The man, the myth, the mystery
Professor Roger Robinson, an acclaimed writer on the subject of running, looks at the death of a New Zealand sporting great on this day 70 years ago, and addresses speculation that emerged decades later.
Seventy years ago today, a man suffering from flu and dizziness fell from a New York subway platform and was killed by a train. Filed by the New York Police Department as a routine ‘‘unidentified death’’, the next day the shocked world was mourning an Olympic legend, revered medical researcher, and one of the greatest New Zealanders, Jack Lovelock, dead at 39.
‘‘Dr Lovelock Is Killed in Subway; Set Olympic Track Record in 1936’’ was the prosaic New York Times headline above a two-column tribute and witness account of the accident.
Twelve years earlier, the world’s media had been poetic about Lovelock’s world record 1500m victory at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, lauding it as the greatest footrace of all time. They called it ‘‘perfect’’, ‘‘marvellous’’, ‘‘faultless’’.
‘‘There never was such a race nor such a runner,’’ wrote the Manchester Guardian.
The race has become inseparable from the babbling ecstasy of Harold Abrahams on BBC radio: ‘‘Lovelock leads! Lovelock, Lovelock! Cunningham second, Beccali third. Come on, Jack! A hundred yards to go. Come on, Jack! My God, he’s done it! Jack, come on! Lovelock wins, five yards, six yards, he wins, he’s won, hooray!’’
In his private journal, Lovelock more calmly described his tactical masterpiece as ‘‘an artistic creation’’. His world record 3:37.8 was equivalent to a 4:06.2 mile but the key was how he surprised the faster sprinters with a long 300m surge to the tape, a tactic unprecedented in 1936, and successfully imitated by John Walker in 1976.
After the race, Lovelock was adored by the crowd, besieged by reporters, praised by Adolf Hitler, and invited to a government-funded celebrity tour of New Zealand. Since then, he has become a figure almost of myth, up there with Katherine Mansfield as a potent if complex Kiwi icon.
So how did it end at that dingy New York subway station, at 9.30 on a wintry morning? How did the name of this much-loved and multi-accomplished man become tainted by alt-facts gossip about neurotic suicide and fascist sympathies?
The first question is simply answered. In 1945, serving near London in Britain’s Army Medical Corps, Lovelock married Cynthia James, an American working in the Office of Strategic Services and the American Hospital.
After the war, they moved to New York and by 1948 had two small daughters and a large house near Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, a short walk from Beverly Road subway station.
It is an area called Kensington, upscale at that time, with Anglo street names (the Lovelock home was 203 Marlborough). It is designated a historic district now but has declined. I saw one small boy step in through a missing panel of his front door. The Lovelock house is a refuge for indigent elderly men. I was shooed away by a fierce matron, or guard.
From that home, a fine one except that it backs on to the subway cutting, Dr Lovelock carried forward his wartime research into the rehabilitation of seriously injured servicemen.
He was appointed assistant director in the department of physical medicine at the New York Hospital for Special Surgery and, a few months before his death, was awarded a prestigious research fellowship. No longer running, he was developing another stellar career.
On December 28, despite a dose of flu, he went to the hospital early, but phoned Cynthia before 9am to say he was feeling more ill, and dizzy, and was coming home.
His eyesight and balance were impaired by a horse-riding accident in 1944. His close-up spectacles were found in his pocket. He took the D line express to Church Avenue station, changing there to wait for a local.
He stood at the front end of the platform, probably because he could alight at the exit nearest home, a practised commuter. The line at Church Avenue is above ground but passes under a long street bridge, around a left bend, a kink in the line. The result is that the train cannot be clearly seen until it is almost at the station, and appears with a sudden rush, still moving quite fast.
Possibly Lovelock leaned out to try to see the oncoming train. For an hour I watched travellers there, and almost every one, 100 or more, leaned out at least once to peer up the line. I used to do it, until Lovelock’s fate taught me the risks.
The train driver, Patrick Hayden, ‘‘saw him fall, and quickly put on the brakes but two cars ran over the body’’, reported the Times, and the medical examiner accepted Hayden’s witness account that it was an ‘‘accidental fall’’.
If the man had jumped, Hayden would have said so.
Not the faintest suggestion of suicide appeared for 37 years, until New Zealand fiction writer James McNeish added that spice to his novel Lovelock (1986).
A habitual mixer of fact and fiction, of the intellectual and the sensational, McNeish included useful period research but declined to admit to the inventions.
He stuck by his tabloid suicide speculation despite protests and the hurt caused to
Lovelock’s family. In a 1994 Epilogue,
McNeish added an unsupported claim that there was ‘‘mental instability in the Lovelock family’’.
Lovelock’s daughters, aged 3 and
2 when he died, have been unfailingly helpful to all researchers inquiring about their famous father but one privately told me they were distressed by McNeish’s inventions.
Even in a novel those have to be called exploitative. The lurid suggestion that pre-war Lovelock had fascist sympathies is easily refuted from Lovelock’s own writing. In an essay on youth and modern sport, written in turbulent 1935, Lovelock is scathing about Germany and Italy, ‘‘the two nations where dictators have recently taken command over all departments of their people’s lives’’.
There is a story that as team captain he ordered the marching New Zealanders to salute a stadium worker with a moustache and a broom instead of Hitler. It is credible – he had an impish wit and an elusive personality (‘‘a hard man to know’’, Lord Porritt said of him).
McNeish’s other fantasy was that Lovelock had gay inclinations, which amuses anyone who has carefully read his training diary and twigged what he means by evening ‘‘cricket’’ with various young women.
The true power of the Lovelock myth comes from the big themes he intersected with. Born in Crushington on the West Coast, his education at Timaru Boys’ High and Otago University took him to the world-shaping 1930s settings of snobbish, pacifist Oxford, noisy, emergent America, rampant Nazi Germany, World War II, and pioneering reconstructive surgery.
He was the star of an era of new media, in mass print, photojournalism, live radio, and film. His races were thus witnessed by millions, unprecedented in history.
In Athletics New Zealand’s new online biographical archive, Lovelock is one of the first to be included. His name has been given to tracks, streets, and sports bars.
He was on a stamp. The bronze statue by Margriet Windhausen at Timaru Boys’ High is one of the best sports sculptures anywhere.
There are excellent New Zealand books or essays by Norman Harris, Christopher Tobin, Graeme Woodfield, Lynn McConnell, and in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. David Colquhoun made a masterly job of editing the journals.
As a last word, I like the reference written to support Lovelock’s Rhodes Scholarship when he was dux at Timaru Boys’ High. Rector Bill Thomas praised his ‘‘well-balanced mind capable of excelling in any branch of study’’, the ‘‘quiet efficiency’’ of his leadership, his ‘‘sound common sense’’ and ‘‘integrity’’, his ‘‘full life’’ and ‘‘unassuming ways’’.
Principals don’t always know their students’ inner problems but nothing I can find in Lovelock’s writings, life or death makes me think of December 28, 1949, as anything but a sad accident and a tragic loss.
Jack Lovelock had an impish wit and an elusive personality (‘‘a hard man to know’’, Lord Porritt said of him).