Walker: Beijing 2008

By James London

It's the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and Walker makes a comeback after his three-and-a half years as a recluse following his marathon victory in Athens, 2004. With some incredible track and field performances, he proves that dedication, diet and extreme physical fitness can beat the cheats who resort to performance-enhancing drugs. But will the timely release of Walker's book, which contains his lifetime's work on controlling the ageing process and prolonging human life, bring disbelief and ridicule when it is revealed that Walker is actually 200 years old?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AUK Authors
• Release date: Jun 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781661505

Book preview

1988.

Chapter 1

It was three and a half years since Walker had vanished into thin air after winning the 2004 Olympic Marathon in Athens in a world record time of 1 hour 59 mins 30 secs. When he entered the stadium, followed by Stelios Polias, the Greek Marathon champion, 80,000 Greeks who had watched every inch of the dramatic race unfold on two enormous television screens, rose to their feet emitting a deafening roar of encouragement to their champion who, overcome by the emotion of the occasion and fatigue at having run a Marathon at a pace ten minutes faster than he’d ever run before, could not respond to Walker’s accelerating burst over the final two hundred metres. He had run side by side, elbow to elbow, with the great Olympic Champion for almost the entire race, until Walker’s sub four minute final mile which had left four great Marathon runners trailing. Breaking the two hour barrier was as significant as Roger Bannister’s first four minute mile in the 1950’s.

The Greeks had hoped for a repeat of their victory at the first modern Olympiad in Athens in 1896, when a Greek shepherd called Spirodon Louis won the gold medal in front of 100,000 Greeks. Polias’ impressive Olympic performance commemorated Pheidippides, a famous Athenian runner, who in 490BC ran barefoot from the plains of Marathon, where the mountains look on Marathon and Marathon looks on the sea, to carry the good news that the Persians had been routed by the fury of the Greeks, with all speed to the City Fathers of Athens. His feet cut and bleeding, he entered the city. Rejoice, we conquer, he cried his last gasp, and dropped dead.

Walker had led the race leaders into the reconstructed Panatheniac Stadium which dated from the time of Lycurgus in 330BC. Dating from 776BC athletes performed four yearly in honour of Zeus the supreme god of Ancient Greece. During these games wars were suspended while the athletes competed in selected events which were a run, a standing long jump, the discus, javelin, and wrestling. There were other events which included chariot racing, running in armour and boxing. From 720BC they competed in the nude. The victors were crowned with wreaths of olive leaves from the sacred olive groves of Olympia.

After midnight on that unforgettable night a tearful Archer had whispered goodbye to Walker from behind the closed window of a ground floor room in the medical centre at the British Embassy in Piraeus, where he had been taken after being pronounced dead by two Greek doctors who’d examined him fifteen minutes after collapsing over the finish line at the finish of the epic Marathon race.

Archer had re-routed the ambulance from the Athens General Hospital Morgue to the British Embassy medical centre because he suspected the Greek doctors had been misled when they examined him because of Walker’s lack of pulse and a zero heart beat.

With a heart appearing not to beat, they had both pronounced him dead. Archer knew that after any great exertion, Walker’s heart seemed to stop beating, sometimes for up to twenty minutes, before it resumed his extremely slow pulse rate.

Having honoured the ancient carrier of victorious news, Walker disappeared, the most successful Olympic athlete in history. His triumphant entrance into the ancient stadium had affected him and he had been overcome with emotion and the humility of the occasion so that not once since that night, and since his victories in the events at which he had won six gold medals and set new world records had he been seen at an athletics event.

This had mystified the sportsmen and women of the athletics world who, at every championship, in preparation for the Beijing Games, had striven to emulate his performances in Athens.

