Lydiard oblivious to the evil in modern elite athletics

Arthur Lydiard

In this tribute, Italy's former national athletics coach, Alessandro Donati, recalls Arthur Lydiard's impact on middle-distance running and of breaking to him the news that doping was part of the success of Lydiard's beloved Finns

 

I had three things in common with Arthur Lydiard: small stature, a passion for middle-distance running, and tenacity.

In 1961, aged 14, I began to compete in cross-country races and listened with huge admiration to the stories of an Italian coach who had seen Arthur, during the Rome Olympics of 1960, on the track at the Acqua Acetosa Complex training Peter Snell.

Lydiard demonstrated to Snell, with great ability and energy, various technical exercises which Snell then repeated magnificently. The coach told me that Snell's very feet released elasticity and power.

In those years I avidly read the rare articles available about Lydiard's coaching methods through Italy's specialist magazine Atletica Leggera. From those days Lydiard and Snell have been my heroes.

In the years to come, first as an athlete and then as coach, I read whatever I could find about the evolution of Arthur's techniques, first in Mexico, then Finland, Venezuela and Denmark. Finally, in 1993, with the help of an editor of Atletica Leggera who is a Lydiard fan, I managed to contact Arthur and invite him to Rome for a coaching conference.

When I met him at Rome Airport, it was as if we had known each other forever. I told him I had been sprint and middle- distance coach of the Italian national team, and that a few years earlier, having spoken up about the growing incidence of doping among top athletes, I had been removed from my post.

This had been the catalyst for the formation of a Coaches Association of which I was elected president. My first act as president was to organise the conference and get Arthur over to talk to us.

Heading back into Rome from the airport, we stopped at the Acqua Acetosa Complex where he recognised the places he had trained both Snell and Murray Halberg for the Olympic Games. I was worried about Arthur's jet lag after such a long flight. With a shrug he made me understand that he didn't worry about such unimportant things, and instead asked if I could take him to the Olympic Stadium, scene of such triumph for his athletes.

The stadium had been rebuilt for the Soccer World Cup of 1990 and was almost unrecognisable. He was somewhat perplexed, but decided that the rebuilding was justified.

He then asked me what had happened to the Olympic village. When I told him the village was still standing, his eyes lit up. He asked to go there immediately. In a few minutes we were there and he recognised it all.

He was keen to return to one part of the village more than any other: the building in which the Finnish team had been billeted and in particular the apartment in which an athlete named Eira had lived for three weeks. She was the gymnast with whom Arthur fell in love.

We found the building, went up the stairs and Arthur managed to pick out the exact apartment. I wanted to knock and ask whoever lived there if we could have a look around, but Arthur told me it was not necessary, that he himself had never seen the inside of the apartment. He had always waited for her outside the door when he came to take her out.

He was now 76 years old, and as he stood there tears rolled down his cheeks. I placed my hand on his shoulder and he patted it, saying it was such a sad memory because she died - of cancer - far too young. But then, he says, he thinks of his third wife, Joelyne, who has made him so happy again.

I asked Arthur many questions in that week. We discussed his relationship with great Australian coach Percy Cerruti, we discussed the Mexican athletes and, above all, the Finnish middle-distance men.

I told him that I had written a book about the Finns, but had since regretted doing so. When he asked the reason I told him that several years after the book came out I discovered that the Finnish success in middle-distance running had been a result of drug use.

When Arthur looked puzzled I told him Kaarlo Maaninka (5000m) and Mikko Ala Leppilampi (3000m steeplechase) had confessed to using performance- enhancing drugs. I reassured Arthur that this bitter discovery in no way compromised his work with the Finns.

On the contrary, as I told him, his technical contribution to the development of the Finnish middle-distance runners had been obvious to all, and that he could in no way blame himself for whatever the Finns had done behind his back.

In his time Arthur revolutionised middle-distance coaching. Most often he emphasised aerobic fitness in the runner, but the other secret of his huge success was the meticulous muscular preparation he used.

It would appear today that international middle-distance running has grown enormously since the golden era of Lydiard. But appearances can be deceiving. Thanks to the use of EPO (erythropoetin), human growth hormone, testosterone or anabolic steroids, a large number of runners who without the drugs would manage 13m 10s for 5000m, now cover the distance in 12m 40s.

If it weren't for the drugs, the difference between the times run today and those of Snell and Herb Elliot would be much less, as evidenced by research in Germany.

In the time I spent with Arthur I was under the impression that he did not realise the full extent of the doping epidemic at the highest levels of the sport and the implications it has for the results. If that is indeed the case, I am pleased.

What good would it have done for an old man to realise that instead of athletics being the queen of all sports, it is in fact the corruptor of all sports, and that for a long time now athletics has known no other route than that of an unscrupulous race for victory through doping?

Professor Alessandro Donati is head of the Italian Olympic Committee's research centre in Rome. Lydiard died in December, aged 87, while on a lecture tour in the United States.