The Front Runner

rights, and thought Prescott could make a practical contribution that would be in keeping with the college's aim of "more human people."
    He also took Jacques onto the faculty as a graduate assistant in the environmental activist course.
    All three boys were delighted with this development, and so was I. It solved the problem of a base for their training until the Olympic Trials. Billy, of course, stayed on campus to be near me, and the other two stayed on to start working up their course material. It was making their gayness more public, but the rumors in the track world were now so insistent that we knew by next fall sometime their cover would be blown.
    That summer I finally began to see Billy's true potential as a runner. For the first time I began to think that a medal in Montreal was not just a wet dream.
    After the Drake Relays, his improvement had stopped, as his overstrained system slowly, secretly healed itself. I wasn't too worried—it was the familiar plateau in an athlete's development. By now I had him on the program I was sure was right for him. I'd run it through a computer and tinkered with it endlessly, studying the results. He was now weaned down to a mere 100 miles a week, and a single daily workout. But it was all quality and strength work.
    Every day he ran thirty to eighty minutes in the woods, burning through it at a 5 or 5:15 mile pace. All the hills made it a beautiful brutal strength exercise. Then he went back to the track for speed laps. He would do, say ten quarters or twenty to twenty-five 110s at seventy-five percent effort. Before a major meet, I would let him add some second daily workouts of five miles run at nearly race pace. He loved that second workout—he behaved like a child who'd been given a popsicle.
    In July he suddenly started improving again. His three- and six-mile times started dropping so rapidly that I knew he would break twenty-eight minutes in the 10,000 meter any time now, and go 13:35 in the 5,000.
    We kept strictly to our sparse meeting schedule, and did not parade our relationship on campus, because summer school was going on, and a good number of
    students and faculty were there. Nevertheless, we were met with a growing number of hostile remarks when we traveled to meets that summer.
    I found it more and more unbelievable that spectators and officials could deride those three handsome manly dignified young men. I found it particularly curious that they could deride Billy, when he looked more and more like the only serious threat to European domination in the 5,000 and 10,000 that America had so far had. But the deriders wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted medals hung only on clean-cut heterosexuals.
    Thus, a paunchy track nut sitting in the first row, with his well-thumbed program and his cigar, would yell at Billy, "Hey, loverboy, whose girlfriend are you?"
    If Billy came in second, some wit would be sure to yell, "Nice gays never win."
    Vince and Billy were not disturbed by the remarks. Vince might throw the guy a bird or yell back something smart-ass. Billy simply ignored them. But Jacques shrank from them. "I don't know how long I can take this," he said. His performances that summer really dropped off. He was so nervous that his legs were dead by the time he got to the starting line.
    We got to one meet in July and they told us the boys couldn't compete. They were very sorry. They said that our entries hadn't been received before the closing date. They were polite, but firm. They didn't say anything about the boys being gay. They just said they couldn't run.
    I had anticipated this kind of trick. I pulled out a signed certified-mail return receipt with the meet secretary's signature on it. I always sent the boys' entries by certified mail now. Since I'd sent them in weeks before, the meet people had forgotten somebody had signed. They had to let the three run.
    At another meet, Vince was barred from the track at the last moment. The officials insisted that his new AAU registration was not valid. Vince fumed and cursed, and got out his AAU card. The officials insisted that the matter would have to be looked into, and meantime he couldn't compete. They practically shoved
    him off the track. We had the matter investigated immediately, and of course his card was okay.
    They picked on Vince a lot because they disliked his impudence. At still another meet they wouldn't let him run until he'd paid an extra fifty cents of entry fee to make up