His absence had led to speculation that, although he had never tested positive for performance enhancing substances, he had taken undetectable stimulants, leading some people to think that nobody would ever get near his achievements. Athletes that disappeared from public life were often those tainted by accusations and suspicion, or guilty of drug taking. Through the Telegraph sports pages Archer ensured that Walker was never considered a cheat and his untarnished reputation remained. In prize-winning author, Ed Jedburg’s magnificent book about the Olympic Games in Athens, he placed Walker at the summit of the sport. The Victor Ludorem of the Olympic Games, alongside Jesse Owens and Michael Johnson.

To Archer it seemed longer than three and a half years. After the games, he had tidied Walker’s affairs, and spent time fighting off those clamouring for news about his whereabouts.

Nobody could forget his achievements and the world records that had accompanied his gold medal-winning performances. He had come from nowhere, with clear-cut decisive victories, to win six track and field Olympic gold medals. Athletes from the nations who considered it their God given right to be world champions were unhappy. For the USA sprint squad not to be Olympic champions, in the 100 metres and the 4 x 100 metre relay was incomprehensible to them. They regarded his wins as freak performances that would never be repeated. Until Athens the US had owned the sprints. They had been the only nation to break 39 seconds in the 4 x 100m relay. How could they lose their crown to a nation without a recognised 100-metre champion?

The secret of how Walker could run so fast, jump so far, and hurl the 2kg discus further than any man on earth, was beyond the comprehension of professional athletes who had sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of their dream, of winning an Olympic gold medal. To them, a man from nowhere, who had stolen their life’s work. No-one would accept that a man they could not meet and learn from had the right to take away the glittering prizes they had given their lives for. In Athens they had applauded him, now after he had disappeared, they despised him. They had been let down. They were angry at his refusal to share his secrets with the brotherhood of athletes, who wanted their champion to lead them too, to the Promised Land, and share what he had discovered that had so far eluded them. He had shown them the Holy Grail, but not the pathway to it, or the opportunity to share what he had with them.

With the Beijing games just a few months away, some of these athletes were still searching for the key to what Walker had shown them was possible.

In the UK, with the spectre of Athens now unused, empty, decaying Olympic stadiums already an embarrassment, the excitement caused by London’s successful bid for the 2012 games had been replaced by concern at the mounting cost of staging the games, already three times over budget with five years still to go. In track and field it was too early to see if any 2012 gold medallists would emerge. Five years in the life of an athlete was a whole career, and if in 2007 they were at their beginning of their careers they might not be around in 2012.

Jack Galloway, the Telegraph sports Editor and Archer’s boss at the time of Athens, had retired. His job had gone to Archer’s new boss, Alan Bolton, Galloway’s assistant for twenty years. Archer had been promoted to special feature sports editor, and aside from these duties he had taken over Jack’s responsibility for managing Walker’s life, including acting as a trustee for his estate. In the fifty years Jack had managed Walker, he had not been out of touch with him at any time for longer than six weeks, either personal contact, letter, telegraph, and in recent years by mobile telephone. He had provided for his wants in whichever part of the world Walker had required his assistance. In return for his devotion Walker had been a dear friend to Jack for fifty years. Advising, educating, guiding him to success in his chosen career, he had rewarded him well from his considerable wealth. This in its benefit, and some might say burden, Archer had willingly inherited.

In trying to rescue World Athletics from the plague of drug taking he had exposed himself to scrutiny, which he didn’t want, neither could he handle, so he opted out of the society he had become a part of for one year.

He had called Archer from South America a few weeks before saying that he would return to Yorkshire in 2008 once the pre-Olympic athletics season was under way, when any expectation that he might re-appear would have faded, as also would any attempt to discover his whereabouts.

When he called in late February from Yorkshire announcing that he was back, Archer detected changes in him. It made him uncomfortable and reminded him that beneath a formidable exterior Walker also sometimes demonstrate the frailties of an old man.

Jack had warned him of this. You must recognise them immediately and make allowances, he had said.

So the following morning he set off to Yorkshire to see his friend for the first time since the Athens Olympics.

For a year before the start of the 2004 games in Athens, he had been Walker’s constant companion until those traumatic final hours when Walker had vanished.

