People who know nothing about the decathlon often think that decathletes choose this discipline because they cannot excel in one particular event. One cannot be more wrong than this. A short race can be more spectacular and even field events can be easier, for the non-specialist, to understand, compared to an event stretched over two days, where the winner is decided through the addition of points. But, once one has made the effort to understand the workings of this unique discipline, there is no going back. One is hooked because there is nothing more captivating than the decathlon.
Before proceeding further I must point out that I am not talking about "combined events". The women's heptathlon is a watered down version which cannot hold a candle to the real thing. The only solution would be to drop this half-baked event and introduce the real, gruelling, event for women. We have been talking about parity, like, for ages. Let's stop considering women as the weaker sex and let them compete in the decathlon.
When decathlon was first introduced we had a real run of luck. It happened that the first olympic champion was one of the greatest (if not the greatest) decathletes ever. I am talking about Jim Thorpe, according to King Gustav of Sweden "the greatest athlete in the world". He dominated the competition head and shoulders. He won 4 of the 10 events and was among the first three in 9. He obtained a 4th place in the javelin, not having thrown the implement before the US trials (where he threw without a run-up, since he did not know better). He won the 1500 m, a feat not reproduced by the winner of olympic or world competitions till 2019, when N. Kaul secured the championship title by winning the 1500 m. After the Olympics, Thorpe broke the world record in the 110 m hurdles (alas, not homologated) and came that close to equalling the high jump world record. He was excellent in everything.
It took long, long years before someone with vaguely comparable talent appeared in the decathlon. I think that only when Bob Mathias arrived in the Empire Stadium for the London, 1948, Olympics, we could really say that we had the successor of Thorpe. Mathias won his first olympic decathlon at an age of 17! Six months before the competition he did not even know the existence of the decathlon. He had three weeks to prepare for his first decathlon and had never competed in pole vault, long jump and javelin, let alone run a 1500 m. He won the regional AAU event and three weeks later he participated in the national AAU championship which served as the trials for the Olympics. He won there as well and by the time he won again in the 1952 Olympics he was unbeaten in the decathlon. In Helsinki he dominated the event in a way similar to that of Thorpe, winning by a 900 points margin and a world record to boot. (He wished to participate in the 1956 Olympics as well, having won his 11th decathlon in the military 1956 championships, but those darned amateurship rules made sure he was pushed out of athletics).
I don't imply that there have been no good decathletes in the 40 years that separated Thorpe from Mathias. If you wish to know more about that period you can consult the various books of F. Zarnowski. But, better still, if you can read french go and buy the book of F. Gousset, « Des Hommes complets », who is telling the captivating story of the decathlon through the biographies of its champions. It is by reading Gousset's monograph that I discovered the unique feat of H. Osborn who, in the Paris, 1924, Olympics won both the high jump and the decathlon.
I do not know if the near-mythical figure of Mathias was the reason for the flourishing of the decathlon. Be that as it may, the decathlon started attracting more and more attention in the 50s. In the beginning the high level decathletes were mainly specialists of some track or field event who could also excel in the decathlon, but pure decathletes started to appear. The winner of the 1956 Olympics is a perfect example of the first. M. Campbell was a high-hurdles specialist who did not manage to qualify in his event in the US trials and thus focused on the decathlon, winning the gold medal. While perusing the list of the participants of the 1956 olympic decathlon, one encounters the names of M. Lauer, who, in 1959, set a world record in the 110 m hurdles, or B. Richards who won the the pole vault in both the 1952 and the 1956 Olympics. (The tendency of the hurdles or pole vault specialists to dab at the decathlon continues even today. This is easy to understand, since the hurdles and the pole vault are the two more difficult technically events of the decathlon, and thus the two most difficult to master). Alongside the names of Lauer and of Richards one finds also a "pure" decathlete, like Vasili Kuznetsov. He was probably the first who was really preparing all ten events of the decathlon, and while he had to to content himself with two olympic bronze medals, in 1956 and 1960, he did improve the world record on two occasions.
