Daley Thompson and Jurgen Hingsen - Los Angeles 1984 - Part Two

“A World Record and a Gold Medal”

by Rob Leachman

From the “Great Rivalries of Olympic Track and Field” Series

This Series

As the Olympic year of 1980 began, Daley Thompson was just twenty-one years old, had never won a major international decathlon competition, and the previous year had only competed in one decathlon, a competition he did not complete. Still, as prognosticators began to predict the results of the decathlon in Moscow, based almost totally on his potential, Thompson was increasingly considered the athlete to beat.

Changes

In addition to the high expectations he was experiencing, Daley Thompson’s life at the beginning of 1980 was changing in other ways. First, he was suddenly able to focus on training without worrying about monetary issues. While officials at the British Sports Aid Foundation had just two years earlier considered the young decathlete to be unworthy of financial assistance, after a string of world-class caliber performances, they considered him to be a major Olympic prospect. He received enough funding that he no longer had to worry about where he was going to sleep, what he was going to eat, or how he was going to get from one training venue to the next. He could even spend a few weeks of winter in warmer climate settings like the South of France or California where the weather didn’t impede his training. For the next several years, he would spend extended time training in Southern California.

In 1980, Olympic sports like track and field hadn’t yet ditched the notion of amateurism, but they were clearly moving in that direction. While athletes still couldn’t accept cash payments from companies or meet organizers, they could enter into “sponsorships” in which such companies provided non-monetary assistance like goods and services to the better athletes in the world. For example, Thompson received the “Number One Award” from Hertz, which provided the free use of a car. His sponsors in 1979 included British Caledonian Airways, which provided him with no-cost flights, and Baxters Butchers, which provided the young athlete with a monthly allotment of meat.

Second, particularly after his strong performance in Edmonton, a location not far from many US cities, Daley Thompson became the subject of heavy recruitment by major university track programs. Though he would never enroll in a university in the United States, and though there is no evidence suggesting serious consideration of doing so, he embarked on a seven-week tour of the United States to visit a few of the more than thirty universities that offered him scholarships. These included Oregon, Oregon State, Texas-El Paso, and San Diego State. In commenting on these college visits, he said, “They didn’t want much from me, but I decided I’d rather stay home.” Commenting separately and a bit less diplomatically, he later suggested, “What do they give you? Enough money to pay for your education, books, and laundry. I prefer to stay with my sport until one of those fabulous chances comes along . . .”

He had earlier decided to focus on training and decathlon competitions rather than academics, and moving across the Atlantic, leaving his friends, and again splitting time between studies and sport made no sense to him. But in addition to touring the United States, he came away from this prolonged visit with a winter training location. Thompson was impressed by the weather in San Diego as well as by an assistant coach at San Diego State with whom he had interacted, Joe Briski. He introduced his friend, Richard Slaney, to Briski, who offered the British discus thrower a scholarship. After this initial visit in 1979, Thompson spent several months each winter until his career began to wind down training in San Diego. For the first few years, he trained with his good friend, Slaney.

Another change in Thompson’s approach was self-imposed and largely an outgrowth of what he considered to be the debacle in Prague. Though introverted and in many ways private, throughout his career, Thompson exuded the image of a carefree, playful, and outgoing individual. Early in his career, as an outgrowth of this image, he was very open to the press. Reporters came to rely on him for “good copy,” vivid and occasionally controversial comments. (Thompson described himself during this period as “quoteful.”)

But his experience in losing at the European Championships in 1978 caused him to reassess his approach to dealing with the press. Young and perhaps a bit naïve to the ways of the press, Thompson had freely granted interviews to reporters, and some had misquoted him or taken his comments out of context. Of equal or greater importance, in the eyes of the young athlete, some reporters had demonstrated neither knowledge about the decathlon nor the desire to increase their understanding of such a complex event. After Prague, he became much more selective about who in the press he spoke to and what he spoke about. As he commented a year later, “I haven’t been giving many interviews. There are some things you should talk about and some you shouldn’t. Sometimes I’ve talked too much.” Justifying his new, less open approach, he commented, “Regardless of what you say, you’ve still got to go out there and do it, so there’s no need to say anything.”