In the years since, he had married Chelsea, who had been Walker’s personal assistant, secretary, and confidant during his stay at the Villa Odysseus in the eight-month long build up to the opening of the Athens games in August 2004.

Although Walker had disappeared from sight he had spoken by telephone to him regularly, and corresponded frequently, but he had not met him. So after such a long time he had many reasons for visiting him at his forest home in a remote part of Yorkshire.

Questions were no longer being asked by the press, television, media and the International Athletics community, who had ratified his world records as to his whereabouts. At UK Athletics the head of the Olympic selection committee, Cartwright, assumed he had retired and ceased to consider him for the under-achieving British Athletes team.

Archer’s principal concern was to see to the well being of his friend. His physical and mental health was of the utmost importance. He also wanted to seek his counsel about developments in the Chinese athletic squad.

The Chinese Olympic team preparations for the games at their Athletics training camps, under the Chinese Communist Party banner, were ruthless, and savage. Sport was a political vehicle in which China had to be seen to be as all-conquering. Where their methods did not prevail, the coaches were prepared to introduce performance enhancing substances as part of their training programs.

A Beijing News Agency staffed by journalists who had worked in America for international newspapers were unhappy about Communist Party press censorship, published a report about Olympic training camps for athletes in the interior lands of central China, which said athletes were subjected to training programmes where deaths had taken place. The coaches said the deaths had occurred during training in extreme weather conditions and while regretting these fatalities during the build-up vehemently denied the use of banned substances by the athletes and added that if it produced a team of gold medallists, it would be a triumph for China.

For months the Athletics world had been focussed on the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Athletes beaten in Athens were determined to claim their place in Olympic history, particularly those who’d been denied a gold medal and the enormous financial rewards that go with it, by Walker’s incredible victories. Another group determined to win were the Chinese, whose coaches employed methods to produce world class athletes that were not acceptable. They had worked for years to produce champions who could set world records in 2008. Their athletes had been recruited as children in the very early 1990’s selected on physical criteria at age between six and ten years immediately it was known that Beijing would succeed in its Olympic bid to host the 2008 Games. By 2004, too young to compete in Athens, they were enrolled in an elite training program where the training methods were brutal and in some instances an affront to human dignity. Although their methods might be regarded as morally unacceptable they were not illegal, unless it involved the use of performance enhancing substances which many people thought it did.

***

As Archer ran towards Walker’s hidden home in the forest, he recognised tracks between the trees which, in high summer, were knee high with long yellow grass and dark green stinging nettles. Marks high up on some of the principal trees and rocks, carved by Galloway forty years before, were still visible. The journey through the dense forest took him more than an hour. When he arrived at this oasis in the forest, Walker was waiting for him, unchanged in appearance since 2004 and looking fit and no older. Although they’d been in frequent telephone contact, the absence of physical contact made this meeting extremely satisfying and he was demonstrably excited to see Archer. It re-awakened memories of excitement and sense of achievement they’d experienced together in Athens.

I have tea, he said, knowing Archer’s preference.

The compound that surrounded the timber house was overgrown with four years of brambles and undergrowth. Branches had extended over the roof, providing a dense layer of camouflage. The Long Jump pit and run-up he had created to train for the Athens games had vanished. Soon he’d clear it, and in a week it would be back to what it had been.

You are staying, so that I can tell you all about my travels, and you tell me what’s happened since Athens.

It had been a long time since we said goodbye in the middle of that night at the Embassy in Athens.

Archer detected a change in him.

Why did you come back? he asked him as they walked along the bank of the Stayling River before the spring evening closed in, and black darkness surrounded everything.

I had to, something has changed my life.

So I’ve come back home to my point of reference, to focus on where it takes me.

Can I help?

You already have, by being here, he said.

Walker, always the gossip, wanted to know everything that had happened to Archer at the Telegraph, and about his friend Jack since his retirement. When a period of silence descended upon them, he said:

I was happy with how it ended in Athens.

In the spirit of Jesse Owens, I had nothing else to say.

