The Olympian - Softcover

The Olympian was first published in the United States, by Cord McCann, in 1969 a few weeks before it appeared in England. It was given a reception for which I remain grateful not only for its generosity, its catholocity, but for the fact that American critics and reviewers understood what the book really was. "This isn't about track at all, is it?" asked Joe Garagiola, when, he interviewed me on the Today Show. From Garagiola to the critic Mark Schorer, from Howard Cosell to Jesse Owens, from Pete Axthelm to Bob Lipsyte, there was a warm general awareness of what I had tried to do.

The Olympian is, of course, about track, in the sense that the background, the details of the athlete life, are first hand and authentic, based on the years I spent covering the sport and the Olympics for the London Sunday Times. It is equally true that the book has allegorical themes, that Ike Low is a symbol as well as a contemporary figure. The book may be read on any level you please; in England, the deep disappointment was that even those who liked it best took it as documentary, an essay in realism.

It was never just that, even if it began, in my mind, as an image; a man and a woman, running. In athletes' singlets and shorts. A kind of closeness between them as if she were somehow supporting and standing by him. From that image flowed in time the themes of the book. Faustian effort. The athlete as victim. Tensions between the old and the young. Our alienation from the body.

It is splendid to have the book in print once again in America, which received it so well. When it appeared, in 1989, in Rumania--where publication was first planned 16 years earlier--it sold 60,000 copies.

Over those intervening years, one great, sinister development has taken place in athletics; the use of drugs. Quite when this began is debatable, but it seems to have been in the heavy events, shot putting, weight lifting, and the like. It spread quickly to the explosive events, and made track and field seem more Faustian then ever. Athletes who used anabolic steroids know that they are sabotaging their whole physical future, yet such is their obsession with their event that they persist, as one might have expected.

Yet where once the use of drugs might have made a man a champion--as it surely did with Ben Johnson--now, not to use them has condemned athletes in many events to failure. An horrific choice. Blood doping, the use of testosterone and other abuses have followed. They were implicit in the world we have created. For the athlete is not alone, merely the product of his tormented times.

If then, the shape and pattern of athletics has been radically changed by drugs, it still seems that the milers, of whom Ike Low was one, have by and large not tended to take drugs. Ike flew too near the sun, and he fell. The most potent, dangerous drug of all is such obsession with success.

Even Faust who sold his soul, did not sell his body.

London

July, 1991