Smeal: A Column by Len Johnson

By Len Johnson.

At first glance, a 2:52 marathon for 45^th place almost half-an-hour behind the winner doesn’t seem much to write home about.

Claude Smeal’s run in the 1952 Olympics though had already been “written home about.” In fact, it was the very fact that a trial run of his had been publicised that led to him being a last-minute addition to the Australian Olympic team. The small matter of finishing the Olympic marathon almost 30 minutes behind the legendary Emil Zatopek scarcely mattered.

Why? Because Claud Smeal was a serving Australian army officer with the United Nations forces in the Korean War. A good, but not outstanding marathon runner at home _ he had finished fourth in the 1951 Australian championships in Hobart, and ‘won’ his New South Wales championship by finishing a distant second to Australia’s other Olympic representative, Bob Prentice of Victoria _ Smeal was noted for keeping his running going in difficult and unusual circumstances.

When he was selected in the Australian team, Smeal’s wife Cathy, told the Sydney Daily Telegraph she thought he was “crazy” when he started: “He began running home from Victoria Barracks and would turn up for meals at unexpected times.”

Quite: but that was as nothing to his training in Korea, which consisted of running behind his own lines in areas where snipers and landmines were not unknown.

Not surprisingly, Smeal’s running came to the attention of a couple of war correspondents. Noel Monks was an Australian journalist who had worked in London and the USA and, at this stage, was writing for London’s Daily Mail. Norman Macswan filed for Australian Associated Press and Reuters Newsagency.

More importantly, Monks had the ear of Sir Frank Packer, the Telegraph’s owner, and a fervent backer of the Korean War effort (the paper was running an appeal for woollen caps for the serving troops at the time).

So when Monks and Macswan organised/observed/timed a marathon trial for Smeal, the story got good play. It was written with an eye to representations that were already being made on Smeal’s behalf to get him added to the team and to expedite any special leave required to get him to Helsinki.

On 25 June 1952, the Telegraph ran a front-page story headlined: “Olympic drama: Korea Man May Go To The Games.”

Describing Smeal’s 2:44:05 ‘trial’ in glowing terms _ “he ran over rough country and wore ill-fitting, makeshift shoes” _ the opening paragraph of the story anticipated his selection.

“An Australian soldier may go direct from the front line in Korea to the Olympic Games in Helsinki,” it read.

No less than the Director-General of Recruiting, one Lt-General Sir Horace Robertson said on the impact of a Smeal selection: “It would be a tremendous boost to the troops in Korea to know that one of their comrades had gone straight from the battlefield to the Olympic Games.”

Who were the Australian Olympic Federation to stand in the way? Two days later, a page three Telegraph story confirmed Smeal’s selection. AOF secretary Edgar Tanner, possibly looking to deflect any criticism of this unprecedented decision, said the AOF believed “Smeal had improved vastly” and his presence in Helsinki would help Prentice.

It’s hard to believe active service would lead to improved form, but one month before the Olympics, Claude Smeal was added to the team and a few days’ later joined his teammates in London. No ordinary story, but Captain Claude Smeal was no ordinary runner either.

There is an amazing sidebar to the Smeal story which takes us in just a few steps to famed author _ and notable war correspondent _ Ernest Hemingway. Noel Monks married another journalist named Mary Welsh in London in 1938. Towards the end of the war, Welsh entered a relationship with Hemingway. Eventually both became free to marry and she became Mary Hemingway, the author’s widow after his suicide in 1961.

Harry Gordon wrote about the Smeal case in his official Australian Olympic history and I included it in The Landy Era as an example of cold war politics around the Helsinki Games.

I then related an anecdote about the 1978 Fukuoka marathon when Chris Wardlaw and I nicknamed the ‘third’ Soviet runner _ the other two were European championship gold and silver medallists Leonid Moseyev and Nikolay Penzin _ ‘the KGB agent’. Not because we thought he was KGB, but because this stocky, thickset fellow did not look much like a runner.

In the race, our ‘KGB man’ ran 11^th in 2:13. Now, in another coincidence, I have chanced upon his story. While trawling the Running Times website in search of something else, I came across this article (http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=15252) on the friendship with Bill Rodgers which developed out of that 1978 race.

Just like Claude Smeal, there was more to the Yuri Laptev story than appeared to be the case at first sight.

Len Johnson was The Melbourne Age athletics writer for over 20 years, covering five Olympics, 10 world championships and five Commonwealth Games. He is the author of The Landy Era, From Nowhere to the Top of the World, and a former national class distance runner (2.19.32 marathon) who trained with Chris Wardlaw and Robert de Castella.