coach d wrote:
[quote]Jon Ulm wrote:
full disclosure: I am old enough to remember the 1972 marathon on television. I believe ABC only showed highlights and not the entire race. I remember the imposter and the announcer saying, "You won, Frank, you won."
Not quite. I remember getting up very early that morning because Jim McKay said an American had a good chance to win. It started at something like 5 or 6 AM, but as I recall they showed the whole thing. Another thing that people who didn't see it might not know about it was that Erich Segal, the author of "Love Story" was the color commentator for the TV broadcast. Segal had been one of Frank's professors at Yale.
And when the imposter came out Erich and Jim McKay absolutely went crazy.
“That’s not Frank, it’s an imposter, get that guy off the track! It’s a fraud, Frank!”
I did watch it on television. They did show the entire race. Shorter broke away early (I believe it was around 15K) and was never challenged. I remember the imposter sprinting into the stadium and Erich Segal just went nuts screaming for the imposter to get off the track and for Frank not to pay attention. I think Segal also said something about this is the kind of thing you might have seen years ago at other marathons, but not in the Olympics (I could be wrong.) I also remember Shorter saying that that he was so pissed off at the fumes the vehicle in front of him on the course was leaving that he just spat on it. Don't know where I read that. In August of 1972 I was in London on vacation. The British press had put a tremendous amount of pressure on Ron Hill to win the Gold Medal. Hill was a chemist by trade, and had coated his uniform with a substance to reflect the suns rays. Didn't help.