I fell into my hands – nothing fell into my hands, I went to get the book at the São Paulo Library, at the Carandiru subway station, in São Paulo – the biographical novel “Correr”, about the Czech Olympic champion Emil Zatopek, by the Frenchman Jean Echenoz.
As a biographer, Echenoz is a fiasco, merely using Wikipedia to construct the little more than a hundred pages of his book. As a novelist, he also owes it, limiting his conventional third-person narrator in every way.
But, given that this column is not literary criticism, let’s move on. Zatopek, the “Human Locomotive”, as he became known, was considered one of the great post-war athletes and the greatest distance runner in history for having won the 5,000, 10,000 and also the marathon at the same Olympics, Helsinki. , from 1952.
He also broke world records 18 times and was the first to run 10 km in less than 29 minutes and 20 km in less than an hour. He ran around making facial expressions of pain, strange grimaces, a notable characteristic of someone the New York Times obituarist called “part actor, part artist”, since some of that agony was “merely for effect”.
Zatopek was also the main attraction in the 99-year history of São Silvestre, the famous street race in São Paulo, winning it on the night of December 31, 1953. He should be remembered a lot in 2025, which marks the centenary of the competition .
Sheltered and controlled by the socialist regime of Czechoslovakia in the harsh years of the Iron Curtain, but later banned for criticizing the deposition of leader Alexander Dubcek by Moscow forces in 1968, the runner ate the devil’s bread for a few years, acting as miner in uranium exploration and later as a garbage collector.
Having said that, it must be said that Locomotiva may have left some legacies for us, amateur pangaré racers.
The first: Zatopek started late, entering the adult race, due to professional injunctions and against his will, when the shoe factory where he worked required the participation of some employees in a race. If you arrived as a big guy like him, but have ambitions to get on the podiums, know: yes, if you can.
Second: Locomotiva was its own main coach. He is credited with spreading and increasing the famous interval training, brand new in his time, and which Zatopek took, one could say, to a paroxysm, even practicing in a single session up to 70 sprints from 200 to 300 meters.
Finally, he always took advantage of adversity: difficult weather situations and wearing heavy boots in the snow, for example. More or less like the slippery track and zero visibility during Ayrton Senna’s incessant training with his kart in the rain, a paternal pedagogy extensively explored in the Netflix miniseries “Senna”.
Think about this when you think that a little rain could come in handy as a good alibi to skip the week’s gravel.
Zatopek can still serve as an example of how harmful the manipulation of information is. Even though he was full of praise for Brazil during his stay in São Paulo, he was denied a visa by Brazilian authorities for a possible return. His country’s official newspaper always distorted the normally very positive view that the athlete expressed, even as a courtesy, about the capitalist countries he visited. It had already happened in France.
Keeping the proportions in mind, it might be a good idea to read the text a second time before posting it on your networks.
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