Free Blood by Lawrence Hill Page A

through the TV screen and give Paula Findlay a hug. I thought her courageous to complete the race. I believe that it takes as much courage to suffer and finish last as it does to vanquish all your competitors and run away with the gold medal. I am not an elite athlete and have never been one, but I could certainly identify with finishing last in a running race — something that I had experienced many times as a teenage middle-distance runner.
    I began to dream, at the age of eleven, of becoming a champion runner. By the time I joined a track club at the age of twelve, I had a plan in place. The year was 1969. One year earlier, American 200-metre sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos had raised their fists to make the black power salute as they stood on the podium with their gold and bronze medals at the Mexico City Olympics. They were expelled from the Games and vilified back in the United States, but I loved them for their daring chutzpah and for their fearlessness about expressing black pride. I had no thoughts about imitating their protests, but certainly wanted to achieve the same degree of success and fame. The blueprint was clear. By the 1984 Olympics, by which time I would be twenty-seven, I expected to win the gold medal in the Olympic 5,000-metre race. I would hang behind the race leaders for the first 3,000 metres, surging to break their will (and empty their lungs) until the 4,500-metre mark. At which point I would accelerate again, steadily pulling away from my last rival over the final 150 metres. I would cross the finish line 20 metres ahead of the next runner.
    This grandiose dream was all to please my father, although I didn’t understand it at the time. A hard-working, domineering, charismatic, brook-no-dissent-at-home African-American immigrant to Canada, my father had little interest in relaxation, except when it came to turning on the “boob tube,” as he called it, to watch westerns and sports. While he whooped and hollered at the athletes on the TV screen, I studied him. Dad had three sporting passions, all left over from the near-religious worship of sport that had marked his own upbringing in the United States: boxing, football, and track and field. In our household, two athletes in particular became my father’s obsessions: the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, also known as the Brown Bomber, and the track and field star Jesse Owens. Both sprang into international prominence as a rebuttal to the notion of Aryan superiority in Nazi Germany, Louis by trouncing the boxer Max Schmeling in 1938, and Owens by winning four track and field gold medals in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
    I decided that the most effective way to secure my father’s everlasting admiration was to become the most successful runner in Canadian history. By the age of thirteen, I was training daily and keeping a detailed logbook of my workouts. By fourteen, I often trained twice daily, getting up to run five or ten kilometres before school and doing intervals on the track in the afternoon or evening. I undertook my first very long runs by the age of fifteen, twice running the entire thirty-two-mile Miles for Millions — a fundraiser for charities that was massively popular in Toronto in the 1970s. Thousands of Torontonians hit the streets once a year to walk the thirty-two-mile route. I chose to run it. The second time I ran it, I believe I was one of the first participants to finish. But I am not entirely sure how many people finished ahead of me. It was meant to be a walkathon, not a race, and the walkers were spread out along the streets of Toronto, many hours behind me. I arrived at City Hall so early that nobody was there to greet me. Thousands of people who had the good sense to walk the route crossed the finish line over the next twelve hours — long after I had taken the bus home, had a bath, bandaged my blisters, eaten a bowl of ice cream, and gone to bed.
    After Miles for Millions, I continued to dream of