(See Cover) Long, long ago, when ancient Greece's local wars were called off so that Greek could meet Greek in the Olympic games, athletes were faddish about food. At one stage, the training-table diet for athletes was fresh cheese at all meals — and nothing else except water. Then things swung the other way: Milo of Crotona, the greatest wrestler of ancient times, ate an entire ox at a single sitting.
Last week, some 2,000 years later, Olympic athletes in London were still talking about food. At Uxbridge, where 289 U.S. Olympic athletes were quartered, their angry roars could be heard in the kitchen. The wrestlers were getting enough to eat, but the wrong kind of diet. One coach threatened to smuggle his he-men into London for a feed on black-market steaks.
Where were the 5,000 steaks, the 2,500 lamb chops, the 2,500 Ibs. of ham that were supposed to arrive with the U.S. team? The team's special chef (borrowed from Manhattan's McAlpin Hotel) didn't know. Back in the kitchen the cooks spoke five languages, and he couldn't make him self understood in any of them.
Mostly Mental. Most from of the U.S. trackmen—recruited 20-odd states — had met for the first time on the cinders at Evanston, Ill. three weeks ago, or on the trip over. The 1948 squad differed a little from former U.S. teams: the majority of them were ex-G.I.s, many were married, and some had kids at home. At one training table, nobody followed the ancient Greek rule — designed to prevent dyspepsia and headaches — that only the lightest topics be discussed at mealtimes. The conversation volleyed from the high price of neckties to reincarnation (one sprinter wanted to come back as a dog, another as a race horse). Then it lit on the most dyspeptic subject of all — track. The lean steeplechaser asked a half-miler: "Does all that sugar and dextrose you guys fill up on help any?"
Said the half-miler: "Sure, but it's mostly mental. Your running's about 90% in your head. The nervous energy you build up before a race carries you the first 200 yards. You're not breathing any harder than when you started."
The half-miler confessed unblushingly that he invariably goes under the stands half an hour before his race and gets deathly sick. The others nodded understandingly. All of them got sick too, some before a race and some afterwards. It was the terrible "keying up" process that track champions must go through. Since it helps them win, most of them consider it a blessing, not a handicap.
One of them knew a runner who got so nervous before a race that he was afraid to walk down steps and had to be carried by teammates. At those times, Herb McKenley, the great Jamaican quarter-miler, walks around in a stupor, unable to speak when spoken to. Sweden's famed miler, Lennart Strand, gets absentminded; he recently went out for a race without his running shirt.
Was it worth all this nervous strain?