Michel Jazy has died, publishes with infinite sadness L'Equipe, his newspaper, and in Spain his contemporaries, the gods of the 60s, the first prodigious decade of national athletics, strongly feel the vertigo of the passage of time, so fast.
Jazy, nine-time world record holder – of the mile (3m 53.6s), of the two miles, of the 3,000m and the 2,000m, but never of the 1,500m: he could not beat Herb Elliott, the Australian who defeated him magnificently in the final of the distance queen in Rome 60-, Olympic runner-up and two-time European champion at a time when there were no World Cups, died in the hospital in Dax, in the Landes, at the age of 87.
“All those close to us are falling,” Jorge González Amo, a 1,500m middle distance runner in México 68, regretfully declares, despite the fact that he is 10 years younger than the idolized French athlete. “He was my model, my idol, an example,” says González Amo, who remembers the afternoon in May 1963 when he, a young man hungry for knowledge and athletics, was a spectator at the inauguration, with Franco in the stands, of the courts of the Real Madrid Sports City next to the La Paz hospital. “It was a 1,000m world record attempt. José Luis Martínez, who had trained with him in Paris, played the hare. He stayed at 2m 19.1s, two seconds away from the record.”
The Bilbao pole vaulter Ignacio Sola also reminds him, Olympic record holder of a few minutes, 5.20 meters, also in Mexico 68, who just yesterday turned 80 years old – “I had a lot of relationship with him, since we worked for many years in the marketing department of Adidas. He and his wife were in the Paris office, where many of the meetings were held. He told me that Julio Iglesias was his favorite singer and I, when we went to have meetings, brought him records, but he had them all and bought them as they came out. A great and loving person. And Javier Álvarez Salgado adds: “I remember him in the 5,000 in Tokyo 64, in an agonizing finale for a gold medal that was within his reach and in the last meters he lost everything,” says the Galician distance runner, 5,000 meters finalist in Munich 72, and his very vivid memory of a few minutes that in France are still remembered as one of the great tragedies of its sporting history.
“Those were the times when an athletics event had the power to even delay the start of the sacrosanct eight o'clock news program on television,” recalls journalist Marc Ventouillac in the obituary published in L'Equipe. “France lived sharing two sporting idols, Jazy and the jazymania who accompanied him, and Jacques Anquetil, the god of the Tour de France.” Jazy, like Jean Stablinski, world champion cyclist in '62, was the grandson and son of Polish miners who emigrated to the north of France after the first great war. As a teenager he went to live in Paris, where his great athletic talent moved Marcel Hansenne, editor-in-chief of L'Equipe and former world record holder in the 1,000m, who manages to get Jacques Goddet, the newspaper's director, to offer him a position as a typographer in the workshops with a schedule adjusted to his training and competition needs. She left soccer, which she liked more than anything, and there were still days when she preferred to train by playing soccer and not running. She became an almost invincible athlete.
In Melbourne 56, his first Olympic Games, he was eliminated in the 1,500m series, but he returned happily to France. He was a 20-year-old boy and had enjoyed and learned sharing a room with Alain Mimoun, winner of the Olympic marathon. In Rome 60 he won silver in the 1,500m after Elliott. His third Games, the last, were Tokyo 64.
Peter Snell, the New Zealand midfield phenom, and Jazy played hide-and-seek before the Games. They didn't want to find themselves in any race, they were so afraid. Jazy finally chose to run the 5,000m. Snell ran, and won both distances, the 800m and the 1,500m. “If Jazy had been there he wouldn't have run the 1,500m,” he said later. To prepare, Jazy concentrated the summer in Volodalen, the Swedish town, forests and meadows, which years later the best Spaniards, Mariano Haro and González Amo, would frequent to prepare. One day he sprained his ankle. The injury dragged her almost to the Tokyo Games, to which he arrived without experience in 5,000m events. All of France is waiting for him and he, in his own words, runs “like an idiot.” Under the rain that turns the Tokyo ash track into mud. He attacks with the sound of the bell. “With 200m left I felt so strong that I would have bet a fortune on my gold medal,” he said later. In the final stretch he is overtaken by the American Robert Schul, the German Harald Norpoth and another American, William Dellinger. He finishes fourth.
Only a year later was Jazy able to erase the disappointment of that Japanese autumn day. Helsinki. June 30, 1965. Jazy is a boiling volcano. Untouchable. In three weeks of June he has broken four world records. To close the month in which everything was possible, a unique challenge awaits him in the Finnish capital. It is a 5,000m baptized in all media as the race of the century. His rivals, the phenomenal Ron Clarke and Kip Keino. Jazy hesitated. Ron Clarke, the prodigious Australian, has just broken the world record for the distance (13m 25s) and then, generously, he acted as a hare in his two-mile record and in the 3,000m step. The press says that after Tokyo he is finished and this convinces him. If he quits, he fears he will be called a coward. He accepts the challenge and wins. He attacks from afar, like in Tokyo, but resists Keino, who three years later will amaze the world by winning the 1,500m in Mexico 68, and Clarke, who raises his arm in recognition of his defeat. “That victory,” wrote Jazy, who retired the following year, “was the consequence of hard work and proof from nine that the defeat in Tokyo was an accident.”
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