Jack Lovelock

Jack Lovelock won the 1936 Olympic gold medal for 1500 metres, with a race that was acclaimed as a tactical masterpiece, in a world record time. In middle distance track racing, that’s the ultimate. “There never was such a race, nor such a runner,” wrote the Manchester Guardian. Lovelock described that Berlin race as “an artistic creation.”

It was the peak of a career that included a gold medal for the mile in the 1934 British Empire Games, three world records, and high-profile victories against world-class fields in America and Europe. He did all that at a time when public and media attention on sport was greater than at any previous time in history, with radio and film newly powerful alongside the most potent vintage era of newspaper journalism and photography. In August 1936, Lovelock was one of the most globally famous sportsman the world had ever known. This fame was prolonged by the choice of Lovelock’s race as a key sequence in Leni Riefenstahl’s classic documentary film Olympia, and by the lasting appeal of the BBC radio commentary by Lovelock’s friend Harold Abrahams,  with its babbling partisan ecstasy: “Come on, Jack! My God, he’s done it! Five yards, six yards, he wins, he’s won, hooray!” 

In New Zealand, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage now refers to a “Lovelock legend,” and he has become a figure of almost mythic standing and complexity. He has been on a stamp, the oak tree grown from his Olympic seedling at Timaru Boys High School is a nationally protected landmark, and his name has been given to streets, track meets, a track, and a sports bar. His life and somewhat elusive personality have been reinterpreted in four excellent biographies,[i] several outstanding essay-length studies,[ii] and in fiction, drama, television drama, and sculpture. There are full entries on him in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. His own journal, edited and published in 2008, is one of the best of all books from inside the life of a famous runner.[iii]    

John Edward (Jack) Lovelock was born 5 January 1910 at Crushington, near Reefton, where his father was then superintendant of a goldmine battery. The family moved to Greymouth, Temuka, and Fairlie, where his father died when Lovelock was only 13. That loss may have given him the depth of determination that Lovelock could utilise on crucial occasions. After being dux of Fairlie primary school, and winning a national junior scholarship from Fairlie District High School, he went as a boarder to Timaru Boys’ High School, where he became head prefect and dux, won a University scholarship, and became the school’s best boxer and runner. At the University of Otago, he studied medicine, and progressed to national level as an athlete, helped by coach Bill Dryden, and by his own experiments, seeking precise pace judgment, and using photography to perfect his fluid and springy running style. He was beaten for the 1929 Otago one mile title by J. G. Barnes, later mayor of Dunedin, but won the title in 1930 and 1931.

That year he was third in the New Zealand mile championship, and then took up the award of a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Living overseas from then on, he never won a New Zealand title. In England, he quickly made important lifetime friendships, with Jerry Cornes, England’s best miler and President of Oxford University Athletics Club, with the pioneering University coach Bill Thomas, and with Arthur (later Lord) Porritt, an earlier Rhodes Scholar, and bronze medallist in the 1924 Olympic 100m, who was beginning his eminent career as a surgeon. To the end of their lives, Porritt (who became a member of the International Olympic Committee) and Harold Abrahams (who became chairman of England’s Amateur Athletics Association) used to hold an annual commemorative dinner on the date of Lovelock’s Berlin victory.[iv] 

With Thomas’s programme of sustained training, with winter cross-country races up to nine miles, and with the unusual Oxford-Cambridge calendar of beginning track competitions during the late winter, Lovelock’s progress was dramatic. On 26 May 1932, he set a British and British Empire record for the mile, 4:12.0, becoming the third fastest miler in history.  Two weeks later, he broke the world record for the rarely contested three-quarters of a mile, with 3:02.2. Those times made him a leading contender for the Olympic 1500m in Los Angeles on 3-4 August. Inexperienced at international level, he finished a disgruntled seventh, vowing in his training diary that night “to square my account with Beccali & Co.” The top five – Luigi Beccali, Jerry Cornes, Phil Edwards, Glenn Cunningham, and Erik Ny  – all made the final again in 1936, when Lovelock made good on his vow.

