Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (44 page)

Medawar took control of the NIMR at a time when Pugh’s long-standing problems with Edholm were coming to a head. Pugh had been so resentful of Edholm muscling in on his Channel-swimming studies in the mid-1950s that he had given up the cold-water studies altogether. Edholm then lost interest too. Four years passed before another physiologist, William R. Keatinge, grasped the baton and took the subject forward.
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After the success of the Silver Hut, Pugh found it more difficult than ever to accept that Edholm deserved any authority over him. And after Sir Edmund Hillary’s attempt to take the credit for the Silver Hut science, he was no longer prepared to brush off such slights and suppress his resentment as he had in the past. The resentment rose to the surface and he became extremely touchy.

While researching my father’s life, I met seven physiologists who worked alongside Pugh in the 1950s and ’60s.
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Several of them told me that Pugh did not regard Edholm as a worthy boss: “I don’t think Griff thought very much of Edholm,” one commented. “Edholm was not the serious scientist that Griff was . . . Griff objected to being overseen . . . by Edholm, whom he thought was inferior—and he was inferior, no question about it.”

Edholm was the same age as Pugh, so there was no chance of Pugh ever succeeding him. The only avenues open to him were to leave, or to break away and form his own separate unit within the MRC. The latter, however, could only be brought off with Edholm’s full support, and with a great deal of politicking and schmoozing of the right people.

Pugh was at a highly productive stage in his career. His work on hypothermia and altitude had been widely acclaimed. His advice was much sought after by many influential organizations. For years he had plowed his own furrow, getting work independently of Edholm. Deeply frustrated that his professional status did not, in his view, reflect his academic achievements, he felt—rightly or wrongly—that Edholm was always there at his shoulder, waiting to move in and take credit for his work.

At the time of the Four Inns Walk, Edholm and several colleagues were also working on hypothermia on land, and Pugh became exceedingly secretive about what he was doing. When he went on field trips, he wouldn’t tell Edholm where he was going. He refused to submit his expenses to Edholm, and wouldn’t allow him to see any of his research results, as was expected of all junior staff. Furthermore, he often let slip derogatory comments, which showed all too clearly that he had little academic respect for Edholm or his close collaborators. His scorn did not, of course, enhance his popularity. “Griff didn’t think much of people who were less bright than he was,” one colleague commented. “He was really unable to communicate with anybody except other very bright people.”

Most of Edholm’s team found him a considerate and supportive boss whom they remembered with affection and gratitude. As to clashes with Pugh, they felt there were faults on both sides. Edholm’s greatest strength, they agreed, lay less in the originality of his own research—“one wouldn’t say he was a great scientist”—than in being a networker, an “explainer of science,” a mover and shaker and an excellent manager. One colleague described him as being at the center of “a huge spider’s web of contacts.” He sat on countless committees and public bodies, and was constantly looking for ways of promoting and expanding his division.

Like most people, however, Edholm had more than one side to him. “When he liked people—young people—then he was absolutely 100 percent,” I was told. “But when he for some reason or other took exception to people, he could be absolutely vicious.”

If Pugh resented Edholm, Edholm almost certainly resented Pugh for his insubordination, and for insinuating that Edholm wanted to steal his work. He, in turn, made life difficult for Pugh. He discouraged young researchers from applying to work with Pugh, telling them that he was impossible; the idea that “everyone found Pugh difficult to work with” became common currency within the division, despite clear evidence to the contrary from the Silver Hut.

The MRC’s climatic chambers were in constant use by Edholm and his colleagues. When Pugh was in the midst of his studies with the Scouts, they refused to allow him access. He had to appeal to Medawar for an allocation of time. It cannot have been a healthy environment in which to work.

If Pugh wanted a change of circumstances, he should perhaps have cultivated head-office executives. Instead, he was often barely polite to them. “He could be very disparaging if he didn’t agree with something,” John Brotherhood, his junior researcher, explained: “He was not an ordinary person. Just completely focused on his work. A man who was intellectually orientated. That’s where he got his kicks. He was just irritated [by head office staff]—and didn’t have time for anything else.”