I have, on purpose, omitted, from the paragraph above, the two sacred monsters of the decathlon, Rafer Johnson and C.K. Yang. Their battle for the olympic title in the Rome, 1960, Olympics, is one of the most captivating moments in athletics. Both competed in the 1956 and 1960 Olympics, Johnson winning silver and gold while Yang obtained silver in Rome. (He was 8th in Melbourne and 5th in the Tokyo, 1964, Games). Up to 1956 Johnson was not a pure decathlete. In fact he was qualified for the long jump for Melbourne but he was injured and preferred not compete in that event. After the Olympics he concentrated on the decathlon taking back his world record from Kuznetsov, the first time in Moscow during the legendary USA-USSR athletics meeting. C.K. Yang was the prototypical runner-jumper (but also an excellent javelin thrower). Participating in the Asian Games not only did he win the decathlon (in 1954 and 1958) but he also won silver in the 110 m hurdles and bronze in the 400 m hurdles! He was an accomplished pole-vaulter and even held the world record, just for one week in 1963, with 4.96 m. (Later, he did jump 5 metres). He broke the decathlon world record, the same year, being the first man to tally over 9000 points with the 1952 tables or over 8000 points with the current, 1985, ones. Yang is the only athlete I know of who did attempt a world record (in pole vault) during a decathlon. (But, of course, the only athlete who broke a world record during a combined event is R. Legendre: while competing for the pentathlon in the Paris, 1924, Olympics he jumped 7.76 m in the long jump). Yang did participate in the 1964, Tokyo, Olympics, but could not do better than 5th, due in part to his catastrophic high jump. (Do not try to find anything reliable on C.K. Yang in the World Athletics page. Neither his pole vault world record nor his Rome silver medal are mentioned. What a shame).
In the 60s things started to change for the decathlon. The event became dominated by true specialists. Decathletes learned how to hurdle and to pole vault, and thus specialists of these two events lost their advantage. This does not mean that specialist of some event do not try a decathlon from time to time. The lure are the decathlon world records for each event. The catch is that for the world record in some event to be homologated, the athlete must obtain a total of more than 7000 points in the ten events. Thus the pole vault decathlon record went from P. Collet with 5.61, to T. Vigneron with 5.62 to J. Galfione with 5.75 and finally to T. Lobinger with 5.76 m. R. Lavillenie did have a go at that but he could only jump 5.47 m and anyhow his total was just 6676 points. However the only pole vault specialist who was also an accomplished decathlete was Tim Bright, with records of 5.82 m and 8340 points respectively. He did participate in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics in the decathlon, finishing 12th and 7th, and in the 1991 World Championships in the pole vault finishing 6th. In 1992, he finished 12th in the pole vault olympic competition.
To my eyes the best decathlete among the specialists of other events would have been L. Doucouré, the 2005 110 m hurdles world champion. He obtained a total of 7794 points in 2001 when he was just 18 years old. Had he specialised in the decathlon towards the end of his career, he would easily had been a 8500+ decathlete.
The emergence of decathlon specialists had as a consequence that the decathletes could no more be competitive against the specialists of the various events. The only exception is A. Eaton's season devoted to the 400 m hurdles. Although he did not manage to reach his out-of-this-world objective of a time between 47 and 48 seconds, he did much better than the pessimistic forecast of K. Akabusi who thought that Eaton would "be lucky to break 50 s in his first year". Eaton obtained a superb 48.69 s in 2014 and, what is even more impressive, won the Diamond League race in Oslo, becoming the first ever decathlete to win an individual Diamond League event. Apparently the 400 m hurdles, the "mankiller" event, is particularly attractive to the decathletes. John Mulkeen is giving in his blog a long list of top decathletes who have competed in the 400 m hurdles. And as I mentioned in the paragraph on C.K. Yang, he obtained a bronze medal over that distance in the Asian Games of 1958. A. Järvinen, the decathlon silver medallist in Amsterdam, 1928, and Los Angeles, 1932, did even better with a silver medal in the European Championships of 1934 in the low hurdles.
And it is not finished. In a recent interview, N. Kaul, the 2019 decathlon world champion, explained that he did some low hurdles training and that he had the intention to run some 400 m hurdles in the future. And of course we should not forget that one of the best 400 m hurdles specialists, K. Warholm, started his athletics career in combined events, winning the world U18 title in the octathlon and obtaining a silver medal in the decathlon of the U20 Europeans. He has clearly a 8000+ potential.
So, how about the statement of the title. Is is true that the decathletes are average in everything and good in nothing? Well, I do not think that one can be further from the truth than this. The top decathletes are excellent in everything. And the fact that their event lasts two days is making their efforts even more laudable. Ah, if only World Athletics were a little bit more audacious and introduced a women's decathlon...
No comments:
Post a Comment