to the introduction of the IAAF Road Race Label, endorsing the world’s leading road races, and our ongoing work with AIMS (the Association of International Marathons and Distance Races) on the standardisation of the best measurement practices for road races, we will continue to give all our support to the future growth of road running around the world.
Lamine Diack
IAAF President
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction: The Great Dorando
1 Once a Winner
2 A Taste of Defeat
3 Two Wheels to Happiness
4 Conan Doyle and the Mystery of the Dirty War
5 The Stamp of Love
6 Cheating for Boys
7 Digging and Dreaming
8 The Soldier Returns
9 In Love with a Legend
10 The Race that Saved the Games
11 Torn Apart by Passion
12 The Baron’s Lost Vision
13 The Shambles of St Louis
14 The Great American Winning Machine
15 Humbled by Distance
16 Eruptions in Athens
17 Meet Mr Fair Play
18 I Will Win or I Will Die
19 A Ticket to London
20 Secrets of the Great White City
21 No Earthly King
22 The Tug-of-War Nations
23 Testing Positive for Profit
24 By Royal Command?
25 The Marathon Contenders
26 The Great Halswelle Affair
27 The Road From Windsor
28 The Man Who Lost and Won
29 A Fair Field and No Favour
30 The Morning After
31 The Lion in Chains
32 Marathon Mania
33 The Sweet Music of Fame
34 Running to Death
35 Victoria’s Secrets
36 The Battle Is Over
Afterword
Appendix I Entries for the 1908 Olympic Marathon
Appendix II Result of the 1908 Olympic Marathon
Appendix III Dorando Pietri’s Marathon Career
Index
Copyright
In the spring of 1948, in a London still recovering from the Blitz, a diminutive, middle- aged and slightly balding café owner from Birmingham turned up, and announced to the world: ‘I am the Great Dorando.’
He stepped out of the shadows to haunt the Olympic Games, which were staged defiantly in this austere city that was still patching itself up from the ravages of war; he swanned his way around town, cashing in on the Olympic fever that was beginning to build up in the press, and would boast colourfully of the exploits of forty years before.
Dorando told the tale of how, on a scorching hot day in July 1908, he had staggered into the stadium at Shepherd’s Bush looking near to death, and how he stole headlines around the world during one of those endless Edwardian summers before the war to end all wars ripped the world apart. He told how the famously evocative picture of him reeling and collapsing dramatically at the finish of London’s first-ever Marathon had turned him, like Charlie Chaplin, into one of the first internationally recognised celebrities of the twentieth century.
In the London of 1948, he was invited for drinks here, a lunch there. For one crazy moment he was the hero men still spoke of whenever they told of the Marathon.
‘I am,’ he boldly asserted, ‘the man who long ago launched the great marathon craze on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. I am the man who thousands flocked to see when I conquered the finest runners in the Madison Square Garden in New York. I am the man who was given a special Golden Cup by the hands of the Queen of England herself for my pluck, my courage and for Italy.’
By the time he strutted around Britain’s capital, two world wars had wiped the name and the memory of Dorando from the headlines. But here, as a battle-weary world once more turned their thoughts to the bloodless struggle of sport, the legend seemed to rise from the dead.
On 5 August 1948, as the day of the Games loomed closer, four Italians from Dorando Pietri’s hometown of Carpi, near Modena in Italy, along with three reporters, turned up on his doorstep to meet him. The Italians began to talk to Dorando in the lilting strains of the local Carpigian dialect, and as the panic showed in the imposter’s eyes, one of them told how he had seen the real Dorando lowered into his grave in 1942 and inspected the words on his tombstone, announcing that here lay the ‘Champion Runner of the World – Gold Medallist’.
A few days after the hoaxer was unmasked, the Evening News in London printed an apology to the real Dorando’s widow, Teresa Dondi, who lived on until 1979 in San Remo. The hoax Pietri’s real name was Pietro Palleschi. He was married to an English woman called Lucy Evans, born in Tuscany, and in 1948 he was 65 years old. Pictures in the London newspapers taken outside the Temperance Bar he ran in Barford Street, Birmingham, show him in a white coat.
It was an amazing story but such was the power of the man who, forty years before, had shaped the future of twentieth-century sport, that, like others from those same Games in 1908, the legend lived on. The Games were important because they defined sporting archetypes that were to endure for the better part of a century.
As the life of Queen Victoria drifted to a close, a new century was opening: the century of the Edwardians, which swept in an era that was to bring the most profound changes – industrialisation,
