First Olympics

(To mark twin 50^th anniversaries in 2017, as a fulltime running journalist and as a marathoner, I am posting a piece for each of those years. This one comes from 1968.)

OLYMPIANS EARN their way to the Games. Journalists and tourists pay their way, or find someone to pay it for them. I joined the latter group in traveling to the Mexico City Olympics.

Now I was on assignment to write a “Mexican Diary” for Track & Field News. This writing, plus coverage of a few events, was part of my double-duty here – and the lesser part.

T&FN’s more senior writers (and I was second to the bottom in seniority on this staff) could have handled the wordsmithing. What really allowed me to come here was agreeing to act as a tour guide.

The company had booked Olympic tours since Helsinki in 1952. With these latest Games sitting so close to the States, this tour group was the largest yet at more than 1000. With tour director Ed Fox, I arrived a week before Opening Ceremonies to check the housing, collect the tickets and greet early arrivals.

Early in this Olympic visit I learned the tricks and advantages of pretending to be an Olympic athlete. At 25 and with a younger-looking face, I could act the part even if my legs couldn’t have given a convincing performance.

I’d been told, “Walk up to any guarded gate and act like you know where you’re going. If challenged, say you forgot your badge and keep walking. You can go almost anywhere this way.”

My first morning in Mexico City a guard at the overflow Village stopped me and pointed to my chest, where a credential should have hung. I shrugged and said approximately the Spanish word for “forgot.”

He waved me through. Inside I met Hal Higdon, who’d also faked his right to enter.

I’d known Hal since 1960, as both a runner and writer. I had thought of him as an old runner before, and now he’d aged to 37. He stood talking with an even older man (all of 50, I’d learn later) – weathered of skin, graying of hair and wiry of body.

Hal introduced him only as “George.” This meeting, which would go unnoted in the published diary, would be the most important event of this Olympics for me.

None of us could have guessed that this chance meeting, in a place where we didn’t belong, brought together a trio who would become the most prolific authors in our sport’s history. George Sheehan would be the widest-read and most-quoted of all.

MY MOST memorable race from these Olympics was the 1500-meter final. By then I’d touched the two main protagonists. By chance I’d shaken hands with both of them outside the competitive arena.

Jim Ryun’s future wife Anne, along with other family members, came to Mexico City with the Track & Field News tour. Jim made a practice of running over to our housing complex to visit them.

I’d never even seen him in person until that morning when he stood before my apartment waiting for someone, anyone, to join him. When he spotted three of us leaving to run, he asked, “Can I join you?”

I told him we’d slow him down. He said, “Not at all. It’s just an easy 30-minute run today.”

He knew the territory better than we did, having been here longer. “Let’s go to Azteca,” he said of the soccer stadium about two miles away.

The locked, spike-edged gate didn’t stop him. He crawled right over with the rest of us to have a look inside. If he had slipped, I could see the headlines: “Ryun Spiked While Breaking into Stadium – Out of Games – Track Writer to Blame.”

Safely back outside the spikes, Ryun said, “I’m going to pick up the pace a bit.” He shook hands all around.

Soon he was just a dot in the distance, but none of us would ever forget how we’d stayed with Jim Ryun for as long as we had. Not many runners could say that.

Later I became a regular visitor the athletes’ Village. And soon after that I was hopping onto buses labeled “Atletas” that took them to the stadium.

One afternoon I walked into the bus behind someone with “Kenya” on his back. He took an empty seat, and I grabbed one beside him. Only then did I look him in the face and see this was Kip Keino.

We made small-talk during the short ride, Keino answering in precise Swahili- and British-accented English. I didn’t confess to being a journalist.

At the stadium, where he was about to run a 1500-meter heat, I wished him luck. “And to you as well,” he said, thinking that only an athlete would ride this bus.

Kip Keino and Jim Ryun met later in one of the most anticipated races of these Games. It would be one of the best finishes of any Games, for both of them even though Ryun’s performance was widely panned in his county’s second-place-is-first-loser media.

Despite the breath-taking altitude, Keino set an Olympic record that would stand for another four Olympiads. Without benefit of an altitude birth or much training there, Ryun ran a time that would have won him all previous Olympics but one and would still have put him on the U.S. team 40 years later. This is failure?

Photo: Jim Ryun ran one of the greatest races of his career at Mexico City, though he received little credit for “only a silver” behind Kip Keino.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]