Michel Jazy has died, it is with infinite sadness that he publishes his newspaper L'Équipe, and in Spain his contemporaries, the gods of the 60s, the first amazing decade of national athletics, feel the dizziness of the passage of time so quickly.
Jazy, nine-time world record holder – over the mile (3:53.6 minutes), over two miles, over 3,000 m and 2,000 m, but never over 1,500 m: he could not beat Herb Elliott, the Australian who he excelled in 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 hospital in Dax in the Landes at the age of 87.
“We all fall,” declares ruefully Jorge González Amo, a 1,500m middle-distance runner in México 68, even though he is ten years younger than the idolized French athlete. “He was my role model, my idol, a role model,” says González Amo, who remembers the afternoon in May 1963 when he, a young man with a thirst for knowledge and a hunger for sport, was a spectator of the inauguration with Franco in the stands Real Madrid sports city next to the La Paz hospital. “It was a 1,000m world record attempt. The hare was played by José Luis Martínez, who had trained with him in Paris. He stayed at 2 minutes and 19.1 seconds, two seconds off the record.”
The pole vaulter Ignacio Sola from Bilbao, Olympic record holder of a few minutes, 5.20 meters, also in Mexico 68, who just turned 80 yesterday, reminds him: “I had a close relationship with him since we were together for many years worked together in the marketing department at Adidas. He and his wife were in the Paris office, where many of the meetings took place. He told me that Julio Iglesias was his favorite singer and when we went to meetings I would bring 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 meters in Tokyo 64, in an agonizing final for a gold medal that was within reach, and in the last meters he lost everything,” says the Galician Distance runner, 5,000 meter finalist in Munich 72, and his very vivid memory of a few minutes that are still remembered in France as one of the great tragedies of its sporting history.
“Those were the times when an athletics event could even delay the start of the sacred eight o'clock news program on television,” recalls journalist Marc Ventouillac in the obituary published in L'Équipe. “France lived with two sporting idols: Jazy and the Jazymania that accompanied him, and Jacques Anquetil, the god of the Tour de France.” Jazy, like Jean Stablinski, world cycling champion in 1962, was the grandson and son of Polish miners who emigrated to the north of France after the first great war. As a teenager he moved to Paris, where his great sporting talent moved Marcel Hansenne, editor-in-chief of L'Équipe and former world record holder in the 1,000-meter run, who managed to persuade Jacques Goddet, the newspaper's director, to offer him one Hire as a typographer. In the workshops with a schedule adapted to your training and competition needs. He gave up football, which he loved above all else, and there were still days when he preferred football practice to running. He became a nearly invincible athlete.
At Melbourne 56, his first Olympics, he was eliminated in the 1,500 meters but returned happily to France. He was a 20-year-old boy and had enjoyed and learned sharing a room with Alain Mimoun, the Olympic marathon champion. In Rome 60 he won silver in the 1,500 m after Elliott. His third and final Games were those of Tokyo 64.
Jazy, after his last race, a 5,000m race at Colombes Stadium, in 1966. Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Peter Snell, the New Zealand midfield phenom, and Jazy played hide-and-seek before games. They didn't want to find themselves in a race, they were so scared. Jazy ultimately decided on the 5,000 meter run. Snell ran and won both distances, the 800 m and the 1,500 m. “If Jazy had been there, I wouldn't have run the 1,500 m,” he later said. To prepare, Jazy concentrated the summer on Volodalen, the Swedish town with its forests and meadows, which years later the best Spaniards Mariano Haro and González Amo often visited to prepare. One day he sprained his ankle. The injury took her almost all the way to the Tokyo Games, where she arrived with no experience in the 5,000 m run. The whole of France is waiting for him and he is running, as he himself says, “like an idiot”. Under the rain that turns Tokyo's cinder track into mud. Attack with the sound of the bell. “After 200 meters I felt so strong that I would have bet a fortune on my gold medal,” he later said. On the home straight he is overtaken by the American Robert Schul, the German Harald Norpoth and another American, William Dellinger. Comes fourth.
Just a year later, Jazy managed to erase the disappointment of that Japanese autumn day. Helsinki. June 30, 1965. Jazy is a boiling volcano. Inviolable. In three weeks of June he broke four world records. At the end of the month in which anything was possible, a unique challenge awaits you in the Finnish capital. It is a 5,000 meter run, which is referred to in all media as the run of the century. His rivals, the phenomenal Ron Clarke and Kip Keino. Jazy hesitated. Ron Clarke, the extraordinary Australian, has just broken the world record for the distance (13:25 minutes), and then he generously behaved like a rabbit in his two-mile record and in the 3,000-meter pace. The press says he's ready for Tokyo and that convinces him. If he resigns, he fears he will be called a coward. Accept the challenge and win. He attacks from afar, as he did in Tokyo, but defies Keino, who three years later would astonish the world with his 1,500m victory in Mexico 68, and Clarke, who raises his arm in recognition of his defeat. “This victory,” wrote Jazy, who retired the following year, “was the result of hard work and Nine's proof that the defeat in Tokyo was an accident.”
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