Emil Zátopek, the man who ran for everyone

In September 1978, Emil Zátopek was in Prague for the European Athletics Championships. He preferred to follow the events on his television rather than face the pack of journalists. In a secluded corner of the stadium, however, Yves Jeannotat—editor of the magazine *Spiridon*—managed to secure an exclusive meeting with him. The resulting interview is one of the most valuable testimonies ever published about the man and his method. It forms the heart of *Spiridon* issue number 40, which features Zátopek on the cover.

The man who sowed confusion

Zátopek speaks about himself with disarming lucidity. Two major training schools claim his legacy: Gerschler’s scientific interval training on one side, and van Aaken’s pure endurance on the other. He laughs at this:

"They said I was the father of Gerschler's interval training, and that van Aaken, too, had been inspired by my way of running slowly. One might think I trained quite poorly, since one man began to scientifically break down what I did by instinct, increasing the speed of the segments and imposing the stopwatch and the track, while the other extended the basic rhythm of my sessions to infinity."

In reality, Zátopek always did both—slow sets and very fast sets—without labels or doctrine. His method was too personal to be generalized. He himself admitted: no one ever truly understood it.

Forty times 400 meters

What Zátopek actually did is enough to make one pale: at his peak, a typical session looked like this—5×200m + 40×400m + 5×200m, recovering not by stopping, but by continuing to run slowly between repetitions. He fled the track and its stopwatches:

"I very quickly fled the track and its gibes to train in the forest."

He would set his 200m and 400m markers with stones, by feel. "By guess-timating," he told Jeannotat with a smile. This detail says it all: one of the greatest runners in history did not need a stopwatch to become a legend.

The Soviet spy and the lesson of Kuts

The most revealing anecdote about his personality occurred during a joint session with Vladimir Kuts, his Soviet rival. The head coach of Soviet athletics, Komenkov, witnessed the scene. He filmed Zátopek in secret and measured his distances with a stopwatch. Then he told him:

"Emil, you have helped us a lot. But you see, Kuts, by training half as much as you, has far surpassed your 5000m record. It is not just about quantity; it is also about quality."

Zátopek took the blow. And confided his realization to Jeannotat:

"It was a revelation for me: on one side there was me—enormous quantity, very low quality—and on the other, Chataway and then Kuts: excellent quality. Today, I recognize that quality is much more important than quantity."

Rare are the champions capable of such honesty regarding their own mistakes.

Nurmi, the idol: "athletics was still an art"

In Helsinki in 1952, Zátopek and his wife Dana visited the grave of Paavo Nurmi. A photo of this moment appears in *Spiridon* No. 40 (photo by Kari Sinkkonen). Zátopek confided:

"Nurmi was an idol to me, an artist of the cinder track. But in Nurmi's day, athletics was still an art; today, it is more of a science."

This sentence, spoken in 1978, seems more relevant than ever.

What *Spiridon* had understood

Yves Jeannotat followed Zátopek through several issues of the magazine (Nos. 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, and 38) before this No. 40. Not to celebrate a list of achievements—three gold medals in Helsinki 1952, world records in the 5000m, 10,000m, and beyond—but to understand a man who ran by instinct, against the system, without a stopwatch or a doctrine.

That is exactly the spirit *Spiridon* had championed since its launch in 1972: running as an act that is free, human, and irreducible to an equation.

Emil Zátopek died on November 22, 2000. His stones in the forest lasted longer than many laboratories.