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I notice you make no attempt to address the lack of competition...
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MDH, your reasoning about the lack of competition does Zatopek a disservice. It's true that the East Africans - where the power now lies of course - were yet to emerge as a force on the world stage. Abebe Bikila was the first East African to win an Olympic medal of any kind when he won the Marathon in 1960. Nobody had heard of him at the time, and he famously ran barefoot.
That said, there were some of the great names in the history of distance running competing at the time - Gaston Reiff, Alain Mimoun, Vladimir Kuts, our own Chris Chataway as well. One can not - imo - decry Zatopek for lack of competition any more than one can question Margaret Court for not having to swat away a conveyor belt of surly looking Slavic birds with unfeasibly long legs. |
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And while he would have certainly derived some benefit from being in a sinecure Army posting while he purused his career, this was not uncommon at the time in many countries. And whatever help he got from the Army, there were not colonels standing behind him forcing him to run the hundreds of kilometres a week through which he reshaped and professionalised the discipline. It was only when adding the Herculean extremes of distance training that Zatopek perfected to their natural advantages that the Kenyans and Ethiopians were able to take complete control of the sport - they had isolated winners throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties but never the clean sweeps which they routinley achieve now.
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