The Beijing Olympics are four months away and Italy needs a sports hero. With live ones in short supply, the Italians have decided a dead one in the tiny form of Dorando Pietri, the 5-foot-3 pastry cook who simultaneously won and lost the marathon at the 1908 London Olympics, will do nicely. Next month, a century after his famous race, a statue of Mr. Pietri is to be unveiled in Modena, his home town in northern Italy. He will be celebrated in books, festivals and on stamps too.
A news photo shows Mr. Pietri crossing the tape in first place. He is in obvious pain. He is upright but leaning back, as if about to topple. Two men, to his immediate left and right, urge him on. One is Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes writer who covered the games for London's Daily Mail newspaper. The crowd went wild, but Mr. Pietri was not declared the winner. How did that happen?
Mr. Pietri was unknown outside of Italy when he went to London to compete. The favourites for marathon victory were Johnny Hayes, an American who was not liked by British sports fans, Tom Longboat, the Canadian who had won the 1907 Boston marathon (more on him shortly) and Charles Hefferon, a South African.
Mr. Hefferon set the pace and was out front for most of the race. But he flagged about a mile from the finish and was passed not by the American or the Canadian, but by the little Italian with a mustache. No one knew who he was, but within seconds he had captured the hearts of thousands. Mr. Pietri entered the arena clearly exhausted, dehydrated and confused. He went the wrong way on the track and had to be turned around. Within a few hundred yards of the finish line he staggered and fell. A doctor lifted him to his feet. He collapsed four more times. There were moments when the crowd thought he had died. Then pandemonium broke out. Mr. Hayes had entered the stadium and would win unless Mr. Pietri could run, walk or drag himself to the finish. Instead he was more or less pushed across by sympathetic race officials. Mr. Hayes finished seconds later.
The New York Times declared the finish the “most thrilling athletic event that has occurred since that Marathon race in ancient Greece, where the victor fell at the goal and, with a wave of triumph, died.”
The American team protested, arguing Mr. Pietri's victory had been assisted. The judges agreed and the Italian was disqualified. But recognizing a crowd pleasing opportunity when she saw one, Queen Alexandra personally awarded Mr. Pietri a gilded silver cup. An instant celebrity, Irving Berlin wrote a song in his honour.
The London marathon was the peak of his running career. After the Olympics he turned professional and managed to beat Mr. Hayes twice. But he couldn't beat Mr. Longboat, the Canadian who was called “the Indian” by the press because he was from the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ont. Mr. Longboat beat him twice, the fist time in a one-on-one race in Madison Square Garden. Not long after, Mr. Pietri retired from competitive running.
Mr. Pietri's statue, to be unveiled in Modena, does not capture the essence of the beautiful loser, in my opinion. It is 8-feet tall and shows him running gallantly and powerfully, his chest bare. But Mr. Pietri was hardly the embodiment of the ideal Greek Olympian. He was plucky little chef who staggered as much as he galloped. A statue that showed his agony and determination would have been more appropriate.
