Written by Richard Askwith
Reviewed by Coach Adolfo Salgueiro 

While the running heroes of the latest generations may be Usain Bolt, Ryan Hall or Eliud Kipchoge, to their grandparents, most likely, there was no greater running hero than Czechoslovakian Emil Zatopek. If you know anything beyond just his name, is that he is the only person in Olympic history to win the 5,000, 10,000 and Marathon, and he did it all in the same games: Helsinki 1952.

“Today We Die a Little” is a comprehensive biography published in 2016 by author, Richard Askwith, who has also published a few other sports books, most of them on running. A self-confessed Zatopek admirer, he delves into a quest to find as much first-hand information on his subject so he can figure out how to separate the man from the myth.  During the narrative he explains his process and his sources, so it becomes easier to establish what and how much goes beyond mythology.

What I liked from this book is that it establishes Emil as a real person, beyond the accolades and the world records. It spends plenty of time on his family background and the political situation that surrounded his childhood, which eventually becomes an inescapable part of his personal history. His first steps into foot racing happen as a teenager and little by little, defeat by defeat, he starts figuring out his talent until he becomes the Emil Zatopek we know. It is then that the Czechoslovakian communist regime figures out they have a propaganda tool at their disposal and begin to exploit it in every possible way.

Zatopek was a household name before Helsinki 1952. These Olympics were just the summit of his career. After doubling in the 5 and 10 thousand, he decided on a whim to give the marathon a shot, which he had never run. Not only did he win, but he also established his third Olympic Record of the games.

Emil is well known for the fierceness of his training. The book spends a good portion digging into his method and the reason behind it, which was more art than science based. He would run full-out 400-meter repeats relentlessly, almost every day. It is said that he would run up to 50 of them on a single session. Emil was big on recovery and took walks or easy runs around the woods, many times with his wife, Olympic champion Dana Zatopkova. But the constant hammering of his body and the frequency of his racing was too much, even for the most gifted of athletes, so his career fizzled out way sooner than if he had managed it with contemporary methods of rest and recovery.

As stated earlier, Zatopek’s life went beyond the track, and given his notoriety and propaganda value for the communist regime in his country, he became an army officer with way more privileges than the norm. Even though at times he was outspoken and fought for what he thought right; his position was never undisputed. He took all the advantages and privileges he could from the regime, until he no longer was useful to them.

Emil had to work an impossible balance act to please both his admirers and his government. There were the ones that wanted him to be the face of the oppressive regime and the ones who needed his celebrity to speak against it. Such an act was so difficult to pull off that he paid for it dearly. At the author well puts it: “It is not as if Emil went un-judged in his lifetime, either: by the Communist who thought he had betrayed them and by the anti-Communists who thought he had betrayed them”.

In his sundown years, he was still an Olympic hero and was invited to many events and sports meets as a goodwill ambassador. At home he was ostracized and hidden from public view, but overseas the government still displayed him as a national treasure, while surrounding him with chaperones that made sure he did not say anything inappropriate while his wife stayed home as a hostage, making sure he didn’t defect.

I really enjoyed this book. Very well researched, very well written and a story very well told. Beyond Emil Zatopek’s life, this story takes you to a period in the history of our planet that most of us in the western world, 70 o 80 years later, may have already forgotten. This is a good read which I recommend to any runner interested in learning about one of the biggest glories of our sport.