Athletics: Resolve, the measure of a champion

Former English Olympic great and world mile recordholder SEBASTIAN COE pays tribute to John Walker.


This is another story about an athlete and drugs. And it's not full of limp excuses from the morally bereft or the synthetic, lawyer-fuelled indignation of the manifestly guilty.

Nor is it about anabolic steroids, nandrolone, EPO, stimulants or diuretics.

It is about one of the greatest runners in history who, with the help of drugs, is today tackling Parkinson's disease with the same determination he showed when shattering world records.

Twenty-nine years ago at the Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, John Walker, at the improbable age of 22, became part of a two-man revolution that cut a swathe though the moribund orthodoxy of middle-distance running.

Up until the afternoon of February 2, 1974, in the Queen Elizabeth II Stadium, 1500m racing was mostly about a couple of tentative opening laps, an occasional surge in the third and a sprint for the line off the bottom bend in the last.

It usually handed championship races on a plate to athletes such as Peter Snell with electric changes of pace.

The second half of the revolutionary duo could not have been more different from his accomplice. Filbert Bayi, a softly-spoken and slightly-built Tanzanian Army officer, came to New Zealand with a plan.

It wasn't hatched up in the athletes village or its training track, or even in the call-up room which sorts out the winners and losers moments before the race.

It was a plan that evolved in the foothills and trails around Dar-es-Salaam.

"I thought I was strong enough to win the Commonwealth Games by running from the front all the way, and I thought if I did that I would break the world record," Bayi said at last month's tribute dinner to Walker in Auckland.

He did both. In an extraordinary piece of front running - his opening lap was a little more than 54s - he opened up a gap of nearly half a straight by halfway over his chasers.

With 300m of the race left, Walker, who had shadowed team-mate Rod Dixon, realised too late that Bayi was showing no signs of flagging from the relentless and metronomic pace.

He did close the gap to three-tenths of a second but, with Walker chasing him down like a blond lurcher in pursuit of his quarry, Bayi made it to the line and the title in a world record time.

Walker, who had raced over the distance only twice before Christchurch, took silver and the consolation of knowing he, too, had broken the world mark.

"My race plan was simple," Walker recalled. "I knew Bayi was strong, but I thought Rod [Dixon] would take me through and Bayi would stop.

"The problem was nobody thought Bayi could keep going at that pace and Dixon was just not strong enough after Bayi took us into never-never land.

"If Bayi had a pacemaker that day, God forbid, he would have probably run five seconds faster. When I look back to Christchurch I realise it was 30 years ahead of its time.

"Bayi was super human that day ... gun to tape and no pacemakers. It was the perfect race."

I remember sitting in front of the television in Sheffield in the early hours of the morning with club-mates and coach, stunned at the end of the race.

After a few moments the silence was punctured.

"Well, that's changed the game," my coach said.

The shockwaves spread far and wide.

American mile record-holder Marty Liquori "accused everyone of being on drugs," Walker said, smiling.

To what extent coaches are the architects of greatness is always a matter of conjecture. Would Herb Elliott have been as formidable had his path not crossed the eccentric Percy Cerutty, who persuaded a 19-year-old Elliott to spend hours flogging up and down the sand dunes of Portsea?

If Peter Snell had rebelled against the demanding, almost despotic regime of New Zealand's legendary coach Arthur Lydiard, would he have dominated the early years of 1960s track and field?

In Walker, coach Arch Jelley saw a raw young talent from a cross-country background whose sporting interests lay elsewhere.

"It is difficult to escape the influence of Lydiard in New Zealand," Walker said. "We are such a small nation, with such a small population, and yet we dominated distance running for so long."

Lydiard was the force behind the gritty Murray Halberg, who won the 5000m Olympic title in Rome.

New Zealand had waited 24 years since Jack Lovelock's Berlin 1500m gold medal, and yet within a couple of hours Halberg was joined on the winners' rostrum by Snell, the unheralded young Kiwi and Lydiard protege, who four years later became the first, and so far only, athlete to win the 800m and 1500m Olympic double.

This jelly was from a different mould.

"Arch modified Lydiard's schedules and cut down the heavy mileage," Walker recalled. "I still had the long runs, but Arch wanted quality over quantity. I also did much more track work than Arthur would have given his athletes."

In the early years Jelley was fiercely protective of his young charge.

"I was desperate to race Rod Dixon and Dick Quax, but Arch held me back until he knew I was ready - his eye was always on the 1976 Olympic Games," Walker said.

He arrived in Montreal as the clear favourite, having broken the mile world record in Gothenberg the year before.

"I knew the world was waiting for the Christchurch rematch. Earlier in 1976 I beat Bayi easily over 1500m in Helsinki, but I knew he would be ready for me at the Games.

"My training was totally geared to dealing with Filbert throwing everything at me as he did in Christchurch. But when the African boycott prevented him from being there, I was left with a field with no front runners and potentially a much more dangerous threat because they were all fast finishers who, with Bayi in the field, would have been nowhere near us in the finishing straight."

Walker's unease was not misplaced and although he grabbed the title he had to call on every shred of his uncompromising mentality in the finishing straight.

"In the call-up room I took my track suit off and stood and looked at all the finalists in turn. I wanted them to look at me and the Silver Fern on my vest. And after I'd looked at them, all I knew they were running for second. And I wanted them to know it.

"It also helped that Jumbo Elliott, coach to the world indoor mile recordholder, Eamonn Coughlan, wrote me a letter telling me how I was going to lose. Poor old Eamonn had no idea he had written it until I told him a few years later."

Walker's win was his last championship victory and the end of Kiwi dominance of middle and long-distance running.

As David Moorcroft, the chief executive of UK Athletics, who was one of those beaten in the final, said: "Looking back I realise we were all in awe of his reputation and we let him dominate us."

In 1985, Walker completed his 100th sub-four-minute mile.

He retired after the 1990 Auckland Commonwealth Games that ended in the ignominy of being tripped up in his final race by the serially-awkward Australian, Pat Scammell.

And from then on the story should have been about a sporting legend relaxing into a happy family life and national affection. He has both. But he also has Parkinson's disease.

"I have no sympathy for my situation nor do I look for it," he said.

The athlete, who in his career would no more have taken an aspirin than jump off Beachy Head, now lives courtesy of drugs. "It is frustrating," he said. "I have to time the tablets to the exact minute. They will help me for three or four hours, and then I struggle. I still live a normal life, but within reason. I have to turn myself over five times a night and that means sitting upright.

"And yes, I do worry about the future. It's the little things that you always took for granted. Putting your hands in your pocket. Brushing your teeth. I hope one day they find a cure, but until then I just have to get on with life.

"My family have been incredible through thick and thin during my career, but their support and love now is so important to me, even if my wife does think I now walk like Ozzy Osbourne."