I want to be a millionaire, I don’t want a normal job
Carl Lewis, and 1979
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Kenenisa Bekele kicked off the 2007 Paris marathon.
I know because I saw it.
I could make out him from my starting line, as I was caught in the crowd, tense and scared: high up on stage, the God in the background raised his right arm and pulled the trigger.
-¡Boo!
Then I started to run and suffer and I did not think about that scene anymore until the next day, when I went for a walk on the Champs Elysées, clumsy as a penguin, and suddenly I was surprised by the unexpected: sitting on a bench, absorbed in his thought, there was Bekele.
There was now the God, perhaps an invisible God, now an unarmed guy.
(Bekele: then world record holder in the 5,000 and 10,000; ten-time world cross-country champion, another handful of world and Olympic titles.)
There was the lonely God, now just one more in the crowd, a man outside the world.
Confused, I said to myself:
-Nooooooo.
So I went up to Bekele, I went over to say hello to the myth, to exchange a few words with him, and after a while the myth asked me:
You run, right?
-Why do you ask?
Because he recognized me…
(…)
Javier Moracho is 65 years old, has two daughters and four grandchildren, and is already retired. And when he feels like it, he gets on his bike and travels through the Aragonese Pyrenees (in these summer days) or the Catalan Collserola (on a daily basis), but before he ran and passed hurdles, he was a stellar hurdler, with European and world podiums , brilliant especially when he competed indoors.
And when I tell him about the loneliness of Bekele, the loneliness of the myth in Paris, Moracho tells me:
It wasn’t like that in my day.
And he tells me about the legends of his early years, about the stars that flew over stadiums in the 80s and 90s, in his decades as an athlete: Coe, Ovett, Cram, Dreschler, Mary Decker, Merlene Ottey, Jackie Joyner, Kratochvilova, Koch , Moses, Foster, Lillak, Bubka, Daley Thompson…
–Carl Lewis would never have been able to sit on a bench in a crowd. Carl Lewis was indeed a God.
And he compares him with Maradona and Platini, and he is not the only one who thinks so, because the director of a sports newspaper who had promised to pay a fortune to bring together the three myths at a gala: Lewis, Maradona and Platini also thought. .
“Actually, it was enough for that director that Carl Lewis came,” Moracho tells me.
And to bring him from the United States, the Son of the Wind and his sister Carol, and the parents, the entire Lewis clan, the newspaper had come to pay for a round trip Concorde and another one back.
–In those eighties, Carl Lewis charged three million euros for a ten-second duel against Ben Johnson, who charged 1.5. That was athletics back then – Javier Moracho tells me. And when I give those numbers to today’s athletes, their eyes widen, they don’t believe it.
(The cache of a top-level Spanish athlete barely reaches 1,000 euros per test).
–Is this how modern athletics was born? I ask him.
“That’s how it was born,” he says.
(…)
Modern athletics was born 40 years ago, a round number today, when the World Cups in Budapest start.
He had done it in Helsinki, in 1983, in that Finland that adored (and still adores) the javelin throw, the Finland that had hosted the first World Championship, the one that had opened our eyes to the kids of the time.
Lewis and his sister Carol had competed there, and Cram, Dreschler, Decker, Ottey, Joyner, Kratochvilova, Moses, almost all of whom I have mentioned a few paragraphs earlier, all of them sports legends who earned millions, and also Javier Moracho, the Monzón hurdler who was a friend of everyone and especially of the American clan, since he had received a scholarship at Washington State University and spoke English, two exceptional virtues in that Spain of the Transition.
(Moracho was the captain of the Spanish team, that of Josep Marín and Llopart, Abascal, González, Alonso, Prieto, Corgos, Lobito Ruiz, Cabrejas, some of them have already left us: a team of 24 men and only three women, among them María José Martínez Patiño).
–Until that 1983, the world of athletics only met at the Olympic Games, which were our World Cup –says Moracho–. You know that the Games are held every four years, so great athletics had very few occasions to come together. Nebiolo decided to give us more life and more presence.
Primo Nebiolo was Italian and was the president of the International Athletics Federation (IAAF, today the World Athletics chaired by Sir Sebastian Coe), and he had been cursing himself for years:
– It cannot be that athletes are only protagonists every four years. So we can’t grow.
And so, looking for answers, is how I was going to conceive the World Championships, a great global meeting, four-yearly in its origins (since 1991 it became biennial), whose spectacularity, rhythm and aesthetic sense was going to capture millions of viewers and attract to big sponsors.
Why were those athletes so popular? Why did they earn so much money? Moracho asks himself: because they had more hours of television. Then, only in Spain, Unipublic organized eight international meetings that were broadcast on TVE. Abascal and González charged 12,000 euros for a mile in England. Direct duels were valued very well.
There were the Coe-Ovetts.
Los Thompson-Hingsen.
Los Dreschler-Joyner.
Los Lewis-Johnson.
Los Cram-Auita
Edwin Moses went on to chain 122 consecutive victories in the 400 m hurdles: he remained undefeated for nine years, nine months and nine days. Harald Schmidt suffered that torment. He was never able to defeat Moses. Danny Harris did it, in Madrid, in a race that Moracho himself had ridden, in 1987.
“And today?” I ask.
–Today, athletics appears much less on television. It is difficult for me to find three names of maximum global interest.
I am thinking of Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Armand Duplantis, Yulimar Rojas, Grant Holloway and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, stars starting this Saturday at the World Cups in Budapest.
I think any of them could sit on a bench overlooking the Danube to enjoy the twilight: I suspect no one would bother them.
