Endurance – The Amazing Life of Emil Zatopek

As I am not an athletics fan other than watching when the Olympic and Commonwealth Games are on TV the name Emil Zatopek was not one I recognised. When talking with associates who are athletics fans I was given a lesson in what a legend of the sport he was and how he really was the King of Distance running.

This excellent biography by The Times former athletics correspondent Rick Broadbent not only a well-researched and written book, but one that gave me an education in history. This looks at more than the three Olympic Gold medals that he won at Helsinki in 1952, but goes in to his life after that as he was a Czechoslovakian athlete and he was living his life with the paranoid of a communist country during the Cold War.

Looking how he went from being admired in the 1948 Olympic Games to a three time champion four years later in Helsinki. How Emil Zatopek went from the world famous athlete to a none person in the communist world, to being rehabilitated later in life.

I personally was amazed that he is revered by marathon runners, when he ran the marathon in the Helsinki Games as an afterthought, having never run one previously. How he went from a 5000 and 10,000 distance running to 26 miles as an afterthought and how he sought out advice on how to run that distance.

Being born in 1922 how he had to survive the German Occupation during the war years and then later the communist takeover. That one of the reasons he joined the army was not only so he could train better, but could eat better. Anyone with family behind the Iron Curtain will tell how food became political and in short supply especially to those against the communist regimes.

This is also the story how Zatopek spoke out against the Russian Invasion during the Prague Spring in 1968, and was therefore stripped of his army pension and sent in to internal exile. This exile would cut him off from the outside world, force him to work in uranium mines, where he lived in a caravan and turned to alcohol. That it would not be until 1988 that Zatopek would finally see the Czechoslovakian Government would finally rehabilitate him and his reputation and actually apologise.

Endurance is an excellent biography that really does take you on a journey of discovery and growing admiration, to a man who lived and died in a world many will never fully understand today. What does shine throughout this book is the humanity that Emil Zatopek possessed that never left him when his world was turned upside down and lasted to the very end.

A biography that will open your eyes, this is not the usual sports person’s biography it is also a history of a country behind the Iron Curtain where sport was international marketing for communism. Where you were not an individual but a person to be used and abused, but Zatopek still manages to rise above this throughout his life.

A fantastic read from beginning to end and an honour to recommend it to all this biography which is a story of one man’s humanity above all else. ( )