THE FRONTRUNNER, by Brad Fawley. I rarely read track & field fiction, knowing that usually there will be a lack of authenticity and inaccuracies that will spoil my reading pleasure. I had hopes for The Frontrunner, despite the trite plot of clean American heroic distance runner vs. evil Russian dopers, in this case the Pushkin twins. Yes, the Pushkin twins.
Fawley can write, and it all goes along smoothly until it goes stunningly off the rails. Our hero, Russ Clayton, decides he must, like Zátopek in 1956, go for an Olympic triple despite not having run a race in two or three years. But under the tutelage of a former Olympic silver medalist (he was edged for gold by the current coach, and doper in chief, of the Pushkin twins), Clayton quickly becomes a world beater.
Despite not having raced in a couple of years, he is asked by his former coach at Oregon to rabbit in the Pre Classic and of course he doesn’t step off the track but beats the best 1500m runners in the world, setting an American Record, and continuing another lap or more, setting a 2000 record in that same race.
Does that sound a little farfetched? Yes, it does. His Cerutty-like coach convinces him to go for the 1500-5000-10,000-marathon quadruple in the upcoming Olympics, as if the triple weren’t ridiculous enough. After winning the first three races handily in the Games, he’s narrowly edged in the marathon by Sergei Pushkin, brother Mischka staggering home in 3rd.
The medics fail to revive Mischka (who has taken a new drug ordered by the coach) and Sergei makes a speech on the victory stand, blaming the coach for his brother’s demise and confessing to drug use over the years. The coach grabs the microphone and claims innocence, but the investigators disqualify Sergei and award a fourth gold to Russ. This is all laughable. If they allowed gold medal winners, and coaches, to make speeches on the victory stand, we spectators would never have gotten home!
There’s so much more wrong with these final chapters that I wish he had let a T&FN reader look them over and set him straight before publication. OK, no more track & field fiction for me!
COACH OF CHAMPIONS: D.L. Holmes and the Making of Detroit’s Track Stars, by Keith Wunderlich and David L. Holmes, Jr. When I told co-author…
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