Here is a copy of Ed’s book about the games, said Archer, smiling. It’s signed and he has written a message for you.

I told him that you had survived, and he held my hands and said ‘I know’.

He’d like to have given it to you himself.

When we meet he can give me another copy, he said.

What did you think of it?

He thinks it’s better than any book he has so far written.

I think it’s a triumph. He wants you to come back, speak to the athletes, and show them the way forward.

Your records are their targets, and you are their inspiration. You competing in 2008 would inspire them further.

It’s too late, he said, and I can’t go back.

You would not be going back, said Archer. To those men, who followed your glorious moments with admiration, you have not been away. Invisible yes, but you were also invisible before Athens.

After a swim in his rockpool and a bowl of hot vegetable stew, Walker began the story of his life since the night he had vanished from the glare of publicity and media scrutiny after the men’s marathon race in Athens in 2004.

After leaving the British Embassy, I walked to the centre of Athens, with a haversack of personal items and wearing a baseball hat I was unrecognisable and inconspicuous. I boarded the 5.00 a.m. bus that travelled west out of Athens towards the ancient city of Corinth. There I took a room in a second rate hotel. The Hotel Dionysus was small, from which I was able to come and go unnoticed. I stayed there and recovered from the tension of two weeks of track and field and my effort in winning the Marathon. To have stayed in Athens after those achievements would have demanded a mental and spiritual effort which, after the immediate pain of the marathon, I was incapable of. In the noisy, dirty industrial town of Corinth, I rediscovered my soul, and after two weeks the games were history. Then I set off to the port of Patral by bus to link up with an overnight ferry to Brindisi in the southern part of Italy.

On the ferry, and in Brindisi in the holiday season, there were people everywhere, and I became part of the vast crowd. It was there I decided to travel overland to Paris to see Alain Pavier, the former French Marathon champion, and to take his counsel.

Using local transport, buses and trains, I made it in three weeks. By then all interest in the games had subsided and I became an anonymous part of Pavier’s circle.

The journey helped me acclimatise to life without the expectation of people and competition.

Being with people everyday at the Villa Odysseus had drained me. I needed to be alone and what I am and so I headed to France slowly to see my friend, who I discovered was sick with cancer. Nevertheless my arrival after my Marathon victory was an opportunity for him to celebrate with a new Marathon champion. For him, a victory against the great Emil Zatopek had been the summit of his athletic career.

I went to seek his counsel, and as I was in unfamiliar territory, some direction. I know that as an old man you’re always in touch with the end of life, and so he was. He reinforced those qualities of beneficent and humility and charity and above all one duty to one’s fellows. \Hence I stayed for three years working at the Pavier drug and alcohol rehabilitation hospital. Working with punch drunk boxers with too many dead brain cells. Athletes with depression from failure and using performance enhancing substances, and cyclists who, having been found out, had spiralled into a pit of self disgust. I saw champions who had reached the heights sink to the depths - with the help of Pavier most recovered to lead better lives. Once I had recovered from my experience in Athens and the adulation for the track and field victories, I regained the sense of who I am - and became immersed in the day to day activities at the hospital. I was relied upon by persons who needed me, and then I couldn’t leave. Looking back these few months since Alain died, and then I did leave I see as one of the most satisfying periods of my life. I could not leave until he died but as it turned out he did not leave me alone. By then I had the place running to a high professional standard and I left this privately funded hospital that he had founded was on a sound financial footing. I stayed until August 2007 until his staff had adjusted to his loss and a successor appointed.

He never regarded his cancer as an illness and patients at his clinic never saw him as sick. ‘It’s just a condition of my age’ he said. I promised him, once he had passed into that world he believed was waiting to receive him, that I would travel to Argentina with some of his personal effects and deliver them to a lady called Maria Cavalier-Orlando. They had met thirty years before, and regularly since, she had helped him with his work. He said she had inspired him to live into his eighties, and to establish and develop the Pavier Institution which had steered many great sportsmen back from the desolation of depression and despair that comes, to some, once they hear the final whistle, or the final salutation and pitches them into drink, gambling, drugs or prison, with prison records for crimes against the society that had idolised them. Giving them a regained sense of self worth and purpose, that had vanished with their sporting excellence; many became leaders again outside the arenas they had graced so majestically inside.

