Why don't you know Richard Quennell? By Hopi Sen

This article was kindly offered to us for use on our site by the author, Hopi Sen. See the original version at: Hopi Sen's Blog.

In a very slightly different world, Richard Quennell would have become a megastar this weekend.

Today’s newspapers would have his beaming  face peering out of the front pages as an affirmation of human willpower. Within weeks, his face would be staring at you from billboards the size of football pitches. His rumoured endorsement deal with Gillette would make David Beckham’s agent gasp. 

But we don’t live in that world.

Unless you’re a member of  the British ultra running fraternity, you’ll never have heard of Richard Quennell.  I certainly hadn’t. But here’s what he did. Between 12 noon on Saturday and 12 noon on Sunday, he ran 145.9 miles, or 234.8 kilometres, to win the 2009 Sri Chinmoy 24 hour race.  It was his first attempt at the event.

Simple numbers  don’t begin to let you grasp the scale of that achievement.

In 24 hours, Richard Quennell ran the London marathon, then ran back to the start, then ran back to the finish, then ran back to the start again before running back to the finish one more time, completing five marathons in total.

Then he did the Great North Run.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Many runners, like me, enjoy 10 Kilometre  races. 10k is enough of a distance to feel like an achievement, but not so far that you have to disrupt your life to train.  For thousands of recreational runners, our sense of achievement is based on whether we break the hour mark for the 10 K.  Richard Quennell ran a 10k on the hour, every hour, for twenty four hours*

Or how about this? The world’s biggest ultramaration is the Comrades, in South Africa. This is a 55 mile, 90 kilometre course. Runners get 12 hours to complete the course. Richard did the distance twice, then threw in a two oceans ultra marathon in the time he had left.

I’m trying to explain the scale of what Richard did because for six hours on a freezing Saturday night, I was his lap counter.  This involved noting the time Richard completed each lap, working out his splits, and making sure he knew I hadn’t missed him completing a lap, usually by waving as he went past.

It was a freezing cold night. I was wearing a hat, gloves, shirt, jumper, coat and being heated by a gas fire, I was also being supplied with regular cups of tea.  Richard was wearing a light t shirt and shorts, no gloves, no hat, no leggings. I feared he must hate me, having to use precious energy to wave at me every time he went past, every two minutes seeing me sitting there, all wrapped up warm.

Supresssing any homicidal urges he may have felt,  Richard completed some 150 laps of the track in those six hours. It must have been the most energy sapping period of the race: a sustained struggle with the natural desire for sleep and the freezing cold.  Despite this, Richard ran like a metronome, completing 2.25 lap after 2.25 lap after 2.25 lap.

At 6.30am, Dawn broke and after eighteen hours of running, Richard sped up, completing eight minute miles. I went home to read sports pages full of Jenson Button,  Beth Tweddle and a beach ball.

I’m no athlete. I can slowly jog around a marathon course, and I can now actively enjoy running (also slowly) a half marathon.  So I’ve no doubt that to be a top level performer at any sport takes talent, dedication and unremitting hard work.

Yet I can’t help but wonder why some sport stars recieve huge rewards, and others little or none.

Ultra distance events haven’t always been obscure.  Six day running events were regularly held at a packed Madison Square Garden in the 1870s and events like the Astley Belt attracted crowds of 70,000 in London.  The sport was so big that a race victory could command the entire front page of the New York Times. The rewards were as big as the crowds. The winner of the 1879 Astley belt took home $25,000, perhaps $400,000 in today’s money. (However, as the link points out, such calculations are flawed and hazardous. How much would a treatment for TB have been worth in 1880?)

So why are names like Charles Rowell or Don Ritchie unknown today, and why is an athlete like Richard Quennell competing in front of an audience of tens, not tens of thousands?

Part of the answer lies with television and radio coverage, which focusses attention on sports that can be covered within the framework of a single broadcast. A horse race, or a baseball match, even a marathon can be dealt with in the course of  an afternoon or evening. A 24hour race cannot.

While a newspaper can (as the New York times did) summarise a days racing in a single story, building tension and suspense until the next deadline, a radio or TV programme struggles to sustain interest over a day of slow, uneventful progress.

Even the Tour de France or Le Mans are hard to cover as broadcast sports journalism, though recently, the speed of editing makes it possible to create professional hour long summaries of each days events.

Another answer might lie in the rise in the attention given to Amateur Athletics. The great competitors of the 1870s were professionals, and with the emergence of the Olympic games, their combination of showmanship and commercialism seemed to earn disapproval. The purity of the amateur was the height of sporting achievement. It was half a century before the ideal of athletics as a pastime, not a profession, died.

Yet another factor might be the fact that as communications technology improved, the attention of the public became directed to fewer, bigger events, which  created their own momentum. Certainly, reading old newspapers, you get the sense that it was simpler to gather attention to spectacles – that in an era without radio or television a live sporting or cultural event found it far easier to draw crowds.

A few decades later, and you would hear your sporting news by radio, and there would be less desire to see a “fringe sport” even if your team was playing in a distant city.

All of which makes me wonder if their isn’t some new hope for sports like ultra-marathonning. While crowds in the tens of thousands are unlikely, an online community of fans and athletes could be created for such a sport, attracting enough of a sliver of global audience attention and sponsorships to justify a tour and a world championship contest.

Perhaps a million people compete in marathon length events each year. Ultra marathonners could become celebrities to that audience.  The model would be something like Beach Volleyball, or skating, poker tournament coverage or even competitive eating. You would not need huge audiences, merely a sense of specatacle and occassion and  a committed fanbase willing to pay a little to watch each event online.

Since athletes wouldn’t have high expectations for income (The prize for winning the Tooting 24 hour race was a mighty £0) you could begin small, trying to build an audience and sponsorship slowly, and charging only a token amount for dedicated coverage of each event. What’s more, since timing technolgy is advancing, you could hope to create events for hundreds of competitors, giving the chance for more marathoners to compete alongside the elite.

I rather like the idea that one of the side effects of new technology could be the revival of old sporting challenges and dramas. Nobody who spent any time watching the effort a 24 hour runner puts in would begrudge them a little more support, encouragement or money.

Who knows, perhaps one day a Skins sponsored Richard Quennell will compete for the Astley belt before an audience of tens of thousands across the world?

At least that would mean he had some warmer kit. The shorts and shorts he wore this weekend looked pretty cold.

 

* To be strict about it, Richard actually finished 6177 metres short of completing 24 10K races in 24 hours. Loser.