Before then, a year of perfectly judged preparation gave Lovelock, on 15 July 1933, “the greatest mile of all time,” a world record 4:07.6, almost two seconds under the old mark. Lovelock’s impeccably timed sprint defeated the powerful American Bill Bonthron, also under the old record, on his home track at Princeton University. Bonthron would break the 1500m world record in 1934, but Cole Porter’s lines “You’re the top, You’re a Roosevelt smile, You’re the top, You’re a Bonthron mile” should strictly be “Lovelock mile.” But at the showdown International Student Games in September 1933, Italy’s Beccali, the Olympic champion, again prevailed over Lovelock, equalling the world 1500m record. Lovelock was happy with his 3:49.8, a personal best. “It’s probably rather good for me to take an occasional drubbing,” he commented wryly in his diary. But he added the footnote, “Two wins to him, the third is mine.”

Lovelock was elected President (=Captain) of Oxford University Athletic Club for the 1933-34 academic year. The position required organising and competing in frequent contests against Cambridge, the AAA, etc, and against visiting American universities, and representing the Oxford/Cambridge Achilles Club in many fixtures at private schools in southern England. The appointment showed how he had been accepted into the English or at least Oxbridge sporting world.  Yet almost always in his international appearances, Lovelock wore the defiant New Zealand all black with a huge silver fern. At the 1933 Student Games, he carried the flag at the opening ceremony, but he was the entire New Zealand team. 

In 1934, he ended his undergraduate career. Before beginning medical studies at St Mary’s Hospital, London, he had a superlative summer track season. He won the AAA one mile  championship at White City, he returned to America for another tactical victory over Bonthron (that’s the one where the camera caught him at the tape grinning impishly across at the anguished Bonthron). And he reaffirmed his true identity by winning New Zealand’s only gold medal in the British Empire Games, convincingly beating England’s rising Sydney Wooderson, and the British Number One, Cornes, in the one mile, winning in 4:12.8 with a 60-yard burst, in a style one writer called “melodious prose.”

As the clock ticked towards Berlin, the top Americans were still improving. In June 1934, Bonthron set a new world record for 1500m, and Cunningham for the mile. American entrepreneurial flair assembled the best mile field ever for the proclaimed “Mile of the Century” at Princeton on 15 June 1935. It was promoted as the “4:00 minute mile cocktail.” Lovelock peaked to perfection. Strong winds enforced a tactical race, and he brilliantly outmanoeuvred Bonthron, Cunningham, and Gene Venzke. In his journal he commented on the “terrific enthusiasm” of the crowds. “I was mobbed by ‘Kind’ yet thoughtless enthusiasts.”

He won two more major international races over 1500m, in Antwerp in 3:59.2, and in Stockholm in 3:57.6. That field included two who would be Olympic finalists the following year, Venzke and Erik Ny (Sweden). On British tracks, however, Lovelock was beaten twice by Wooderson, who worryingly proved his ability to match Lovelock in tactics and in sprint speed. Despite feeling “flat and stale as hell,” Lovelock ended the 1935 season with a win in the International Student Games 1500m in Budapest, in a slow 4:00.0, against weak opposition with Beccali no longer eligible. 

Lovelock paced his 1936 season with scientific precision. He ran longer than before in early training (though not nearly long enough, by our modern knowledge), and used low-key races, including 880s, to carefully increase speed. In early June, he ran his first 3 miles, winning in 14:20.2, with a fast last lap that was practice for his planned tactic for the Olympic 1500m. At the Southern Championships, where Wooderson broke Lovelock’s British mile record, Lovelock chose the 880, and ran second. He commented in his journal,  “The others are all running too fast too early, I suspect, and must pay for this by the time the Olympics are held.”

His “first hard race,” according to his diary, was the AAA one mile championship on 11 July, where Wooderson held off a series of sprints by Lovelock, who privately commented “I have some way to go yet!”  He had just under four weeks to the Olympic final on 6 August. First step was a British 2 miles record, 9:03.8, on July 25, when he “found unexpected stores of energy…covering the last lap in 61.8.”

This performance fuelled Lovelock’s uncertainty whether to run the 5000m in Berlin as well as the 1500m. It was never a choice between the two, as some have assumed. He was entered for the 5000m heats, and had changed ready to run, but felt anxious that heats and finals for two events in four days might blunt his planned 1500m finish. He asked Porritt, his team manager, to make the decision. In various accounts over the years, Porritt was consistent in his recollection of “the worst [ie hardest] decision I have ever had to make”: “I said, ‘All right, get dressed,’ and he did, and [as he had promised] he never spoke about it again.”

In his Olympic 1500m heat on 5 August, Lovelock worked with Cornes to keep the pace slow while taking no risks, and called it “most satisfactory running & team work by Jerry & self.” He placed third in 4:00.6. The slowest qualifying time in the other three heats was 3:56.2. Wooderson was suffering an ankle injury and couldn’t finish his heat. Bonthron, the world record holder, did not make the fiercely contested USA team.