He spoke with some reporters, particularly those he had reason to believe he could trust. One writer to whom he gave tremendous access off and on for several years was Skip Rozin. The result was the book Daley Thompson – The Subject is Winning, a fascinating look into the mind and approach of an amazingly talented and complex athlete.

But to most reporters, he went largely quiet. He summed up his view of the British press in an interview a few years later when he said, “I don’t consider English newspaper people to be included in my life. They just happen to be a necessary evil.”

That Daley Thompson was a confident athlete could not be denied, even by the athlete himself. That he could be boisterous and playful was true as well. But he had become known as somewhat of a cocky and arrogant clown, and the maturing athlete had begun to take steps to regain control of his image. He was well on his way to establishing himself as the greatest decathlete of all time. However, in the months leading up to the Moscow Olympics, British fans and reporters were intrigued by Thompson but enthralled by two middle-distance greats representing the nation, Steve Ovett and especially Sebastian Coe. One of the greatest track athletes of all time, in the summer of 1979, Coe had in the span of six weeks broken the world record in the 800, 1,500, and mile runs. The battles in Moscow between these two middle-distance greats would become legendary.

Viewed by some as an attention hog, Daley Thompson did not begrudge Sebastian Coe the limelight he was receiving. “It’s just fine. He deserves it,” Thompson suggested. “So let the press write about him for the next seven months and leave me alone to train. Let them all leave me alone.” Contrary to how some viewed him, Thompson didn’t need accolades or headlines; he needed time to train.

And train he did, believing it was virtually impossible to work his still young body too much. “Training is the only way you can guard against defeat. There is no way of assuring you won’t lose, but by training—all you can—you at least know you’re getting everything out of yourself that’s there.”

He lived and breathed the decathlon, avoiding drugs, drinking, late nights, and anything that might detract from his ultimate goals. “Competition is my life—winning is my only goal,” Thompson commented. “Everything I do is directed toward that end and I will never permit anything to jeopardize it.”

In many respects, though he had come tantalizingly close to breaking the world record, Thompson had failed to put together a truly complete decathlon where he performed well in all ten events. That would change in 1980.

An Invasion and a Boycott

Early in the Olympic year, in a brutal geopolitical move that seemed unrelated to sport, military forces of the Soviet Union invaded the neighboring nation of Afghanistan. Though the Soviets would never gain control of the vast and largely barren Afghan nation, the brazenness of the attack took the Western world by surprise. And at least initially, the United States and its allies struggled to respond to the invasion. In a televised address to the nation in early January, President Jimmy Carter outlined a series of possible steps the United States might follow in response to the Soviet aggression. Near the end of the speech, in what seemed to some to be almost an afterthought, Carter stated, “Although the United States would prefer not to withdraw from the Olympic Games scheduled in Moscow this summer, the Soviet Union must realize that its continued aggressive actions will endanger both the participation of athletes and the travel to Moscow by spectators who would normally wish to attend the Olympic Games.” With that statement, the boycott of the Moscow Olympics by the United States and most of its allies was set in motion. And with the president’s call for a boycott, popular among the American people and ultimately supported by the US Olympic Committee, the Olympic dreams of countless athletes in the United States and sixty-four other countries were dashed.

Support of the boycott by American allies, however, was not universal. Among those allied nations opting to send a team to Moscow, albeit with some limitations, was Great Britain. Assuming he was healthy and made the British Olympic team, which if he was healthy was virtually inevitable, Daley Thompson would have his first real chance to win an Olympic medal. But with the boycott, the tenor of the decathlon competition would be much different. Though the United States had declined as a decathlon powerhouse since the Montreal Games, top American decathletes like Fred Dixon and Bob Coffman, the top-ranked decathlete in the world in 1979, would not be in Moscow. But the most significant blow to a competitive Olympic decathlon was the loss of West Germany with Guido Kratschmer, silver medalist in Montreal, and the rising star, Jurgen Hingsen. Though he would still face Soviet athletes like Aleksandr Shablyenko and Yuriy Kutsyenko, and Siegfried Stark of East Germany, in the span of a few weeks, Daley Thompson had gone from a gold medal favorite to a prohibitive one.

