The Front Runner

Helsinki, I wasn't really thinking of Billy winning.
    Still, I was nervous as I watched the men line up at the start. The big stadium hushed a little. The Europeans really idolize distance runners, in a way that Americans are only now learning to. For them, this was a moment.
    The gun fired and they rolled off the line.
    The pace dragged a little. Nobody wanted to lead. The kickers were noodling in the rear. Sepponan was running easily in last place. Billy, unusual for him, was running in third place. He told me later that he had felt suddenly intimidated by the thought of all those big guns behind him. Then he thought, What the heck, what was he worried about, and he was worried somebody would elbow him.
    So he moved to the front, and picked up the pace sharply. I was relieved to see him do that. The rest had their choice: hang back or go with him. So they all picked up, and three others stayed close to the front with him.
    Billy was running easily, beautifully, his shaggy curls lifting, his glasses glinting as the sun caught them. He might have been a perfect machine, except that he was so real, flesh and blood turned to an ultrasonic pitch of rhythm and control. His spiked shoes seemed scarcely to strike the track. He kept pulling the
    other front-runners farther ahead, sticking to the pace he'd struck.
    With a half-mile left to go, Billy suddenly picked up the "pace sharply again. This was his long drive, running flat out to the finish, the tactic that was supposed to burn off the kickers. The other front-runners immediately lost contact with him, and he sped on alone. The crowd started to scream, because now Sepponan, Felts and Gil were moving up fast, hauling Billy down.
    With one lap to go, Sepponan and Felts were coming up for the kill. The crowd was screaming. They were mostly Finns, so they wanted to see Sepponan kill off the presumptuous young American that nobody had heard of.
    Billy didn't turn his head to look, but he heard them coming. And then I saw a glimpse of what he was capable of. He accelerated too, ghosting along with those great soft strides, his face impassive.
    The crowd was going wild. As the four men rounded the last turn, we all knew that three, possibly four of them would go under 28. They had left the pack laboring far behind. They tore out of the turn in a tight little bunch, Billy still ahead, Sepponan at his shoulder, Felts and Gil behind.
    I knew in my heart that he didn't have the stamina yet to hold them off.
    Almost at the moment I thought it, Billy seemed to falter a little. Sepponan burst past him. The four were sprinting down the straight to the tape. In a last heartbreaking effort, Billy stayed even with Felts until just ten yards from the tape. Then he cracked. He had nothing left. He crossed the line staggering in third place, just barely shading out Gil.
    The Finns were going wild, and Armas Sepponan was taking a victory lap. Nobody paid much attention to Billy as he circled shakily back.
    I went out to him. He bent over, his hair hanging, his hands braced on his knees. Then, as always when he'd really extended himself, his streaming sides contracted with the dry heaves. I threw a towel over his shoulders, wiped his face with a wet rag. Then I showed
    him my stopwatch. He smiled faintly, nodded—he'd already known—but didn't speak.
    The times were already going up in lights on the big scoreboard. SEPPONAN 27:47. FELTS 27:49.05. SIVE 27:50.2. GIL 27:50.7.
    The two other American runners in the race, Bob Dellinger and Mike Stella, placed ninth and fifteenth with a 28:15 and a 28:25.3. They had the AAU's blessing.
    Sepponan finished his victory lap, came up to Billy and put his hand on Billy's shoulders. Billy, recovered now, palmed him back.
    Sepponan was a plain skinny man of 27 with close-cut blond hair and high Asiatic cheekbones. "You make me work very hard," he said in accented English.
    "Yeah, you made me work hard too," said Billy.
    That night, Billy, Sepponan, Felts and a few other European runners sat down together, and talked. They all had beers. Billy had milk. They managed to talk, in their limited common languages, of running, and laughed a lot. Sepponan was straight as a yardstick, but his friendship and respect for Billy endured all the uproar that came later. "He has sisu," he said bluntly, using the Finnish word for guts and pride.
    John Sive and I let the runners have their fun, and we went off somewhere else to sit and talk.
    "You know," I said, "I