Otherwise, they were all there: the top five from the 1932 Olympics, plus Venzke, Archie San Romani (USA), and the best from France, Hungary, and two from the fervently competitive hosts, Germany. Chancellor Hitler entered the stadium, to heroic acclamation, just as the 1500m finalists were lining up.

Cornes did the early leading (wrongly identified in Abrahams’s radio commentary), and then Cunningham and Ny took over, with Lovelock watchfully in third, watched in turn by Beccali, who was looking to repeat his 1932 win. There was tension and some jostling – Cunningham had to take a step inside the track as they entered the straight with just over a lap to go. The third lap in 61 was the fastest Lovelock had ever run, but he was ready. Round the first bend of the last lap, he moved past Cunningham into second, paused for a moment behind Ny, and as they came off the bend, picked up his cadence and surged to the front, seizing a crucial five yards. Cunningham and Beccali had to go around Ny to give chase, and never closed. The break came earlier than anyone expected, yet Lovelock sustained it for a last 400m of 55.5, and time of 3:47.8, a full second under the world record.

“It was as usual a case of getting first break on the field, catching them napping,” he wrote, and years later he spoke to Roger Bannister about the need “to choose the moment for the unexpected finish.” That’s understating it. The moment he chose was the one that exactly fitted his strengths in relation to his opponents. All the key ones possessed better basic speed. Lovelock’s asset was his ability to sustain a pace close to his maximum, and yet accelerate with dramatic suddenness, and then hold it for an unpredictable period at the finish

“I finished in perfect form…It was undoubtedly the most beautifully executed race of my career, a true climax to 8 years steady work, an artistic creation,” he wrote in his journal.

It proved to be not only the climax, but almost the final curtain. Two weeks later, in a British Empire vs USA meeting in London, Lovelock won the 3 miles by a huge margin, but had to run most of it alone, and so missed the records he hoped for, with 14:14.8 (worth about eleventh in the Olympic 5000m).  There was one more race, a last celebrity mile at Princeton, but Lovelock had sore tendons, and was feeling “sleepless, restless, and very easily tired.” Glenn Cunningham must have felt the same way, as he was dropped on a slow third lap that ended all hopes of a record, and it was the young San Romani, a surprise fourth in Berlin, who held off Lovelock’s faltering challenge. Lovelock’s journal noted “I cannot object to being beaten in 4.9 (the 4th fastest mile ever run), especially by one so good & promising as San Romani…but I was a bit passé.”[vi]

From America, Lovelock went on to tour New Zealand as a guest of the government, but he was uncomfortable in public appearances, and disappointed some audiences. He declined the offer of appointment as national director of sport.

He returned to England to graduate MB, ChB, and practised in London, while also doing some freelance athletics journalism and broadcasting. In the Second World War, he served in the British Army Medical Corps on the home front, specialising in rehabilitation of seriously injured servicemen. A fall from a horse while hunting in 1940 left him with severely damaged vision and a propensity to dizziness. In 1945, he married Cynthia James, an American doing medical and diplomatic war work in London. In 1947, Porritt helped him get a post at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, but still suffering from his head injury, Lovelock found the stress too great. Later that year, he and his wife moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he took a post at the New York Hospital for Special Surgery. He progressed from assistant director in physical medicine to director of rehabilitation, continuing his pioneering war work, and in 1949 was awarded a prestigious research grant.  With that recognition, two small daughters, and an upscale house in the Kensington area of Brooklyn, near Prospect Park, all seemed to be well, when on 28 December 1949, he went into the hospital early, despite suffering from flu. He phoned Cynthia to say he was getting dizzy spells and was coming home, but changing trains at Church Avenue station on the D subway line, he fell from the platform and was killed by a train, aged 39.   

Lovelock’s life was significant for its encounters with world-shaping settings, events, and themes – snobbish pacifist Oxford, noisy emergent America, rampant Nazi Germany’s Olympics, the power of the new media, pioneering reconstructive surgery, and for New Zealanders, the complex but lasting connection with home for those whose careers or circumstances took them away. But mainly he is significant as the best, when it really mattered, of one of the greatest generations ever in the history of running; and for bringing a scientist’s analysis and an artist’s imagination to the creation (in his own word) of a supreme race.

 

Written by Roger Robinson