Sport: Slow Starting Swede

In San Antonio, it was 94° in the shade. Lennart Strand, “Hägg’s Rabbit,” who had come over from Sweden to show U.S. runners how a mile should be run (TIME, June 17), didn’t bother to warm up. “This heat,” said he, “I don’t like it.” Under a sizzling sun he used the first quarter of the race (the National A.A.U. 1,500 meter) to unlimber, and his time for it was a sleepy 65.4 seconds.

At the halfway point, warmed up at last, Strand let out. His white kangaroo-skin shoes seeming scarcely to touch the ground, he swung past Les MacMitchell, king of U.S. milers. At the end, MacMitchell was 30 yards behind. Strand’s time, after his slow start, and on a slow track was 3:54.5 (equivalent to a 4:12 mile). Mission completed, Strand went looking for some shade and some ice cream.

It was the first National A.A.U. Track & Field Championships held in the South since 1914. (The A.A.U. arranged for a special Pullman car to San Antonio, so their Negro contestants would not have to ride in Jim Crow cars.) The only new world’s record set at San Antonio: burly ex-Coast Guardsman Bob Fitch of Minnesota hurled the discus 179 ft. ⅛ in., bettering Italian Adolfo Consolini’s mark by more than four feet.