The Front Runner

married. An hour here, an hour there. He'd call me up from the camp and we'd talk affectionate nothings over the phone. "Mr. Brown," he'd say, "I want to make sure you're not feeling up any cowboys out there." "Oh," I'd say, "I can't stand the smell of horses." But we comforted ourselves with the purpose of it all.
    I passed the empty hours talking gay politics with John and Vince, running, looking at TV, reading a little. We had brought along Billy's typewriter and I even did a little personal writing, putting down some of my thoughts and observations about what I'd lived through. Other athletes came and went, visiting. We always had somebody sitting around with a beer, telling us about his injuries and his hopes.
    With Vince I took long runs on the mountain roads. He was laying off until winter, just wanted to do some easy road work, was going to the Games with us. Vince and I talked a lot as we strode along in the silence. Thos6 weeks were when I really got to know him for the first time. Vince had always been a little guarded with me, following my rebuff his first week at Prescott, and possibly being careful not to provoke Billy's jealousy.

At the bottom of my mind I always had that question of whether there had ever been anything between Billy and Vince, and I had never inquired in detail into their years together in college. Why should it matter, anyway? I asked myself. But I recognized a deep fear of finding out something about Billy that didn't fit into my picture of him.
    For his part, Billy was mildly disturbed at the
    time I was spending with Vince, but I reassured him.
    The rootless days passed. Every day Billy came, seeking that peace that kept him moving. Our bodies were cool and dry in the mountain air. In my old age, I was at last being permitted to make the discovery that lovemaking gets better and better with time, if it's with someone you care for.
    His body seemed to be changing before my eyes, harder, more fined down, the veins more pronounced. My imagination was an X-ray—it could see into him, see all the physiological changes that training forces. In the high altitude, his blood was spawning millions of new red corpuscles—he and the others would go to Montreal with that extra oxygen-carrying capacity. He was doing the second workout now, and the added distance was making his capillaries branch and spread still more finely. Every ounce of weight lost was a better power-weight ratio. The Vitamin E he was taking was building heart strength for those last minutes of the race when he would be committing near-suicide to stay ahead. His lungs were growing their last cubic millimeters of oxygen capacity. To feed this system, he had a huge blood volume, with a far greater proportion of plasma than the unconditioned person.
    He was in another of his breakthrough periods, and every day he was faster. The team traveled to two meets for some last sharpening, and Billy broke 27:40 in the 10,000 for the first time, recording a 27:38.2. Over in Europe, Armas Sepponan was equally hot—he came very close to breaking the world mark in the 10,000, which meant that he was still six seconds ahead of Billy. Everybody was conceding that, barring an act of God, the 10,000 and the 5,000 would be a balls-out duel between the two of them. The riskiest kind of front-running against the most explosive kind of kicking, with each of them having to calculate their pace down to the last split second. I was thirsting to see it myself.
    But some Americans were less than eager to see this duel.
    After Billy made the team and the Time story appeared, the anti-gay activist groups who had opposed
    the Supreme Court decision started making noises again. They showed their political shrewdness by putting heavy pressure on legislators—the U.S. Olympic movement was financed largely by congressional appropriation. They demanded that Billy be removed from the team. One group was composed mostly of teachers and educators who had the horrors about homosexuality taking over the schools. Another called itself MAMA (Mothers Active for a Moral America). None of them seemed to have faced the fact that gays were not sexual omnivores who went around seducing everybody in sight.
    In reply, John Sive and Billy let it be known that they would instantly file a discrimination lawsuit if he was dropped from the team. The USOC, caught in the middle, just agonized. Lindquist kept complaining that Billy was a source of disruption, to the point where