John Stephen Akhwari

Here we go: back to LA, the one place a Summer Olympics should always be in the United States

Here we go: back to LA, the one place a Summer Olympics should always be in the United States

News alert: the Games famously were in LA in 1932 and 1984 and will be back in 2028. If you think Paris was the best ever, and it’s right up there with London, with the proviso that all Games have backstage glitches, and on TV you lived none of that, none of the Olympic Village food drama, the COVID cases or, anywhere, the signage that would send you on trips to nowhere — LA formally now has next.

To be clear, the bar is set high, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach calling these Games, which came Sunday to a close, a “love story.”

There's no quit in John Nunn

Forty-five years ago, at the Mexico City Olympics, a marathon runner from Tanzania finished dead last in the marathon. His name was John Stephen Akhwari. Akhwari had fallen and hurt his knee. He was bloodied and bandaged by the time he straggled to the finish line, more than an hour after the winner. There, he was asked by the filmmaker Bud Greenspan why he had not quit despite obvious pain.

"My country did not send me 7,000 miles away to start the race," Akhwari said. "They sent me 7,000 miles to finish it."

At the recently concluded world track and field championships in Moscow, the American race walker John Nunn fulfilled a mission that in many ways rivals John Stephen Akhwari's for passion and pathos.

And -- absolutely, though it might not seem it at first blush -- dignity.

In the 50-kilometer race walk, Nunn, dead last by about an hour, crossed the finish line in screaming pain. There, he collapsed and had to be carried off the track on a stretcher. Under the stadium, intravenous fluids were pumped into him. An attendant asked if he could take off his singlet and shorts. Nunn was in such pain he could not move. So, literally, his uniform had to be cut off him.

14th IAAF World Athletics Championships Moscow 2013 - Day Five

"I learned," he said, reflecting on it a few days later, "you just don't quit."

In the tightly knit race-walking community, Nunn's effort has already achieved a status approaching epic. Perhaps a few hundred people in Luzhniki Stadium saw it as well.

It deserves more.

Nunn finished 46th, in 4 hours, 34 minutes and 55 seconds.

The winner, Ireland's Robert Heffernan, had crossed nearly an hour beforehand, in 3:37.56.

The guy who finished 45th, Sándor Rácz of Hungary, had made it to the finish line some 22 minutes before Nunn, in 4:12.18.

For the last half-hour of John Nunn's ordeal, it was evident to the Luzhniki camera operators of the jumbo-screen TV that Nunn had set himself on a course of action and a test of will that was awful to watch and yet impossible to turn away from.

The cameras were on his every haunted step. Every time he winced or stumbled or grabbed his leg, it was all there on the big screen. Everyone among the few hundred stragglers at Luzhniki, it seemed, was crying out to him -- keep going.

By the time Nunn entered the stadium, the crowd was down to maybe 100 people. These 100 lived every moment of that last half-hour with him.  When he lurched across the finish line, collapsing, screaming, there were tears in the stands at what he had done and they had shared, all of them together.

"As soon as I finished," Nunn said, "my mind quit, and my body cramped up. They picked me up and I was just yelling. It was so painful. Tears were just pushing out of my tear ducts. They put me on a stretcher. They put me in some medical room.

They said, 'John, we had to take off your shirt so we can examine you. Can you take it off?'

I said, 'No.'

"Same with the shorts.

"So they cut off the shirt and the shorts.

"They put a towel on me. They put an IV in my arm. It took an hour, a full hour, for the intense cramping to calm down to where I could somewhat move."

14th IAAF World Athletics Championships Moscow 2013 - Day Five

The marathon -- 26.2 miles -- is usually thought of as the ultimate Olympic test.

The 50-kilometer race-walk is, in a word, harder.

While race-walking is keenly appreciated around the world, in the United States it is little known and mostly thought of as an oddity.

Which in itself is unusual. The odds of making the U.S. Olympic team in the race-walk -- if you can handle the mental toughness -- would appear to be better than in almost any other endeavor. There are untold numbers of 2:20 marathoners in the United States. And yet there are only a handful of guys who would even consider the 50k walk.

Nunn, for that matter, was the only American entrant in the event in Moscow.

The rules, it must be said, can take a little getting used to.

