challenger off his stride.

The baulk was just a prelude to a magnificent, sustained burst of acceleration that proved too much for American Glenn Cunningham, defending champion Luigi Beccali and all the other pretenders to the Olympic crown.

Lovelock had a way of doing that, of flummoxing people - on and off the track. His enigma has fuelled a burgeoning literary legacy, one set to grow with the release of a book later this year.

Veteran sports reporter and author Lynn McConnell has penned Conquerors of Time, a labour of love that focuses on that famous race and its many and varied participants.

But his offering is only part of the Lovelock industry, which shows no signs of slowing, some 73 years after his 3m 47.8s of fame.

The mystery surrounding Lovelock the man, post-race, temporarily consumed author James McNeish, who journeyed to Berlin to try to solve the Lovelock Code. He has recently re-released Lovelock, the novel, to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the athlete's untimely death.

McConnell and McNeish's works stand alongside Jack Lovelock - Athlete and Doctor (2007), written by Dr Graeme Woodfield, and As If Running on Air: The Journals of Jack Lovelock (2008), edited by David Colquhoun. The eloquent former Herald columnist Norman Harris' Lap of Honour, was the forerunner to them all.

Each author found a different muse. For McConnell, it was the race itself. For Woodfield, it was the debunking of myths' that emanated from McNeish's acclaimed novel.

It is Lovelock's death 13 years after his gold medal, at Church Avenue Station in New York, that acts as McNeish's muse, as he tried to piece together the events in the immediate aftermath of his gold medal: The subtext being that something occurred in Berlin that became the catalyst for Lovelock's probable suicide.

Indeed, some of the basis for McNeish's research into Lovelock's life and death seem vague and vivid all in the one sentence, as painted in The Man From Nowhere, A Berlin Diary, also included in the re-release of Lovelock. Come hell or hochwasser, it seemed, McNeish was going to find something in Berlin that would point to Lovelock's misfortunes whether any existed or not.

"The answer to the riddle might lie in Oxford, where he first found himself as an athlete and flowered, or in New York, where he spent his last two years and died. But everything seems to point to Berlin and I have to start somewhere," he writes.

Soon after, McNeish would write: "Their race on 6 August was early in the programme. The Games didn't end until the 16th, 10 days later... What happened in those 10 days to turn the man with the infectious grin, the smiling darling of the Berlin crowds, into a depressive? The change in personality was so marked that mere anticlimax after victory - which all great exponents say they experience after a supreme test is not enough to account... for it."

However riveting that hypothesis might be, it is nonetheless tenuous.

It was reading McNeish's novel that prompted Woodfield to start his project. He couldn't put Lovelock down, yet it also troubled him. He could not marry the man he was reading about in fiction to the one portrayed to him in his days at Timaru Boys' High School, Lovelock's alma mater.

"I wanted to make sure the image of Lovelock was not tarnished by assertions that weren't based in fact. McNeish is a fine writer and I enjoyed his book immensely but he has muddied the waters somewhat," Dr Woodfield says.

He collected as much data on Lovelock as possible, went to England and showed it to as many medical specialists as he could. He talked to those who had any connection to Lovelock. He took a scientific approach because that is what he is, a scientist.

He found no depressive tendencies and nothing to suggest he had lived any sort of "secret life".

"Everybody liked him, he was a good bloke. He was obsessive about his running but, at the same time, managed to complete a very tough course at Oxford University.

"It makes for a much better novel if you have a brilliant athlete who is a depressive and commits suicide than it does if you have a good bloke who was caught in a freak set of circumstances but it doesn't mean it's the truth."

That, says McConnell, is why he has never allowed himself to treat McNeish's work as anything other than a cracking good yarn.

He visited the station in New York and could "easily" see how somebody could have inadvertently fallen off the tight platform into the path of a train, particularly somebody with poor eyesight who was given to dizzy spells after multiple concussions.

If anything, the morbid fascination into Lovelock's death grates on McConnell - to him, it should be viewed as a macabre footnote only to a fascinating athletic life.

"I guess I've always been disappointed that what was a very fine novel (Lovelock) tended to be taken as some sort of gospel on his life," McConnell says.

McConnell's inspiration came from the writings of Harris, the fact his uncle attended Timaru Boys' High with Lovelock and his own interest in the sport.

He wanted to provide context around the 1500m final and Lovelock's single-minded pursuit of gold, a pursuit so impressive that Hitler reportedly cut short a meeting with the king of Bulgaria to make sure he reached the stadium on time (he was still late, says McConnell).

* * *

That era, between 1932 and 1936, was the first time athletes raced against each other rather than against the clock.

To put Lovelock's victory into perspective, the Games were as much about the 1500m as they were about Jesse Owens.

It was the greatest field ever assembled for a middle distance race - there was Cunningham, Beccali, Sydney The Mighty Atom' Wooderson - and you could still argue that for its time, it was the greatest field ever assembled for an Olympic 1500m final.

In Leni Riefenstahl's seminal film Olympia, the 1500m is the only event shot without the filmmaker applying her own aesthetic to it.

"That was because it was poetry itself," McConnell says.

To paint his picture, McConnell has, where possible, visited the families of the metric milers. He found each individual had his own fascinating story, of which Lovelock's is the most fascinating of all.

"The approach he took to running is described as a fixation but that is underestimating him. Nobody has left a legacy of information like Jack Lovelock.

"I don't think anybody in the realm of sports has left one like it. Bradman had his scrapbooks but they do not compare to Lovelock's diaries for their scale. "They were meticulous and show him to be not just fixated but innovative. He swam, he boxed, he walked for miles," McConnell says, noting that all this activity went against what was considered best practice of the day.

"All the while, he was planning for 1936. It was one of the best-planned campaigns in New Zealand sporting history. He took an almost gentrified No 8 wire approach."

For the television generations, the Lovelock industry provides a fascinating insight into the past. McConnell and Woodfield are anxious that the genius of his life is not eclipsed by the mystery' of his death.

But in the end, McConnell concedes, it will remain a talking point for the simple fact that nobody knows for certain what happened. It's a grey area but he's not sure he even cares.

"No one knows. We didn't see him jump or fall."

But we've all seen him, in black and white, crossing the finish line first. That much is not in dispute.