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.