Regarding the boycott and the notion that the gold medal might be diminished as a result, Thompson was ambivalent. “I didn’t really care,” he later recalled. “I didn’t give a damn who was going. In 1956, when Switzerland and Spain and the others boycotted, nobody gave a damn, and in 1996, when they come around to look at the rolls of the winners in 1980, nobody’s going to give a damn that America and West Germany weren’t there.”

Regardless, Thompson maintained a laser-like focus on winning the gold medal in Moscow, a victory that would, in his mind, legitimize him as a decathlon great. “Winning in Moscow is the most important thing in my life,” he shared in the spring of 1980. “I think about it all the time. I’m impatient. I want to get there and do it.” He then added with characteristic confidence combined with a touch of realism, “I think I’m the best decathlete in the world. But Moscow will be proof for them. You’ve got to prove it to them. The Olympics is the place to do that.”

A Short-Lived World Record

But of course, gold medals must be won in actual competition rather than on paper. And after a productive winter training in Southern California, Thompson made a huge statement in mid-May back in Gotzis, Austria. He had been flirting with the world record for the past two years, but second-day stumbles of various sorts served to derail those efforts. This performance, however, would be different.

In discussing his expectations going into the competition, Thompson shared, “I wasn’t expecting to break the world record, but I was in good enough shape to do it. I look at it this way, whatever decathlon you go into: if you’re in 8,800-point shape, you’ll score 8,600. (The world record was 8,618.) I thought I was in about 8,600 shape, so I thought I’d score 8,400, but fortunately it went well for me. I was lucky.”

There are times when great decathlon performances result from relaxed competitions in which the top athlete simply needs to concentrate on his own performance. Thompson’s breakout score at the 1978 Commonwealth Games was an example of such a competition. But other times, multiple great athletes push each other to greater and greater individual performances. The Hypo-Meeting in Gotzis in 1980 would be such a competition.

Still a relatively young twenty-seven as the athletes lined up to begin his clash with Daley Thompson in Gotzis, Guido Kratschmer had become the quiet, unassuming elder statesman of the decathlon. Regarding his entry into track and field, Kratschmer recalled, “When I was sixteen, a trainer came through our village looking for young men to recruit. Some of the people told him about me, this boy who was always running and jumping, so he came to see. He watched me and asked if I wanted to begin training as an athlete. I’ve been training ever since.”

The powerfully built physical education teacher and farmer’s son at heart, the West German was known as a shy but fierce competitor who had upset the defending Olympic champion, Mykola Avilov of the Soviet Union, to take the silver medal at the Montreal Games. By 1978, he had reached the top of the Track and Field News annual world rankings. Had he not been denied the opportunity to compete in the 1980 Olympics, he would have been considered at least a legitimate threat to challenge Daley Thompson for the gold medal. Given the boycott, though, this would represent his only opportunity to compete against the British champion during the Olympic year.

Though claiming that in the past he had not concerned himself with the world record as he was completing decathlons, this competition was decidedly different for Daley Thompson. He was faced with an actual rather than a statistical adversary, in this case, Kratschmer, considered by some to be the greatest decathlete in the world. If he performed well and defeated this rival, the world record, possibly, might fall as a result.

In past decathlons, Thompson had typically performed strongly on the first day and tried to hang on during the second. In this competition in Gotzis, his performance was much more well-rounded, showing the experience of a more seasoned decathlete.