Pugh’s legendary idiosyncratic habits annoyed many people, too—his late arrivals at work; his habit of blocking the exit to the parking lot with his unmistakable silver-gray sports car; his insistence on eating his lunch long after everyone else, so the ladies in the canteen felt they had to stay open late especially for him. If he wanted something, he would ignore all the proper channels and appeal directly to Medawar over Edholm’s and his managers’ heads.
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So sure was Pugh of his standing with Medawar that when his license was suspended for six months, he tried to persuade Medawar to give him a special MRC grant of £250 to cover the cost of employing a driver.
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He felt his fieldwork with the Scouts was too important to postpone. When Medawar refused, Pugh resorted to a disguise. Dressed up in a raincoat and sunglasses, he commandeered my brother Simon’s Morris Mini and drove himself around the country heedless of the fact that driving with a suspended license was a serious offense which could warrant a prison sentence.

It was perhaps not surprising that when the maverick Pugh complained bitterly about his situation to MRC officials, they were less than sympathetic. In September 1964, one MRC manager wrote to another that Pugh had contacted him to “grumble about his status and [alleged] difficulties in carrying out his work.”
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I think I should inform you of a telephone conversation I have just had with Dr. Pugh. Dr. Pugh, who sounded most agitated, started by saying that he wanted to talk to someone about his salary; soon he switched to bitter complaints of persecution. He claimed he had absolutely no support . . . no technicians, he was being badly treated; he was sick of people riding on his work, stealing his own work and passing it off as their own; he thought he should have his own unit and refused to carry on as at present!
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On such occasions—and there were several—the officials would inform Peter Medawar. Medawar would call Pugh over to the head office and soothe him. Pugh would be mollified and quiet down until the next time.

Medawar sympathized with his predicament and staunchly supported him. He insisted that Pugh be allowed to undertake whatever research he chose, ensured that he received regular raises in his salary, and generally looked after his interests with the establishment. He described Pugh as “one of the most distinguished members of the institute,” and reminded head-office officials that his work reflected “much credit to the [MRC] since it is carried out to high scientific standards.”

Perhaps it would have been better for Pugh if he had not been quite so protected by Medawar, for then he might have left the MRC and pursued his career elsewhere and avoided ending up—as one of his colleagues and great friends described him to me—“a disappointed man.”

But it was not in Pugh’s nature to allow petty resentments to dominate his life completely. Once again a golden opportunity was about to drop into his lap and give him a new lease on life as one of Britain’s pioneering sports scientists.

