Zatopek The Engine is no more
ASSOCIATED PRESS

PRAGUE, NOVEMBER 22: Legendary long-distance runner Emil Zatopek, one of the best-known Czechs, not only for his thrilling speed and unorthodox training techniques but also for his political activism and his exemplary marriage, has died, a hospital spokeswoman said on Wednesday. He was 78.

The four-time Olympic champion died here on Tuesday in a military hospital, where he was treated after a stroke in late October, said a hospital spokesperson who wouldn’T give her name. He had been reported in critical condition since he was hospitalised.

Zatopek, who set a total of 18 world records during his 15-year career and became the first athlete to finish a 10,000-metre race under 29 minutes, enjoyed cult status in his homeland for over five decades - despite being ostracised by the Communist regime after 1968. ‘‘With his death, the legend does not disappear,’’ said Milan Jirasek, the head of the Czech Olympic Committee.

Zatopek was born in September 1922 in the town of Koprivnice in the industrial northeast of the country, and studied at one of the colleges of the famous shoemaker Tomas Bata in Zlin, where he also got engaged in athletics in 1941.He ran his first official race 5,000 metres in 1943 and immediately became Czechoslovakia’s best long-distance runner.

After the end of World War II in 1945, Zatopek started to regularly face the world’s athletics elite and, within a year, he clocked the World’s best times in 5,000 and 10,000 metres, his showcase events. He took his first Olympic gold medal in London, 1948, and added three more golds in Helsinki four years later, where he dominated the 5k, 10k and marathon races, a result which lifted him alongside such greats as Paavo Nurmi and Jesse Owens. The 5k race at Helsinki, where Zatopek won thanks to a 200-metre crushing finish, entered history books as one of the most thrilling athletics races ever. ‘‘I wanted to win every time I was on the track,’’ Zatopek told his biographers. ‘‘At Helsinki, I was tired after the 10k race, but I still shattered all my rivals.’’

Zatopek wasn’t known only for his phenomenal results, but also for his unorthodox training methods, which were adopted by hundreds of athletes in the last five decades. Nicknamed ‘The Engine’ after winning an unprecedented 38,000-metre races between 1948-54, Zatopek became a living legend of Czechoslovak athletics immediately after ending his career in the 1950s but fell out of grace with the Communist regime after criticising the Soviet-led military invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

As an outspoken advocate of the so-called ‘‘Prague Spring’’ a process leading toward democratisation of Communist Czechoslovakia, Zatopek was dismissed from his senior position in the Czechoslovak military shortly after the invasion and sent to a Czech uranium mine where he was forced to work for six years.

Despite disappearing from the limelight and his notorious modesty and humbleness, Zatopek remained a renowned public figure, not least because of his model 52-year marriage with fellow-athlete Dana Ingrova, a former Olympic champion in javelin, with whom he shared not only love of sports but also the same birthday.

In 1975, Zatopek became the first Czech athlete to be awarded the UN’s Pierre de Coubertin Prize for promoting Fair Play.

Zatopek is survived by his wife. Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.

Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.