In the 100, he said he tied up toward the end of the race but still ran 10.55, just over his decathlon personal best. The time gave him 100 points more than Jenner had scored in Montreal. In the long jump, Thompson again showed some rust as he struggled with his approach. “I just wasn’t hitting the board,” he indicated. “Again, I think that was due to a lack of actually doing it.” Still, he reached 25-4 to gain another 100 points on Jenner’s world-record performance. In the shot put, after approaching his personal best in warmups, he threw only 47-5 and gave back fifty-three points to Jenner’s record.

His performance in the high jump was critical in his world record quest as well as his battle with Kratschmer. He had struggled in a high jump competition in Britain the previous week, struggling to surpass 6-0. He entered the competition at 6-¾ and attempted every height as the bar was raised in one-and-a-quarter-inch intervals. “I took every single height; I must have made twenty-five jumps.” He didn’t miss a height until he cleared 6-11, a personal best, and he gained sixty-eight points on the world record.

By the time the top athletes lined up for the 400 at 7:15 p.m., they had been at the track competing since 9:30 that morning. “By then I was really tired and there was a really strong headwind in the stretch,” Thompson recalled afterward. He admittedly went out too fast and then struggled at the end, clocking 48.04. The time extended his lead over Kratschmer but gave back twenty-six points of his lead over Jenner’s performance.

Despite some struggles, he had scored 4,486 points, a solid first-day total that approached what he had scored at the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton two years earlier. He led Kratschmer by 181 points and Jenner’s world record pace by 189.

To defeat the dangerous West German, he would have to have a solid second day. To break the world record, he would need to score 4,132 points, over 200 points more than his previous best second-day performance. As he later recalled, “At this point, I didn’t think the world record was on.” Still, to have a shot at supplanting Jenner, he would need an atypically solid second-day performance. That’s exactly what he got.

To begin the second day, despite hitting most of the barriers, Thompson opened with a 14.37 in the hurdles, another personal best. He bettered Jenner’s world record performance in the event by fifty-three points but lost twenty-four points to Kratschmer. He threw 141-0 in the discus, a decent but unspectacular performance for Thompson that lost 139 points to the world record and sixty-eight to the West German. Through seven events, Thompson led Kratschmer by a dwindling eighty-nine points and Jenner’s world record pace by 112 points.

Any chance at the world record required a strong performance in the pole vault and javelin to place Thompson within striking distance for the 1,500. In no previous decathlon, including his breakout performance in Edmonton, had he been able to string together solid marks in both events. That changed on this day in Gotzis.

In his only decathlon of 1979, Thompson had famously no-heighted in the pole vault, and that was on his mind as the eighth event began. Still, in this competition, he maintained a confident and almost fearless approach as he chose when to enter the competition. As he recounted, “I came in at (14-9), the highest I’ve ever come in and then went (15-5), (15-9), and (16-1). Made them all first time.” It was the second-best pole vault performance of his young career. He now led Jenner’s performance by 135 and Kratschmer by 208 heading into the javelin, an event that the 1976 Olympic champion had dominated. Realistically, he needed a personal best performance to have a shot at breaking Jenner’s record.

Before this day, Thompson’s personal best in the javelin was 204-6, a full twenty feet less than Jenner’s distance in Montreal. On his first attempt, Thompson watched as the spear landed 214-6 away, adding ten feet to his personal best and mitigating much of the loss of points to the world record. Because Jenner had been such a strong performer in the 1,500, Thompson had hoped to be at least 100 points ahead of world record performance heading into the last event. With his PR performance in the javelin, he was ninety-nine points ahead of Jenner’s world record point total after nine events. The record was in sight.

Thompson needed to run 4:26.1 or better, a time he had exceeded five times previously. But through the early stages of the race, his pace was very sluggish. As he recounted, “Before the race, I felt really good, but during it, I felt awful—never felt so bad in my life.” He looked so bad and lethargic that his coach, Bruce Longden, forgot about the world record and simply hoped Thompson could finish.

