The legend of Lovelock / by Norman Harris.

Jack Lovelock was a legend in his lifetime. At Timaru Boys' High School and at the University of Otago he won his early athletic honours; the Rhodes scholarship that took him to Oxford in 1931 set his feet flying on the track that was to lead him to White City, to the 1932 Olympics at Los Angeles, to Turin, Paris, Amsterdam, Princeton, Stockholm - and, at the glorious end, to Berlin, to win New Zeland's first Olympic gold medal for track events. In the anxious 1930's there were great runners - England's Jerery Cornes and Sydney Wooderson; America's Bonthron and Cunningham; Ny of Sweden, Beccali of Italy, Goix of France. Lovelock met them all, won and lost against them, repeatedly, till at the Berlin Stadium he beat them all... It was a life of struggle. Struggle to perfect his tactics and control - by the study of films, by boxing, swiming and marathon running; struggle to reconcile his medical profession with his athletic career; struggle against the pressure of the sporting journalists, who wanted him to break a record every time he ran. Norman Harris, author of Lap of Honour, tells the story. From his own experience as an athlete and as star atletics correspondent for the New Zealand Herald and the New Zealand Press Association, and from Lovelock's own self-revealing diaries and private papers, he has built up the story with uncanny insight. His description, in Chapter 26 of this book, of Lovelock's last great race at the Berlin Olympics builds up almost terrifying tension. His description of the last, tragic minutes of Lovelock's life give the book a moving ending.