Author(s): James McNeish

NZ Fiction

Biography of Jack Lovelock - Gold Medal winner 1936 Olympic Games. "One cannot travel far in the mountains of Olympic conquest without encountering Lovelock. With some exceptions the sportsmen is notoriously short-lived and it is not often that an athlete who is remembered for only one race continues to dominate a landscape after the passing of half a century. Fifty years after Lovelock's victory in the 1500 metres at the 1936 Olympic Games a mystique remains; an aura surrounding a small wraith-like figure in black continues to stir the imagination of people who have no other interest in sport." A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a successful doctor, and the runner who has been called the first modern athlete, Jack Lovelock broke the world record to take the gold medal in the 1500 metres event at the Berlin Olympic games in 1936. Lovelock's unexpected victory, against the 'greatest field of milers ever assembled', has all the hallmarks of a great discovery. He treated his body as a human laboratory. Yet a mystery remains. In 1949 at the age of 39, Jack Lovelock was killed when he fell beneath a train in new York. The riddle of his death, following the strange circumstances of a life masked by silences and disguise, becomes the key to McNeish's quest for the 'real' Lovelock - a man who, in the author's words, ' covered his traces as adroitly as he ran.' Based on research in five countries, Lovelock, nominated for the 1986 Booker Prize, is a rare and exciting book.