He Competes Two Days for One Golden Moment

Some guys work hardly at all for their Olympic gold medals. I mean, Ben Johnson got one (for about a day) for less than 10 seconds of running. Even the hurdlers’ agonies are over in 13 seconds.

The team sports take a bit more doing--but how strenuous can it be beating Uruguay in an early round in basketball? How hard is it to stand in right field for nine innings in baseball?

But, it always seemed to me, decathletes come from a different segment of the population, that class of people who like to do things the hard way. I mean, they’re probably the kind of guys who would get into bomb squads or put out oil well fires, who would dig tunnels under rivers, clean up after the elephants in the circus, walk high iron. They’d be the kind of people who would offer to sleep on the floor if the room was crowded. They’d probably marry the kind of women who would yell at them a lot. They wouldn’t mind if the elevator was out. They’d climb the stairs anyway.

They must enjoy pain.

Listen! A guy who puts the shot in track and field thinks he has it tough. So does the guy who pole vaults, or throws the discus or javelin, runs the mile, the 100, the 400. It takes a lot of dedication to get to be world class at any of these, to say nothing of the high jump and the long jump.

What about a guy who has to do all of the above?

The decathlon is not an event, it’s an inquisition, the athletic equivalent of getting your fingernails pulled out. It was probably invented by Torquemada. Or Himmler. The Marquis De Sade would have loved it.

It is a two-day, 10-event torture chamber designed to make the competitor feel as if he is crawling out of a train wreck or has been without food and water and confined to solitary on Devil’s Island. You come out of it in about the condition of a survivor of the Battle of Jutland. Your ears are ringing, your calves ache, you are so dehydrated you can’t go to the bathroom for days. If a doctor stumbled upon you, he’d order you wrapped in blankets and put in an ambulance.

Dave Johnson loves it. He puts up with the sore back, the swollen wrists, the burning in the lungs. He wants to get his gold medal the old-fashioned way--earn it.

Decathletes take great pride in the fact they not only can play any sport but excel in it. They make a big deal of a Bo Jackson as a two-sport man. What if he were a 10-sport man? That’s what decathletes are.

Sprinters who take the gold in the dashes get the accolade “the world’s fastest human.” The weightlifter becomes “the world’s strongest man.” The decathlete becomes “the world’s greatest athlete.”

Dave Johnson is our best decathloner in a long time, our high hope for the Barcelona Olympics.

The decathlon has a proud tradition in the U.S. Jim Thorpe was a decathlete (and a pentathlete) in 1912. He inspired the King of Sweden, no less, to blurt, “Sir, you are the world’s greatest athlete!” bestowing the label which clung to the sport.

It used to be an American event. Bob Mathias won it as a 17-year-old schoolboy in the London Olympics in ’48 and repeated four years later. Rafer Johnson won at Rome. Milt Campbell won at Melbourne, Bill Toomey at Mexico City, and Bruce Jenner founded a theatrical career when he won at Montreal in 1976. Decathletes have gone on to become movie stars (Bruce Bennett, Jenner) and football stars (Campbell, Mathias, Thorpe).

Decathletes are gamesmen who, if they stuck with one sport, probably would become world class in it. Campbell was an Olympic-speed hurdler, Rafer made the team as a long-jumper. But, decathletes are the Don Juans of sport. They’re fickle. Polygamists. They can’t stick with one. They find the others too fascinating.

Dave Johnson didn’t set out to be a decathlon man. He went out for football in high school in Montana just to be popular on campus and, when a coach, after watching him pick up a javelin and toss it like a matchstick, suggested “Why don’t you take up the decathlon?” Johnson said “What’s a decathlon?”

He found out. It was the track and field equivalent of getting tarred and feathered. It’s a sport for which the word “grueling” is inadequate. “A tennis match is grueling,” Johnson says. “A decathlon is inhuman.”

Americans won nine of the first 14 Olympic decathlons, but we haven’t won it since Jenner in ’76.

An ideal decathlon would be one in which the competitor broke the world record in each of the 10 events. Decathlon points are awarded on the basis of how close you come to an existing world mark.

Dave Johnson, who lives in the L.A. suburb of Montclair, has flirted with the world mark (Daley Thompson’s 8,647 points set at the L.A. Olympics in ‘84). He was well in the 8,500 range when the international federation changed the weight and configuration of the javelin. It was being thrown so far it was becoming a hazard for spectators, landing in the first rows of the seats. Dave thinks he could have come closer to the world mark with the old javelin. “They’ve taken 20 to 30 feet off the throw. It’s as if they added a foot to the hurdles.”

He was picking up as many as 980 points with the old javelin. He just hopes they make the equitable adjustment on the international decathlon table so that, after Barcelona, when you refer to a Johnson as one of the world’s greatest decathletes, you won’t mean only Rafer.