The nine men made their final preparations in the moments before the officials called them to the starting line of the 1500 metre final.

The Belgian runner, Van Damme, who would be dead within the year, shook his legs and his arms, as if they were a bundle of wet sticks that must be dried before he fed them into the furnace of his chest.

Moorcroft and Clement of Great Britain tried not to notice each other, even as they inadvertently touched each other’s hands in the attempt to loosen their fractious bodies.

Wellmann remembered the tracks on which he had trained, the woods surrounding his childhood home, the mornings in which he startled deer in the sun-filled clearings and for fun had taken off to outrun the animals into the shaded enclosures of the trees. Part of him wanted to be in the shadows now, away from the tens of thousands who watched.

There was a bruise on Coghlan’s left foot where he had stepped on a pebble two days before outside the stadium. Never wear your racing flats for a training run. He had been taught that by his first coach twelve years before, but he had forgotten in his need to feel the confidence of being barefoot, as close as he could be now.

Zemen thought of his cousin, Karl, pursuing him on the streets of Budapest with a stick. The bullying had frightened him into a desperate need to run fast. He looked around at the other finalists, as if to find one that would carry the stick.

This is my home. This is my track. Every one here cheers me. Wohlhuter said these three sentences over and over in his mind.

Crouch held a feather in his right hand. A small white feather that he found on the pavement outside the Olympic village.

Walker listened to his breathing. He saw his breath expand inside of him to become an expanding wisp of white vapor. He looked at the blackness of his jersey, how it resembled a cloud over Christchurch.

Over the stadium, he white and the black clouds were compelled into collision by the engine of the wind. At the moment of the firing gun, the conflagration would erupt.

There was a tenth man. A Tanzanian named Bayi.

On May 17, 1975, Bayi had run the fastest mile in the history of the world. Less than three months later, running on a track in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, with the North Sea as a backdrop, Walker had lowered the mile record by over 1.5 seconds.

But stride for stride, Walker and Bayi had not raced each other since the 1974 Commonwealth Games 1500m final. For that contest, Bayi had come to Christchurch to contend with Walker on provided by the loudest crowd to ever view a New Zealand sporting event carried Walker from 20 yards behind to within a yard at the finish.

On that day,  Bayi had broken the world record. In trying to chase him down, Walker had also broken the world record. And in their wake, three of the other runners ran the fastest times in the history of their home countries:  Kenya, Australia and Great Britain.

Now nine men prepared to approach the line for the start of the Olympic final, but Bayi was not one of them. Four months earlier, the country of Bayi’s birth, Tanzania, had joined 27 other African nations in boycotting the meeting of Olympians.

Earlier in the Olympic year, a team of New Zealander rugby players had played a series of matches in South Africa. The nations of the African continent, united in their abhorrence of the apartheid government in South Africa, demanded that the International Olympic Committee ban New Zealand. The IOC refused to do this. Thus the boycott.

*      *      *

Bayi had taken sick with malaria after the boycott was announced. Would one have occurred without the other? Malaria was a common affliction in Tanzania.  He had the strength to rise every morning at five and run a hard-paced eleven miles. He had the strength to run intervals day after day, quarter mile after quarter mile, but the will of his body could not overcome the will of his country.

He lay in bed, shivering. The curtains shivered also. The baseboard expelled more heated hair into the room. He was trying to compose a letter in his thoughts to Walker. Each version  began with the words ‘I hope …’, but he did not wish to write of his hopes. They were meaningless.

I hope. I hope. On tv, the tape of the 1968 Olympics was showing Kip Keino pulling away from Jim Ryun. Bayi watched the tape several times a week … several times a day since he had become sick. The great Kip Keino. He had beaten Keino for the first time in the 1973 All-Africa Games. Keino had a triumph, however, that would be withheld from him.

I am coming to you, Walker. In the morning, maybe I will see you in the darkened streets of Arusha, Before the sun rises, your long blonde hair puts me in mind of the sun. I am coming to you, Walker. We will have a good strong run.

*      *      *

If humans could be sparrows, they would have no use for running. They would fly through the rafters of stadiums before they alight on the top rung where no one dares to sit.

When the gun sounded, the birds in the stadium flew up in panic. They circled beneath the clouds before turning in a frenzied wheel toward the village, in the hope of finding discarded bits of food.

One bird did not leave its perch. The sparrow looked down on the charging runners, flew down to the track. One bird made a circle within the stadium.

© Andrew Grossman

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