28

The “Boffin” and the Altitude Olympics

In 1965 the word
altitude
was suddenly on everyone’s lips. A tremendous public row had blown up about the choice of Mexico City for the 1968 Olympic Games. Encouraged by disgruntled athletes, the newspapers were outraged that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) expected top-flight sportsmen and women to perform at their peak in the rarefied atmosphere of a city located at an altitude of 7,350 feet above sea level.
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Mexico’s altitude posed serious risks to the health of the competitors, the newspapers chorused. If Olympic athletes pushed themselves to their limits in the thin air of Mexico City—where there is 25 percent less oxygen than at sea level—the normal mechanisms protecting their bodies might fail. “There will be those who will die,” Onni Niskanen, the Finnish coach of Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila, was reported to have said. Furthermore, the Games would be unfair because athletes from sea level would be at a disadvantage compared with those born and bred at higher altitudes. The “unfathomable old men of the IOC”—that “self-perpetuating and unrepresentative oligarchy”—were roundly castigated for having selected the location of the Games “in an atmosphere of party-giving and public relations flummery,” without regard for the welfare of the competitors.
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Boycotts were threatened.
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At first the IOC and the British Olympic Association (BOA) insisted that they had received expert advice. K. S. “Sandy” Duncan, general secretary of the BOA, wrote: “The IOC were presented with a great weight of medical opinion stressing that no danger to competitors existed and that quick acclimatization to altitude was obtainable.”
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As to the suggestions of unfairness, Avery Brundage, the chairman of the IOC, defied all the logic of international competition with the sanctimonious riposte that the point of the Olympics was “to take part rather than to win or set new records.”
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Concrete evidence about whether there was a genuine risk to athletes’ health did not in truth exist. Little research had been undertaken into the impact of altitude on athletes. A few research groups around the world—notably in Scandinavia, Italy, Denmark, and the USA—were investigating exercise physiology in relation to sports, but sports science had not yet developed into a burgeoning discipline in its own right, least of all in the UK.
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Eventually the BOA decided to set up a Medical Advisory Committee, asking one of the eight “unfathomable men of the IOC”—Sir Arthur Porritt—to be its chairman.
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A former sprinter and star athlete at Oxford, Arthur Porritt had run against Harold Abrahams in the 100 meters at the 1924 Olympics, winning the bronze medal to Abrahams’s gold. The race was immortalized in the film
Chariots of Fire.
Otto Edholm was invited to represent the Medical Research Council, and Griffith Pugh with his expertise on altitude was commissioned to investigate.
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Pugh’s first point of contact with the athletes was Martin Hyman, one of the UK’s leading long-distance runners. Strongly critical of what he described as the “quite appalling old boys’ club” at the heart of the British sporting establishment, Hyman was chairman of the International Athletes Club, which had fomented much of the controversy over Mexico. Established in 1958 by a band of frustrated elite athletes who wanted a collective public voice, the club had become a significant pressure group. Hyman and his colleagues wanted the 1968 Games moved, but they were also acutely aware that if the Games stayed in Mexico, they would need expert advice about altitude. They suspected that the BOA intended Pugh’s research to pacify them, but they agreed to cooperate. Hyman went to meet Pugh at Hampstead in the summer of 1965, and his first impression of the messy laboratory and the tousle-haired physiologist was that he had been fobbed off with a classic absentminded scientist who knew nothing about athletics.

Despite his initial doubts about Pugh, Hyman was more scientifically minded than most athletes. He and his running partner Bruce Tulloh were members of the Portsmouth Athletic Club, where they had adopted a methodical approach to training, subjecting old and new ideas to objective trials and informing themselves about the latest techniques and research. They reaped the benefits. In five out of the six years between 1959 and 1964, Hyman was ranked one of the top five 10,000-meter runners in the world. Tulloh won the gold medal in the 5,000 meters at the European Championships of 1962. From 1961 to 1964 he was in the top six in the world. They were star members of the club—role models for the wider membership—and other runners at Portsmouth achieved outstanding success in both national and European competitions.
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Then, as Hyman put it, “the other clubs caught up.”

The Portsmouth club was not typical of the country as a whole, however. In Britain in the 1960s, Hyman told me when I met him at his home in Edinburgh, “the concept of analyzing what was needed to enable athletes to perform optimally was quite foreign to people.”
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The majority of athletes had no access to formal training, let alone training influenced by physiologists. Instead they followed training programs based on experience handed down from older athletes, and on anecdotal advice culled from sports magazines and newspapers. Most of the coaching was carried out voluntarily by ex-athletes who were not medically or scientifically trained, and many doubted whether science really had anything to offer the athlete.
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The better-off athletes who could afford professional coaching had typically grown up in the tradition of public-school “amateurism,” which held that it was not only unsporting but also ungentlemanly to mix science with sport, or to give undue attention to training and preparation. For a long time Roger Bannister, who in 1954 ran the first mile in under 4 minutes, felt he had to hide his enthusiasm for running in order “not to appear to take games too seriously.”
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According to his running mate Christopher Chattaway, Bannister “went to great lengths to conceal the amount of training he did.”
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