After three laps his time was around 3:40, approximately 4:35 pace. When Thompson heard the split time, he dug down and began a near sprint that he continued through the finish line. His time was 4:25.5, and with that frantic last lap, he had amazingly surpassed Jenner’s record by a scant but significant five points, extending the world standard to 8,622.

Always looking ahead, Thompson said afterward, “I’m happy for the record. Now I can concentrate on the Games.” In reality, after his near-misses and countless hours of hard work to get him to this point, breaking the record was somewhat of a letdown for Thompson. As he later commented, “When you aim at things and achieve them, it’s kind of an anti-climax. It’s a big letdown. Not that I was expecting fireworks . . . , but whatever I was expecting, that wasn’t what it was.”

When Thompson arrived back in Great Britain, a telegram from the former world record holder was awaiting him. It read, “Congratulations. Ever since the day I met you in Montreal, I knew you had the right attitude to be the best in the world. I know you’ll wear the crown well. My Wheaties contract is up in a year—I’ll give them your name. 9000 or bust. Former world record holder, Bruce Jenner.”

Thompson’s record-setting performance was historic in several ways. At twenty-one, he was the youngest decathlon world record holder since Rafer Johnson scored 7,758 to set the record in 1955 at the age of twenty. Bob Mathias had been nineteen when he broke the record in 1950.

After Gotzis, with less than three months to go before the Moscow Games, an odd malaise set in for Daley Thompson. He had defeated Guido Kratschmer, arguably the best decathlete in the world, and broken the world record, all in one competition, Thompson found that, when he returned to training, the fire that had motivated him for so long was largely gone. He tried different strategies to regain his famous drive, like returning to his roots by working out more with the Essex Beagles and leaning on his friends and training partners, most notably Pan Zeniou, to lift him up. But he simply struggled to return to the mindset that had driven him before Gotzis.

Ultimately, the needed spark came from an unlikely source.

Daley Thompson’s time atop the decathlon world lasted, at least this time, a mere twenty-seven days.

Less than a month after performing well but still losing by 201 points to Daley Thompson’s world record performance, Guido Kratschmer entered a lowkey competition in Bernhausen in his native West Germany. With no Olympics on the immediate horizon for the accomplished but quiet athlete, Kratschmer had something to prove. And prove it he did. In a balanced and consistent performance, he scored 8,649 to surpass Thompson’s still-fresh record by twenty-seven points. As he commented afterward, “I wanted to get the world record to prove I would have been a bona fide gold medal contender at Moscow.”

Thompson suggested that losing his world record so soon after setting it didn’t bother him, that records were made to be broken. (Still, it was the shortest duration for a world record in the decathlon in the history of the event.) And he sent Kratschmer a congratulatory telegram that he said was sincere. Losing his record to an athlete he liked and respected but who he had easily defeated less than a month earlier had to sting, at least a bit. But it served a purpose by providing Thompson with the jolt he needed to lift him out of his doldrums.

In the weeks leading up to the Olympics, his training improved and he competed in an array of individual events. As Bob Mortimer offered, “By Moscow, he’d made himself ready, by the strength of his own will.” As Thompson commented a week before traveling to Moscow, “Now I’m happy. I’ve been waiting for four years, and it’s tomorrow.”

Moscow Olympics, 1980

The gold standard for prognosticating Olympic medalists in track and field has for decades been the predictions offered by Track and Field News. As an American-based publication, with the United States not sending a team to Moscow, the periodical offered a scaled-back version of its predictions. In the decathlon, the three-member panel predicted that Daley Thompson would win the gold medal followed by Siegfried Stark of East Germany and Aleksandr Grebenyuk of the Soviet Union. Thompson’s personal best score was nearly 150 points better than Stark’s, and as a result, the Brit was considered a prohibitive favorite.

The Track and Field News predictions were spot on, at least for the gold medal. Siegfried Stark dropped out after two events and Aleksandr Grebenyuk was ultimately not included as part of the Soviet contingent.

