'Today we die a little' – writing the story of Emil Zátopek

Richard Askwith talks about the difficulty and the joy of writing a biography of one of the greatest runners of all time, from grappling with the legends to capturing the spirit of a truly unique man

I think of Zátopek as the patron saint of runners. He didn’t just revolutionise his sport – he reinvented it. He rewrote the record books and redrew the boundaries of endurance, redefining the whole idea of what was humanly possible. No one else, before or since, has dominated distance running in a way that he did in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His achievements at the Helsinki Olympics will never be equalled. And he did all this with a crazy playfulness and generosity of spirit that made him perhaps the most loved Olympian of all time. The only comparable figure I can think of in 20th century sport is Muhammad Ali – yet Zátopek, unlike Ali, has barely been touched by biographers until now

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from Fitness | The Guardian http://ift.tt/242EJcy
via FITNESS