Vintage Athletes - Part 28

 Runners

Running must be the oldest form of athletic competition.  I can imagine one Neanderthal saying to another, "I'll race you to that tree!"

Above is a Greek amphora c. 530 BC.  Like all Greek athletes, the runners are naked.

The marathon race is based on a historical event.  In 490 BC, the Persian Empire attacked Greece, and the Athenians sent the runner Pheidippides to Sparta to request help.  He did the 150-mile run in two days, but the Spartans refused to help (for religious reasons, but we won't get into that).  The Athenians met the Persians on the plain of Marathon, near Athens, and the Greeks won the battle.  The story goes that Pheidippides then ran from Marathon to Athens, proclaimed "Rejoice, we conquer!", collapsed, and died, as portrayed in this painting by Luc-Olivier Merson, 1869.

To commemorate this possibly fictitious run, the length of the modern marathon race is the distance from Marathon to Athens, about 26 miles.

The Romans also raced naked.  Above are two statues of Roman runners found in Herculaneum, which was buried by the same eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD.

In more recent times, this is a motion-study photo by artist Thomas Eakins in 1885, showing Eakins himself running.

Of course, Eadweard Muybridge, who perfected the stop-motion photo, took photos of runners.  I made this gif from a series of photos called "Nude man running at full speed" from Muybridge's 1887 book Animal Locomotion.

This British postcard from the 1920s shows Laurence Woodford in a racer's starting pose.

German photographer Ernst Voller took this 1929 photo of three men at the start of a sprint.

Another 1929 German photo shows men washing off after a race in Göteborg.

This is Australian runner Herb Elliot climbing a rope in a 1958 photo by LIFE photographer Leonard McCombe. Elliott was the greatest middle-distance runner of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He set world records, won Olympic gold, and never lost a mile race. He credited his unconventional trainer, Percy Cerutty, who is the other guy in the photo.

If you look closely, the rope has snagged Elliot's shorts and we see something peeking out underneath.

We end with French runner Alain Mimoun (right) kissing Czech runner Emil Zatopek to congratulate him at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, captured by LIFE photographer Ralph Crane.

Mimoun would have been the world champion long-distance runner, except Zatopek kept beating him. Despite their rivalry, they forged a friendship. Mimoun finally beat Zatopek in the marathon at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. “Emil, congratulate me,” he said. Zatopek embraced and kissed him. Later, Mimoun said, “For me, that was better than a medal.”