THE FLYING FINNS Lasse Virén was one of a distinguished line of Finnish distance runners
lucky to get a medal. In the heats, Foster qualified with an Olympic record, 13:20.34, with Dixon a stride behind. Virén was 13 seconds slower in his heat, well beaten by Quax. His aura wasn’t going to intimidate anyone in this race.
FIGHT TO THE FINISH
AT 10 MINUTES TO FIVE ON A CLOUDY Friday afternoon (11:50pm in Myrskylä), 14 men lined up for the 5000m final. Virén, wearing 301 on his blue vest, was near the outside. Two Soviet runners, Enn Sellik and Boris Kuznetsov, led from the gun. Virén jostled in sharply at the bend and, from then on, hugged the curb, settling in seventh. Curbhugging was part of his game: he rarely ran a metre further than necessary. The benefits were startling. In Munich, Steve Prefontaine was reckoned to have run 40m further than Virén in the 5000m, while Emiel Puttemans ran 50m further in the 10,000m. In each case, that was more than the distance they lost by.
But Virén knew that, this time, he could not rely on his rivals’ naïvety. His plan was to take the zip out of the fast finishers’ legs, while keeping enough in his own for a devastating final kilometre. He also hoped to avoid any unnecessary pacemaking. Let the others do the work.
In the second lap, Foster took up the running. They went through 2,000m in a respectable 5:26.39; then Foster dropped back. He was too canny to do all Virén’s heavy lifting for him. Virén took over but, surprisingly, did not accelerate. He was still hoping for someone else to make the pace.
alone remains perfectly balanced: taut, elastic, upright, arms pumping straight and smooth. His being seems focused on a single truth: that the pace must be maintained and steadily increased, without let-up, until the very end.
Even as a schoolboy in England, rooting for Foster, I couldn’t take my eyes off Virén. His intensity was mesmeric. The others were debris, fluttering in his wake, dragged along by his gravity yet somehow kept back by his force field.
Head tilting only in his very last strides, Virén crossed the line a second-and-a-half ahead of Quax. Dixon seemed set to win bronze, but Hildenbrand flung himself horizontally over the line a fraction ahead of him. Six metres separated the first four finishers, with Foster another metre behind in fifth. Virén had run the last 400m in 54.8 seconds, the last 800m in 1:57.5 and the last 1,500m in 3:41. The others had thought they had him where they wanted him. In fact, as Brendan Foster later conceded, ‘Virén was always in control’.
The losers seemed to be in shock. Dixon went back to his room and wept. Later, he was reported to have attributed Viren’s victory to ‘that extra blood’. Viren had other things on his mind. Eighteen hours later, he was in action again, going for a third gold in the marathon.
THE LONG SHOT
IT WAS HIS FIRST ATTEMPT AT THE DISTANCE, JUST as it had been for Emil Zátopek when he completed his still-unmatched distancerunning treble (5000m, 10,000m, marathon) in Helsinki in 1952. But Zátopek had had two days to recover before his marathon and hadn’t had to run a 10,000m heat. Virén could manage ‘only’ fifth place, in 2:13:10. Zátopek watched with relief in Prague.
If Virén was disappointed, he went back to Finland with more than enough glory for one sporting lifetime. Not even Zátopek (who became a friend of Virén’s) had done the double-double. And although Virén continued to race, his aura of invincibility once again left him abruptly. It was as if his hunger was sated. He took fifth in the 10,000m at the Moscow Games four years later, but then shifted his focus back to his Finnish roots. As a runner, he had no worlds left to conquer.
And that ‘extra blood’? The allegations still hang in the air, although no one has ever produced evidence to support them. Virén has often been asked, and has always denied blood doping. A German magazine offered him $1m to admit to it. He refused – which would have been an odd decision if the allegations were true, because Virén is unsentimental about trading Olympic glory for cash: in 1994 he put his four gold medals up for sale.
The facts remain simple: there is no evidence. He’s always denied it. It wouldn’t have been cheating, anyway, and everything he achieved can be explained in other