Walkers must keep least one foot in contact with the ground at all times. Two feet off simultaneously -- what would in ordinary speech you'd call  "running" -- is, in the jargon of race-walking, called "lifting," and grounds for a warning. Another rule requires straight legs at the point of first contact with the ground. If three judges give a walker warnings, the third warning leads to a disqualification.

It can all seem -- for those unfamiliar with the rules -- like a spectacle of sorts.

But make no mistake.

Race-walking can be, especially on a warm day like it was the day the 50k went down in Moscow, brutal. The physical demands are one thing. It's the mental grind that is the really hard part.

There are two Olympic-caliber distances, 20 and 50k.

A 50-kilometer race translates to roughly 31 miles.

For comparison, the marathon is 26.2 miles.

A world-class men's marathon is run in just over two hours.

A world-class men's 50k race-walk? Between three and a half and four hours.

The last American to win an Olympic medal is Larry Young, who won bronze in 1968 and 1972. In the U.S., funding is simply not a priority. The discipline has for years been kept alive in the colleges mostly at lower-level schools.

The results in Moscow showed exactly what happens when you invest time, effort and resource in race-walking programs and athletes. Eight different countries put athletes in the top 10.

Behind Ireland's Heffernan?

Russia's Mikhail Ryzhov finished second, in 3:38.58.

Third? Jared Tallent of Australia, 3:40.03.

Nunn's goal coming in was to try to finish in under four hours. A two-time Olympian, he raced the 20k in Athens in 2004 and then moved to the 50k in London last summer, the only American in the race, finishing in 4:03.28, in 43rd place.

It all started well enough for Nunn in Moscow, the kilometers clicking steadily by.

Indeed, through 20 he was hanging in there at a pace of under 5 minutes per kilometer. He turned kilometer 16 in 4:34.

At kilometer 23, though, Nunn started to feel some tightness in a hamstring. It got so bad he could not push off. He backed off. But it got worse. Then the pain moved down and around the leg, into his quadriceps, calf and shins. Then up, into his elbow joints.

"Everything started crunching down," he said. "It was miserable. It turned into Groundhog Day. Every step I was taking, I was, like, this is not going to end."

By kilometer 30, Nunn was doing roughly 6 minutes per kilometer. For conversion, 6 minutes per kilometer would see a jogger cover a mile in about 9 minutes and 40 seconds.

The debate started in his head -- to quit or not?

"At 25k," he said, "I thought, 'No way I'm going to get through this.' "

And this is where the thing gets truly fascinating. Like every racer in the 50k, Nunn went into it expecting pain. Maybe not so soon and not so severe. Even so, the race hurts. It's a given.

What to do?

"I would hit divots in the road. It would shock my body. My leg would go into an intense spasm of pain and lock up and double me over and I would, like, stop for a second or two and then keep moving. Other times, it would spasm so bad and I would try to keep moving but there would be 15 or 20 seconds of intense pain. Two or three minutes later, five at most, there would be the most intense cramping in my legs.

"I realized I would either fall over and be in total convulsion or not do anything and hit the finish line. I thought I would just keep going and see what happens."

Kilometer 44 would prove especially brutal. It took 7:42. More conversion: that would be a jogging pace of 12:23 per mile.

And still he kept going. "I honestly thought I was going to get told by the staff of the race I was going to have to finish out on the course, you are not going to finish in the stadium. But they never did tell me that."

He said, back now in the San Diego area where he is father to a 9-year-old, the two of them proprietors of a cookie business famous in track and field circles, "Part of me, at the end -- I remember when I finished the pain was pain I have never experienced in my life.

"There was a part of me that was crying out of humiliation. I was feeling like I was getting so much better," meaning at 50k strategy. "And then everything happened that day -- there was devastation at what had gone on.

"But in the 50k you just can't quit. Quitting became not an option. I know other people -- other people in the race said, 'I'm done,' and walked off long before the finish line. But USA Track  & Field paid for my airfare and training camp and for us to stay at a nice hotel."

And he said, in an echo of John Stephen Akhwari so many years earlier, "I had been asked to race the 50k. And so I did."

