As we entered the 1983 season, the International Olympic Committee finally addressed its second-biggest problem: the rules that governed amateurism. To that point, it had been technically prohibited for an athlete to accept any financial compensation beyond token expenses during a competition. The rules were absurd, hailing as they did from track and field's upper-class origins, when the sport was still a hobby for young white gentlemen. While meet promoters and the national and international federations reaped huge profits from ticket sales and television revenues, the stars of the show were expected to train full time for the pure love of competition. In practice, the amateur rules had been ignored since the 1920s. They accomplished two things: top athletes were forced to operate outside the rules, and meet directors-unbound by written contracts- found it easier to cheat the less established performers.
During my time at Stanford, assistant coach and former sportswriter Bud Spencer related a conversation he'd had with Charlie Paddock a half-century before. Paddock, the 1920 Olympic champion in the 100 metres, had told Bud he was clearing $500 a week at meets in Scandinavia, a princely sum in that era. Sonja He-nie, the legendary Norwegian figure skater and three-time Olympic
122
Pointing Toward Helsinki 123
gold medallist, did even better. The night before each meet, her father invited the promoter to a poker game and told him how much he would lose. The father's luck never failed-and Sonja became one of the wealthiest amateurs of all
time.
By the 1970s, it was commonplace to see athletes and agents lined up outside the door of an unmarked hotel room in a Grand Prix city, waiting to get paid by the meet promoter for their appearances. The ruling powers winked at this breach as long as the participants kept quiet about it. But in 1977, when Guy Drut, a French hurdler and defending Olympic champion, publicly admitted that he had accepted appearance fees, the IAAF banned him until 1981. For Drut's less candid associates, however, nothing changed.
Six years later, the bureaucrats gave in to reality. Athletes would now be allowed to establish trust funds where they could deposit endorsement earnings or appearance fees. While the funds were theoretically frozen until after the athletes retired, the new rules permitted periodic withdrawals for "living expenses"-and the loophole was liberal enough to put track's superstars behind the wheels of Porsches and Ferraris.
My sprinters weren't yet at that level, and their earning potential was limited by the small Canadian market. Nonetheless, I set about arranging endorsement contracts with Adidas. The amounts were quite low in 1983: about $500 a month for Angella, and $250 for Desai, Ben, Tony, and Mark. But they supplemented the athletes' meagre carding subsidies, kept food on their tables, and allowed them to train without the distraction of a part-time job. Over the next three years, I spent up to 30 hours a week seeking out financing for my runners. I accepted it as a necessary chore to keep my sprinters in the sport.
By the same token, I later refused to endorse a Canadian Track and Field Association drive to raise athletes' club membership fees to $1,000 and thereby pay the coaches, virtually all of whom were working as volunteers. The Optimist club had never collected more than $60 a year from its athletes, and Ross Earl and I agreed that we wouldn't start imposing high fees now. We weren't running a country club, after all. We maintained that the clubs should
124 Speed Trap
generate income for their athletes, not siphon money from them. If the coaches
corporations, for example.
Our over-training caught up with Angella in 1983. Had she continued her rate of improvement that year, she might have become the world's top woman sprinter. But as she'd gotten faster, she'd also become more fragile-and I didn't yet know enough to cut her workload back. Her indoor season was ruined by thigh and groin injuries, which led to a chronic case of sciatica, a painful nerve condition. She received treatment that summer from an expert in Munich and improved temporarily, but was slow to regain top form, and capped her season by crushing her finger in a door hinge.
As Angella regressed, Desai advanced. He swept the nationals that summer, tied Harry Jerome's Canadian record for the 100 metres with a 10.17, and improved his 200 to 20.29.
Ben was making even more rapid progress. He won his first Grand Prix event in Munich, where he logged a new personal best of 10.19, the best time ever by a Canadian at sea level. Ben's starts, in particular, were the talk of the circuit; his eccentric form aside, no one could match him out of the blocks. Then, at the World Championships in Helsinki, his gift deserted him. He started poorly in his opening rounds and even worse in the semi-final, from which he failed to advance. He seemed to be panicking, which was out of character for Ben. After the semi, I sat him down for a long talk. We were joined by Don Quarrie, the veteran Jamaican star. Just as Hasely Crawford had tabbed Tony as the world's next great 100-metre man, and worked with him informally whenever he could, so Quarrie had taken Ben under his wing. (At 32, Quarrie was getting on in years, but he would still run well enough to win a silver on Jamaica's 4x100 relay team in the 1984 Olympics.) His mentor's relationship with Ben was genuinely selfless-a rare quality in the track world.
Ben told us he'd been concerned about his start for a number of reasons: his earlier problem in the preliminary heats; the headwind he'd be fighting; and- most of all-his perceived need to get out
Pointing Toward Helsinki 125
There was the problem: The more you try to do something, the worse it will get.
Quarrie sympathized with Ben's plight. In his own career, he said, he'd often found semi-finals more nerve-racking than finals, since you had to get past the semi to do anything at all in the big race. But Ben's anxiety was misplaced, he added:
"You're already the best starter in the world-you always come out in front. The last thing you need to do is worry about how to get a better start." It was simple advice, but it helped. Ben would never have a starting slump again.
Ben was crazy about cars. Unfortunately, his limited and erratic income made it difficult for him to get financing to buy one. One day he asked me if I'd co-sign for an old Pontiac Trans Am he'd picked out. After I agreed, Tony began pestering me for the same favour. I asked Paul Poce, the Canadian distance coach, if I could co-sign for two different people at the same time. "Sure," Paul replied, "you can go to jail more than once." Despite this lack of reassurance, I helped Tony as well.
As Ben became more prosperous, his auto mania would wheel out of control. In the five years that followed the purchase of that first Pontiac, he would buy two Corvettes, a Toyota Supra, a Mazda 626 (for his mother), a Porsche 928, and, finally, a Ferrari Testarossa. I tried to discourage Ben from turning his cars over so quickly-his depreciation costs alone were huge-but he was stubborn, even compulsive on this score. He loved to go fast and in style, no matter the expense.
Carl Lewis had jolted the track world two months before Helsinki with his performance at the U.S. National Championships in Indianapolis. In his greatest feat ever, Carl ran the 200 metres in 19.75 seconds-just three hundredths off the world record, and more than two tenthsfaster than the previous best time at sea level. But what impressed observers most of all was the way he ran it. Lewis began waving his arms in celebration when he was 11 strides-a good 25 metres- from the finish line, which cost him at least two tenths and
a certain record. Flying past the tape, he went on to complete the lap, with no visible fatigue, at a pace that might have won the 400 metres.