In Moscow, Thompson led from the start, was never challenged, and threatened the world record. Conditions in the Olympic Stadium for the first day were cool and windy, but dry. He ran a solid 10.62 in the 100 on a day when none of the other top contenders broke 11.00. Then, jumping into a headwind, he leaped 26-3 to equal the decathlon world record. Just two events into the competition, he led by nearly 200 points. In the shot put, which had in the past been a troublesome event for Thompson, he reached 49-9¾, his second straight personal best. Suddenly, he was ahead of world-record pace. He high jumped 6-9¾, his second-highest decathlon clearance. Finally, in the 400, he fought swirling winds to finish in 48.01, slower than he usually ran but a stellar time given the conditions. He totaled 4,542 that first day, which was fifty-six points better than he had scored in Gotzis as he was breaking the world record. He led his two Soviet rivals, who would ultimately win the silver and bronze medals, by at least 264 points.

The second day dawned cold and rainy with gusty winds, and with such adverse conditions, Thompson’s chances of regaining the world record were greatly diminished. As he said, “The rainy weather stopped me beating the record.” Still, he continued to push, at least through nine events.

In the hurdles, he held back slightly, not wanting to push too hard given the cold and rainy conditions. Still, he ran 14.47, a tenth of a second slower than the personal best he had run in Gotzis. Then in the discus, in his first subpar performance of the competition, Thompson threw 138-7 from a slippery ring. He remained nearly 200 points ahead of his nearest rival, and he was still thirty points ahead of his own world record pace.

He vaulted 15-5, a very solid performance in wet and gusty conditions. But he had entered the competition at an early height, and as a result, had expended a great deal of energy and was tiring. He was now behind world record pace, but with the athlete in second place, Valeriy Kachanov of the Soviet Union, injured and forced to withdraw, Thompson had a virtual lock on the gold medal.

In the javelin, he reached the second-best distance of his career but still lost another fifteen points to his world record performance. Regaining the mark from Guido Kratschmer would have to wait for another competition.

Needing to run a personal best 4:17.2 to break the record, a challenge under ideal circumstances, Thompson opted to follow a leisurely pace to a relatively slow 4:39.9. Regarding his decision not to push for the record, he offered, “I could have got close. I could have run close. I think I had to run 4:17.9 or 4:18, better than my best. I know I could have run 4:20. It was possible.” Instead, he decided to take his time, enjoy the crowd, and savor winning his first Olympic gold medal, an action for which he was criticized by some in his native Great Britain. In response, he said, “I didn’t care about the world record. If I’d been focusing my mind for five years on breaking the record, then fine, but I hadn’t.” His goal had been to win an Olympic title, the first of what he hoped would be two or three. And in this, he had been successful.

Daley Thompson had scored 8,495, placing him 164 points ahead of the silver medalist, Yuriy Kutsenko of the Soviet Union. Another Soviet, Sergey Zhelanov, was third.

Moscow Olympics, 1980 (English language commentary in background)

Interviewed afterward, Thompson was asked if he was disappointed that he had not broken the world record. “No,” he responded. “This was the most important competition of my life, and it was definitely my best performance, even though I’ve had a higher total score. If I never have another competition the rest of my life, I’ll be satisfied with this one.” When asked about his future plans, Thompson offered, “As much as I’d love to make a million dollars, like Bruce Jenner, I hope and expect to keep competing. I love the decathlon.”

Later that evening, after taking an elongated victory lap around Lenin Central Stadium and flanked by the two Soviet medalists, Daley Thompson was officially crowned Olympic champion as he received his gold medal. As he departed the nearly deserted Olympic stadium, the new champion wanted to celebrate. But despite the late hour, around 11:00 p.m., Thompson had one more task to complete, the providing of a urine sample for drug testing. Perhaps because of the cool and rainy conditions, Thompson had not consumed a lot of fluids during the second day. As a result, it took some time for him to be able to produce an adequate sample. “Three o’clock in the morning they let me out. . . The whole town’s dead. The first time in five years I want to go out, right, and everybody’s asleep. Every single person’s asleep or gone.”

