Track & Field: All Alone & Kinda Slow

The athletes who run the dashes have it pretty easy. All they have to do is blast out of the blocks, boom along full-bore for 100, 200, 400 meters. Once in a while, someone breaks a record. But a record mile takes a curious kind of teamwork: two or three evenly matched runners harrying and extending each other until finally, in that last agonizing sprint to the tape, one man finds some unknown reserve of energy and will power. Poor Peter Snell. At 25, the burly New Zealander is so much better than anyone else that he may never know how fast he can really run.

Snell holds the record for the mile, half-mile, 800 meters and 1 ,000 meters.

At the Tokyo Olympics he became the first man in 44 years to win gold medals for both the 800 meters and the metric mile (1,500 meters) — and then he announced that he intended to clip more than 4 sec. off his mile record by running the distance in 3 min. 50 sec. Last week, before 20,000 homefolks in Auckland, Snell gave it a gallant try. Ranged against him were Czechoslovakia's Josef Odlozil, silver-medal winner in the Olympic 1,500, and New Zealand's own John Davies, who won the bronze. With the possible exception of the U.S.'s Dyrol Burleson and Tom O'Hara, they were the class of the world.

The cheers started when Snell breezed through the first quarter in 56 sec. They became a roar when he turned the half-mile in 1 min. 54 sec., setting his own blazing pace, running easily in that long, loping stride of his. At that rate, he would have an incredible 3-min. 48-sec. mile—if Odlozil and Davies could drive him on. Then Snell started to pull away—5 yds., 10 yds., 15 yds. Odlozil and Davies struggled to keep up, but they were fighting for wind. Snell would have to do it alone. At the threequarter mark, he was 25 yds. in front—and slowly, almost imperceptibly, his pace slackened. The crowd waited anxiously for his famed kick, that last fierce dash to the finish. But there was no one near him, no one to trigger him, and he could summon only part of it. Time: 3 min. 54.1 sec.

It was a new world record all right—.3 sec. faster than Snell had ever run the mile before. But he was bitterly disappointed. "It's very hard without competition," he said. "It detracts from the incentive." This week, in another meet at Wanganui, Snell will try again. There is talk of getting a mechanical rabbit.