When I called her and asked if I could courier the package, she said ‘no’ and insisted I go there.

For three years he’s spoken of nothing else but you - so I must meet you - you were with him at the end - so I need to know things.

She lived on forty thousand acres of farmland thirty kilometres outside of Puerto Santa Cruz in Patagonia, in Southern Argentina.

"When I arrived in late summer, it was unusually cold, windy and quite bleak, even for a Southern Hemisphere summer. I had planned a one-night stay, deliver the package, extend my condolences, talk about Alain’s final days, and leave.

That is not what happened.

I reached Patagonia on a flight from London Heathrow to Buenos Aires, where I stayed for two days. I had not visited this mysterious Latin city. In a world of its own, its population live and die oblivious of any existence beyond the city boundaries.

Buenos Aires was founded in 1580 by Juan de Garay, and is called the Paris of the South Americas, named after the Patron Saint of Sailors or the Santa Maria of the good winds. It stands on the banks of a muddy, shallow estuary Rio de la Plata its shoreline maintained navigable by continuous dredging. In the centre of this historic city is its richly furnished presidential palace called the Casa Rosada, once the home of Evita. Statues of General Belgrano, and Columbus, adorn the centre of the city. I walked the city and obeying a tourist tradition, took breakfast at the Café Tortoni. Then strolled along the Avenido de Mayo to the city centre, lunched at the Alvear Palace, visited the Basilica del Santisimo, and watched Argentinian Tango at the Club del Vino. It was my introduction to romantic Argentina before continuing my journey to the southlands of Argentina during which I dispelled some of the anxiety about meeting Alain’s lady. Buenos Aires is an exciting city, and unlike our northern European idea of a South American city. It is highly sophisticated, savage and raw and teaming and dangerous, with the best, the worst, the richest and the poorest. It was full of excitement. It took a four-hour flight with Acrolineas Argentinas to Rio Gallegos, and a taxi to Jalepo Junction, before I boarded a train hauled by coal stoked steam engine for the final 80Km journey to La Cojita. It reminded me that once all trains were here for more than a century, the rolling stock had chugged their way hour after hour through sheep country and barren scrub stopping at open shelters in desolate places.

As the train slowed alongside the long platform at La Cojita the Punta Arenas railway station with its single station building, from a distance I saw a lady dressed in black waiting on the platform. It was late afternoon and cooling. She wore leather boots with two-inch heels and brown leather riding breeches. Her woolly, linen top had come from a European fashion house. Wearing a Gaucho’s felt hat with a loose chin strap, her black hair, with some visible grey, framed a perfectly formed head and high cheek boned face. As I alighted, a wide tooth smile lit her tanned face, and she moved towards me with an elegant hip-swaying finishing school walk, whilst at the same time removing her driving gloves.

How lovely to see you, she said quietly, holding both arms to embrace and to kiss on both cheeks.

She was tall, slim and elegant, and spoke perfect English. She was a South American beauty, with purple eyes like Elizabeth Taylor, the only other woman I had seen with purple eyes. She had a presence and for a physically perfect female specimen, aged 53, showed only minute signs of deterioration.

You will like Argentina, she said as she led him to an American off-road version of a 4 x 4 Land Rover.

You will be my guest at my house on the far side of the valley in the shelter of those hills that you see in front of you, she said, pointing to a range of blue-grey mountains in the near distance. They are 30Km away, our farm is 25Km.

She drove out through the narrow streets of the town of Punta Arenas, lined either side with bungalows and small corrugated iron roofed houses, some with gables, where the pitch of the roofs varied. Most had small gardens growing hardy flowers, lupins and shrubs that survive the cold and wet of winter.

"This was a big town before they cut through the