So, with none of his mates available to join the festivities, Daley Thompson went back to his dorm room and celebrated, perhaps fittingly, alone.

Heading into 1981, Thompson was brimming with confidence and wasn’t shy about sharing his ultimate Olympic goals. I love this game, every minute of it. I intend to compete in the next two Olympics. No decathlete has ever won three gold medals and I won’t even be thirty in 1988. Why stop doing something that’s fun?”

Many expected the Olympic champion to regain the world record in 1981, but such a performance would have to wait another year. In his one decathlon of the year, a lowkey affair in Saskatoon, Canada, Thompson entered the competition with high expectations. “I am going to try to score more points than I ever have before,” he commented. “I am running faster. I have improved my discus and shot, and we’ve put in a lot of time on pole vault and hurdles . . . I’m in better shape than before last year’s world record.”

Thompson performed well, at least initially, in Saskatoon. But then on the second day, strong winds and torrential rain plagued the athletes. With the world record out of reach, he withdrew from the competition before the 1,500. Impressively, his score through just nine events still totaled 7,936.

For the remainder of the season, he competed only in individual events, as many as six in a meet. But in the decathlon, the defending Olympic champion went unranked in the Track and Field News annual rankings.

Though he competed in just one decathlon, 1981 for Thompson was a year of transition. With the hardline stance on amateurism by the various governing bodies continuing to soften, he took advantage of those relaxed guidelines to ease the financial constraints that had affected his training earlier in his career. And as a well-known athlete in Great Britain, Thompson’s media exposure greatly increased. He began hosting a weekly sports show on the BBC and starred in a ten-week teen-focused series called “White Light.” He appeared on a show called “Superstars” in which athletes competed in sports other than their own.

Despite his increased visibility, he began to tire of the attention he received from the British public. As he commented, “I don’t know if I enjoy the attention any less now, but I’m less tolerant of it. I’m not into being other people’s property . . . People always assume that part of you is theirs, and you’re there because of them. They’re always coming up to me when I’m training, when I’m eating, and they expect me to be really friendly about it.”

The new year also brought changes in training partners, coaches, and training locations. As long as he had been seriously involved in track and field, Daley Thompson had thrived on working out with a consistent group of individuals who were friends as well as training partners. Dave Baptiste, Snowy Brooks, Richard Slaney, and Pan Zeniou all spent time in Thompson’s inner circle. But as Thompson was climbing the ranks of athletes in the decathlon, most of these others lacked his drive and talent and over time simply faded out of the sport. Slaney was still in the United States, but Brooks, Baptiste, and others lacked adequate reasons to devote the time to the sport that Thompson did. In many cases, individuals needed to move on and make an adequate living.

In time, the only consistent training partner was Zeniou, the decathlete from Cyprus who would never approach Thompson’s status or ability. This smaller and older man was talented at such a lower level than Thompson that there was never really much competition between them. (His personal best score was over 1,000 points below Thompson’s) As he commented, “We have different goals. He wants to put the world record out of sight; I just want to be able to feel that all the work, the sacrifices throughout the years, have been worthwhile.”

But Zeniou’s presence helped make the competition feel for Thompson more relaxed, like a glorified training session. He considered his friend to be vital to the success he was experiencing, going so far as to suggest that Zeniou’s absence had played a role in his loss at the European Championships in Prague. “Yep,” he offered, “if Zeni had been there, I’d have won.” As a result, he implored Zeniou to continue training long after he was past his prime and could financially afford to do so.

Another significant transition involved coaching and a related change in his primary training location. Bruce Longden had introduced Thompson to the decathlon and had played an integral role in his development. But through 1980, the contact between coach and athlete had steadily decreased, and after the Moscow Games, they didn’t work together at all. There’s no evidence that this was an acrimonious parting but rather a more natural evolution in a top athlete’s development.

