The Front Runner

for an official's mistake. Vince was scrounging madly for two quarters at trackside, and barely got to his marks on time.
    In late July a more serious matter came up. I wanted to take all three of them to Europe for a month, to get the international experience they needed so badly. We planned to go to a number of big meets, including Helsinki. But when we applied to the AAU for the routine travel permits, the AAU would not give them to us.
    It may seem strange that in this day and age of total freedom, when Americans travel freely everywhere, even to Red China, an amateur athlete does not enjoy quite the same freedom of travel. But the matter of who goes on European tours is a big point of politics with the AAU. They reserve the right to arrange for travel, whether or not it is in accord with the athlete's wishes and needs, and they reserve the right to give or deny permission to go. They insist that foreign meet promoters contact them and not the individual athletes that the promoters might like.
    Recently athletes have been quarreling bitterly with the AAU over travel, especially in view of AAU abuses. Say a Belgian promoter contacts AAU executive director Mel Steinbock and says, "Could I have miler John Doe in my meet?" and the executive director might reply cavalierly, "Sorry, buddy, the meet schedule here conflicts—we need John Doe." John Doe is furious because (1) the meet schedule doesn't conflict and he would have been free to go, and (2) he feels that he should have been consulted about this important decision.
    It reached the point where foreign promoters were as pissed at the AAU as American runners were, and finally the AAU was starting to be more careful.
    That summer, the AAU organized a European tour for a number of athletes as part of the Olympic develop-
    ment program. Some of the athletes' expenses would be paid by the AAU, some by the European promoters. Naturally, though their status clearly warranted it, Billy, Vince and Jacques were not invited on the tour.
    I had known that they wouldn't be. So well in advance I had surreptitiously contacted the European promoters myself, saying we planned to come abroad and asking if they were interested. Quite a few were. Knowing the AAU's strange ways, they kept me surreptitiously informed while they made the formal request to the AAU.
    The AAU was panicked and embarrassed at the thought of their three rumored homosexuals touring Europe. But they didn't say the word "homosexual" out loud once. To the promoters they said, "Oh, we're awfully sorry, we want those three boys for the U.S.Soviet invitational in Los Angeles in mid-August."
    When the foreign promoters relayed this information to us, we told Steinbock that the boys did not plan to go to Los Angeles, and that they damn well wanted their travel permits. Steinbock got furious and said he wasn't giving them any permits.
    Then I got furious and called Steinbock up. "You've got a choice," I said. "You can issue these permits and the whole thing will blow over. Or you can deny them, and we'll go anyway."
    "If you do that, I'll suspend all three boys," said Steinbock crisply.
    "Then you're going to buy yourself a lot of trouble," I said. "I'll get a court injuction preventing you from punishing them pending a hearing. Do you want a hearing? What's the big deal? They don't plan to run at the Soviet meet, so why not let them go? What have you got against them?"
    We packed our bags, and John Sive prepared to get the injunction. But at the last minute, following file AAU's new policy of caution, Steinbock backed down and issued the permits.
    Billy Sive arrived in Europe unknown to track fans there. But he wasn't an unknown long. In Helsinki,
    right on schedule, he broke twenty-eight in the 10,000 meter, which was already then—and would be—his best race. By doing so he joined the select club of fifteen world-class runners who had run under twenty-eight in this event, and was now in fifth place on the world list. But he had a long way to go before he could beat the world-record holders like Lasse Viren and Armas Sepponan, who held the current record of 27:36.11 in the 10,000.
    Sepponan, in fact, was sure to be Billy's biggest worry in Montreal—if he got to Montreal at all. Sepponan had a crushing kick, and blew the front-runners right off the track. Two other big kickers were in that Helsinki race—Australia's Jim Felts and Spain's Roberto Gil—and both of them had run well under 28. So, that day in