Emil Zátopek
1922 – 2000 · Czechia
Known for: Czech runner who won the 5,000 m, 10,000 m and the marathon at the 1952 Olympic Games
“The Czech Locomotive, generous in victory and unbroken in defeat.”
Biography
Emil Zátopek was born on 19 September 1922 in Kopřivnice in Moravia, the seventh child of a family of modest means. At sixteen he went to work at the Baťa shoe factory in Zlín, where a strict works coach picked him out of a group of boys and ordered him into a race. He protested that he was too weak, but a doctor pronounced him fit, and once he had started he found that he wanted to win; he finished second in a field of a hundred. He joined a local athletics club soon afterwards and built his own training programme out of what he had read about the Finnish champion Paavo Nurmi. By 1944 he held the Czechoslovak records at 2,000, 3,000 and 5,000 metres, and after the war he joined the army, which gradually gave him the time his punishing regime required.
Zátopek trained in any weather, often in snow and in heavy work boots, and made interval training the ordinary method of distance runners after the war. He finished fifth over 5,000 metres at the 1946 European Championships in Oslo, won the 10,000 metres in London in 1948 and took silver over 5,000 metres behind Gaston Reiff of Belgium. Four years later in Helsinki he won the 10,000 metres, then the 5,000 metres on a last lap of 57.5 seconds in which he came from fourth to first in the final turn, and then, on a decision taken at the last minute, the marathon, the first he had ever run. He set Olympic records in all three. In 1951 he broke the hour for 20 kilometres, and in 1954 he became the first man to run 10,000 metres in under 29 minutes.
A groin injury and six weeks in hospital cost him his form before the 1956 Games, where he finished sixth in the marathon won by his friend and old rival Alain Mimoun, and he retired from competition in 1957. His wife, Dana Zátopková, born on the same day of the same year as her husband, had won the Olympic javelin title in Helsinki minutes after his victory over 5,000 metres. He kept an open house in Prague for athletes he had met at competitions, and in 1966 he gave one of his Helsinki gold medals to the Australian Ron Clarke, who held many world records but never won an Olympic title. When he supported the reforms of the Prague Spring in 1968 the authorities stripped him of his rank and his post, and he spent years in manual work far from public life. He was rehabilitated after the fall of the regime in 1989 and died in Prague in November 2000, still the only runner to have taken all three of those Olympic titles at one Games.