 

Bud Greenspan, 84

It is standard practice in the world of journalism to write obituaries long in advance of the day someone dies. That way, when the day comes, you don't have to wrestle with the emotion of the moment. I never did get around to writing Bud Greenspan's obituary. I simply couldn't do it. He had been ill with Parkinson's disease but I just could not confront the inevitable.

Over the years, Bud and I -- and Nancy Beffa, his longtime companion -- had become way more than professional colleagues. We had become good friends.

And Bud was always -- always -- one of the most vital people I ever had the pleasure and privilege of knowing. You just had to enjoy being around him, his glasses perched always -- always -- on his forehead. The man could tell a story, he loved to tell stories and he had stories to tell.

So apologies in advance. This column is really, really hard.

Bud passed away Saturday. He was 84.

The history books will say that Bud was one of the foremost filmmakers in Olympic history. In the mid-1980s, he received what's called the Olympic order, the highest award in Olympic circles, the then-International Olympic Committee president, Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain saying that Bud had even then "been called the foremost producer, writer and director of Olympic films -- more than that, he is an ever-lasting friend of the Olympic family."

Bud was so much more than that.

The explosive growth that saw the Olympic rings become one of the most recognizable symbols around the world over the last half of the 20th century is arguably due to two factors -- television and Bud Greenspan.

Television brought what happened on the track and in the pool in all those far-away places into your living room.

Through his films, Bud told you the stories of the athletes, wherever they were from. He made them real people. They had families, just like you and me. That their names didn't sound quite like ours or maybe their clothes didn't look like what we would wear or whatever -- all that faded away.

Bud's gift to us was simple but nonetheless profound. He reminded us all of our humanity.

That's why his work is so powerful. And no matter how many times you see his films, the power endures.

In Bud's world we are all the same. No matter what we look like or are shaped like or sound like, each of us is a human being imbued with potential and dignity.

"Bud Greenspan always understood that the athletes are at the center of the Olympic experience," Peter Ueberroth, who ran the 1984 Los Angeles Games and then served from 2004 to 2008 as chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said late Saturday night.

"Their stories are the ones he told, and those stories reminded us of our shared humanity and the commitment to excellence that are at the core of the Olympic ideals around the world."

In his Olympic films, Bud told dozens and dozens of stories. Perhaps none was as memorable as one of the first -- the Tanzanian marathoner John Stephen Akhwari, who finished last, 57th, in the marathon at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Games.

As the story goes, John Stephen came in about an hour after the winner, Mamo Wolde of Ethiopia. John Stephen had injured his leg in a fall; his leg was bandaged and bloodied.

Why, Bud asked, didn't you just give up?

Give up? Never, John Stephen replied.

My country, he said, didn't send me seven-thousand miles to start a race. He said, they sent me seven-thousand miles to finish it.

"In his lifetime, through his work, he did more than any individual to bring the personal stories of Olympians into households around the world," Mike Moran, who served as the U.S. Olympic Committee's spokesman from 1978-2003, said  Saturday night.

"His style never was out of date. What he produced will be watched decades from now by people who are or will be members of the Olympic family. No one else can ever do what he did. His contributions to what we refer to as Olympism are simply without precedent and Olympic athletes around the world owe him a huge debt of gratitude."

When I think of Bud and Nancy, I think of course of all the great stories he told on film but also the great tales he shared in the times we hung out together -- the back stories of how the films came together, the projects that didn't work, the ones that worked better than they ever imagined, all of that.

We had some great times together. We laughed and laughed with Aussie broadcasting friend Tracey Holmes in Sydney in 2000. We were super-sober while taking in the scene of all the police dogs and the soldiers while we waited our turn to get into freezing-cold Olympic Stadium in Salt Lake City on opening night in 2002; for all his celebrity, Bud was just one more guy getting into the stadium that night, believe me. After we got through and into somewhere where it was warm -- more laughs. As if Bud Greenspan was a threat to anyone.

In November 2007, the USOC endowed a scholarship at the USC School of Cinematic Arts to honor Bud and to encourage future filmmakers.

Donations should be sent to that scholarship fund.

As for flowers, Bud always was fond of relating a quote from another pioneer, Red Barber, one of the great baseball play-by-play men: "If you're going to send someone flowers, make sure they're around to smell them."

The world is diminished tonight because Bud is no longer with us. Godspeed, my friend.