Sport: Off the Mark

Emil Zatopek is about as graceless as an athlete can be: he runs something like an upright turtle. Emil is a sawed-off lieutenant from the Czechoslovakian army. In London last week, in the first day of competition at the XIVth Olympiad, he squared off against the Finns for the exhausting 10,000-meter race (a little over six miles).

The Finns thought they had the race to themselves, as they usually have (the great Paavo Nurmi won it twice). For the first few laps last week, it looked as if they were right. Nurmi's protégé, lanky Viljo Heino, set the pace, with a fellow Finn, Heinstrom, padding at his heels. Like a patient English housewife in a fish-market queue, Zatopek stayed politely back in about tenth or twelfth place. On the tenth lap, "he picked up speed, pounded past Viljo Heino and took the lead. At about the halfway mark Zatopek began lapping the stragglers; Heino, unable to keep up, stepped off the red clay track, exhausted.

Better Than Nurmi. The second of the Finns, bothered by the heat, the humidity and the pace, gave up on the 22nd lap, with three laps to go, and had to be helped off the track. Zatopek himself was grabbing at the right side of his trunks, in obvious pain (he said later that it was a stomach-ache). The crowd of 60,000 cheered him all the way around the track, as he increased his speed, crossed the finish line 19.2 seconds ahead of the great Nurmi's best Olympic time. Zatopek's time: a record 29 minutes, 59.6 seconds.

Three days later, at his own favorite distance—5,000 meters—he finished two-tenths of a second behind Belgium's Gaston Reiff. Both Reiff and Zatopek broke the previous Olympic record.

Better Than Berlin. The Olympics had opened with the kind of easy pomp which the British are so good at, with none of the neo-pagan vulgarism which characterized the 1936 Berlin Olympiad. King and commoner alike sweated in an un-English 93° heat as more than 5,000 athletes from 58 nations (among the largest: the 341-man U.S. squad) marched around the field. Exactly on schedule, at 4:07 p.m., a runner entered Wembley Stadium, bearing the "permanent flame" from Greece. He was anchor man on a human chain which had relayed the torch from a British destroyer landing at Dover. The flame went out twice on the way.