Thompson still maintained a relationship with Bob Mortimer, more a continuous friendship than a formal coaching arrangement. Increasingly, though, he worked with Andrzej Krzesinski, a former Polish vault coach. Krzesinski had coached the past two Olympic champions in the pole vault and was coaching at a sports center in the Haringey borough in Northern London. The training facilities in this center provided a world-class decathlete with virtually everything he needed. As a result, Thompson did most of his training at this location despite having to travel nearly an hour each day to get there from where he was living.

His typical daily schedule spoke to his growing independence as an athlete. He typically arose around 8:00 a.m. each morning and read for a few hours before traveling to Haringey, usually arriving by noon. He then trained with few breaks until starting the long drive home around 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. Pan Zeniou trained with Thompson most days, and together in the winter of 1981, they completed a ten-week program that Krzesinski had developed for them. The coach viewed the program as the foundation for the critical training that would be completed when Thompson and Zeniou spent a couple of months of intense work in San Diego during the coming spring.

His morning reading material was instructive about his evolution as an athlete, and it didn’t include novels, biographies, or other lighter reading. He studied periodicals like Track Technique and analyzed seminal athletics books like Track and Field Dynamics. He studied and analyzed detailed and complex studies of training strategies and event techniques. He had become a student of the sport, and his reading regimen was what would be expected of a coach rather than an athlete. As a result, after winning the gold medal in Moscow, Daley Thompson gradually became a largely self-coached athlete. Regarding his need to control his choice of competitions as well as his training, he commented, “For everything I’ve ever learned, the overriding lesson is that I have to be in control of everything, and not be told to be here, to be there.”

From all indications, Thompson’s extended training in the glorious conditions in San Diego in the winter leading up to the 1982 season had been stellar. That would in many ways be a historic year for the decathlon, and for Daley Thompson in particular. His focus was on three major competitions, the annual international meeting in Gotzis, Austria in late May, the European Championships in Athens, Greece in early September, and the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, Australia in October.

Thompson was clearly ready for a big year, but the increasingly private athlete wanted to keep that information to himself. “I don’t like people to know how my training’s going. Let them find out in competition. Let them find out in Gotzis.”

That they would.

Though there was little indication that Daley Thompson in 1982 lacked motivation, he needed a rival, someone to push him mentally and in important competitions. He found that individual in a tall and athletic West German known to some as the “German Hercules,” and who Thompson would come to call “Hollywood . . .”

At Gotzis in 1982, the track and field world witnessed the first real showdown between Daley Thompson and Jurgen Hingsen.

References

ABC Sports, 1984, “ABC Sports Profile – Daley Thompson – 1984 Olympics,” August 8, 1984, downloaded from youtube.com

Associated Press, 1980, “Briton Breaks Jenner’s Mark,” published in The New York Times, May 19, 1980

Dunaway, James, 1980, “Briton Piles Up 8,495 Points,” The New York Times, July 27, 1980

Moore, Kenny, 1984, “He’s a Perfect 10,” Sports Illustrated, July 18, 1984

Nelson, Cordner, 1986, Track’s Greatest Champions, Los Altos, California: TAFNews Press, 1986

The New York Times, 1980, “Transcript of President’s Speech on Soviet Military Intervention in Afghanistan,” January 5, 1980

Rozin, Skip, 1983, Daley Thompson – The Subject is Winning, London: Stanley Paul, 1983

Track and Field News, 1980, “Thompson Supplants Jenner,” June 1980

Track and Field News, 1980, “Kratschmer Totals 8649,” July 1980

Track and Field News, 1980, “Thompson Narrates His Record,” July 1980

Track and Field News, 1980, “Decathlon,” September 1980

Track and Field News, 1980, “Decathlon,” November 1980

Track and Field News, 1980, “Decathlon,” December 1980

Track and Field News, “World Rankings – Men’s Decathlon,”, downloaded from trackandfieldnews.com

Zarnowski, Frank, 1989, The Decathlon, Champaign, Illinois: Leisure Press