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There was a clue in the medallion that the Hong Kong Marathon organisers had struck for this year’s race, which took place last Sunday. The smart bronze -plated lozenge, celebrating 60 years since the foundation of the local athletics association, bore the legend Year of the Rabbit. That is the current year on the Chinese calendar, which has just begun, celebrated by the annual Spring Festival.
But given that rabbit is the popular term for a pacemaker in a marathon, or indeed any running event, the irony was that the organisers did not employ any rabbits to help their elites to a better time. The race was won in 2.16.00, by Nelson Kiprotich of Kenya, who speculated afterwards that, “a pacemaker might have drawn us to 2.12, or even 2.10″.
I have waxed vicious on the subject of pacemakers in the past, and how they can spoil competition, when they are only used to pull one individual towards a world record. Since these attempts inevitably fail, the process becomes a bore, sine the essence of athletics is competition. But I concede that if rabbits are used to set up a good pace for a mob of runners, in order that they all pursue faster times, there are benefits for the event itself.
We need no better proof of that than the Berlin Marathon, whose organisers will admit that, with a much smaller budget, the event is very much a minor player in the Marathon Majors, the organisation which groups the top city marathons in the world, the others being New York, London, Boston and Chicago.
Berlin’s latter day success in becoming one of the biggest races in the world numerically, with its 40,000+ contestants every year owes much to its flat course and judicious engagement of pacemakers in the last decade or so; all of which has resulted in six world records in Berlin since 1998. That has garnered much publicity, drawing runners from far and wide seeking a fast time; and the other members of the Marathon Majors’ club, who want the world record course on their team. In other words, fast times equal vastly more publicity.
Like Berlin 15 years ago, Hong Kong is very much on the periphery of big-city marathon celebrity. But as part of the second or third big wave of world wide interest in fun-running in general and marathons in particular (and the spectacular rise in leisure time pursuits throughout the Far East), it bows to few other events when it comes to race numbers. There were no fewer than 65,000 contestants on the streets of the former British colony last Sunday.
Admittedly, only 10,000 were in the marathon, while London, New York et al have their 40,000 plus fields all running the full marathon. But maybe the 37,000 Hongkongese who ran the 10k are more sensible (the rest ran the half-marathon), given the thousands elsewhere who really should not be attempting to run 42.195k before they have even walked it; because that’s what they end up doing. Suffice to say, a rabbit or two might not go amiss at the sharp end next year.
Incidentally, more than a few rabbits have ended up winning marathons in the past; which has caused huge excitement if not amusement, except maybe to the pursuers who expected the pacemakers to drop out, and leave the winnings to them.
But that’s not the only laughs which pacemakers have given spectators.
Peter Churney was a journeyman miler in the mid-1980s on the embryo professional track and field circuit. But Churney ensured that his antics, if not his name would be remembered for longer than the four minutes that he normally took to run a mile.
Engaged as the pacemaker in a middle distance race in Madison Square Garden, Churney went out onto the track pre-race, produced a bunch of carrots, complete with long green stalks (”I had to go to a street market to find them with stalks,” he said afterwards), from inside his track suit, and went around the track throwing them into the hugely amused crowd.
But a pacemaker tale from the early 1990s takes some beating. I was doing some TV commentary in the early days of Eurosport which broadcasts in several languages. One night for an indoor meeting in Europe, which we were covering from the studio in Paris, the Dutch commentator hadn’t turned up, and one of the motor racing commentators was drafted in. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll just listen in to the English commentary, and simply translate”.
Everything seemed to go OK, but when I went back to the studios a few days later, for another meet, the producer was shaking his head over the substitute. “You’ll never guess,” he said, barely suppressing his laughter. “That motor-racing guy last week, when you started talking about the pacemaker in the 3000 metres, he went quiet for a while, and then blurted out, ‘isn’t it amazing, that this guy can run so fast, when he’s wearing a heart-pacemaker?’”
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