This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Is it better to be a great winner of races or a winner of great races? Lasse Virén, who turns 75 this July, didn’t have to choose. He was both.

In the Munich Olympics of 1972, Virén won both the 5,000m and 10,000m, the latter in a world record despite having fallen just before halfway. Over the next four years on the athletics circuit, however, he was more of an absence than a presence, let alone the kind of presence befitting a double Olympic champion.

Enigmatic and taciturn, he mostly preferred to stay at home in the small Finnish town of Myrskylä, running vast distances through nearby pine forests and sometimes carving out his own trails with shovel and axe. “When you run in the woods,” he said, “you have to change rhythm to avoid roots, the same way that you have to be constantly alert in competitions.”

This was the Finnish way: run between the trees, swim in the lakes, ski across vast swathes of snow. Sisu, the Finns call it: the ability to endure and overcome any pain and challenge through mental fortitude, a word redolent of forbidding landscapes and dark winters. “Mind is everything,” said Paavo Nurmi, Virén’s idol and the greatest distance runner in history. “Muscle? Pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.”

By the time the 1976 Montreal Games came round, few knew what to make of Virén. Was he a busted flush of a one-hit wonder or simply someone for whom only the Olympics counted, a man motivated by the pinnacle or nothing at all? An emphatic victory in the 10,000m gave the world its answer.

It is perhaps only a little fanciful to imagine that at this juncture the ancient gods convened on Mount Olympus itself. Three golds in three finals is all very well, they might have said, and if this fellow Virén wins again that will make a double double, something no man has done before: but to be absolutely sure of his place in the pantheon, we’ll need to test him to the very edge of his limits. Let’s put him in a race for the ages. Let’s make him run through fire.

It seemed borderline impossible, but that wasn’t a word he understood

Half a dozen men were in contention to win the 5,000m. Some were tough endurance runners, others fast milers coming up a distance. This left Virén in a quandary. He would need to be too quick for the hard men, but also too hard for the quick men. How to square the circle? It seemed borderline impossible, but “impossible” wasn’t a word he understood. “Lasse Virén is a rather special person,” said the great Kiwi coach Arthur Lydiard. “He doesn’t care what other people think about him. He decides what he wants to do, and what he can do. And then he does it.”

With just under three laps left, Virén takes the lead. He suddenly shifts gear, a burst of speed which has those behind him scrambling to keep up: but within a few strides he has throttled back to race pace, and they settle down again. It’s classic Virén, physical and psychological all at once: a revving of the engine to check he’s ready, and a warning to the others that this is his turf.

Now we see how he’s squaring the circle. He slowly but remorselessly tightens the ratchet, a tactic which requires total commitment and unbreakable self-belief: each 100m a fraction quicker than the one before, an Olympic final as boiling frog theory.

Runners are shelled out of the back one by one until at the bell there are only six left: Dick Quax and Rod Dixon of New Zealand, Britain’s Brendan Foster and Ian Stewart, Klaus-Peter Hildenbrand of West Germany, and of course Virén himself. “The Olympic champion leads,” says David Coleman on BBC commentary, giving proper weight to the definite article.

Into the back straight for the final time. Stewart is first to fade, drifting slowly backwards. Dixon, tall and rangy, comes up onto Virén’s shoulder. Virén glances, grimaces, digs in. 200 to go and it’s the bearded Hildenbrand who tries, hair flowing out behind him. Still Virén doesn’t yield.

Foster’s head starts to roll and he’s gone as Quax, menacing in his all-black strip, comes wide and furious round the crown of the final bend. Wave after wave of attacks, all foundering on the granite wall of Virén’s resistance.

Into the home straight. Virén has a stride on Quax, who has a stride on Dixon, who has a stride on Hildenbrand. Four men dredging the depths of their souls, but each unable to close even a fraction on the man in front, a perfect stasis played out at high speed. “Virén defends the title wonderfully well!” exclaims Coleman. “And they are not going to beat him.”

In the final few metres Dixon ties up horribly, strides chopped and head pointing skywards, allowing Hildenbrand to dive full length and claim bronze. It’s somehow apt that one of the vanquished should be prostrate on the ground behind Virén, even though a man as modest as he would neither have expected nor welcomed it: for he had not only achieved something unprecedented, but done it in a way which will stir the blood for as long as men run against each other. For one day at least, there were 13 gods rather than 12 on Mount Olympus.