Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (45 page)

Despite studying exercise physiology at the Oxford School, Bannister found it politic to use his book
First Four Minutes
to distance himself from the idea that science could be useful to sport: “Experiments in the laboratory are not of much practical value to athletes. There is in fact little scientific evidence in favor of many of the things done in training. The adaptation of the body to the stress of running is of such bewildering complexity that the athlete is forced to fall back on common sense.”
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By the mid-1960s, however, things had moved on. Bannister had become chairman of the research committee of the newly formed Sports Council, and the situation created by the Mexico Olympics enabled Hyman to persuade five of his fellow runners to submit themselves to Pugh’s research.

The runners were still skeptical, but Pugh, an ex-Olympic sportsman who enjoyed nothing more than research in virgin territory, seized the opportunity with enthusiasm. The athletes taking part in the project—Mike Turner, John Cooke, Dominic Kelly, the brothers Gerry and Geoffrey North, and Hyman himself—were all long-distance runners of international caliber.
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“Endurance” athletes were chosen because they were expected to suffer the most from Mexico’s altitude, since they use energy derived mainly from the oxygen they breathe (aerobic exercise). By contrast, competitors in “explosive” events like sprinting or long-jumping were expected to be much less affected. They use energy stored in their muscles (anaerobic exercise) and pay back the oxygen debt later, so lack of oxygen in the atmosphere has less impact on their performances.
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Indeed, it was predicted that sprinters would positively benefit from Mexico’s altitude because the air resistance would be less than at sea level. Distance runners would gain from this too, but the benefit would be offset by the lack of oxygen.

Before starting his research, Pugh compared the results of the Pan American Games held at altitude in Mexico City in 1955 with those of the 1956 Olympics held at sea level in Melbourne.
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Compared with Melbourne, running performances in Mexico over distances from 800 meters to 10,000 meters were progressively slower the longer the race, whereas sprint times were unaffected or slightly better. Some observers thought there had been an “abnormally high incidence of collapse in Mexico City,” and there were stories of athletes blacking out and having to be revived with oxygen.
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Pugh’s project kicked off on home turf with a four-week program to establish benchmark fitness levels and running times, followed by a further set of tests in his laboratory.
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By this time Hyman had realized that his first impression of Pugh had been wrong. Rather than imposing preconceived ideas on the athletes, as Hyman expected, Pugh bombarded them with questions about every aspect of running and all its problems.

The first trials brought home to Pugh how lucky he was to have access to top-class athletes.
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Elite athletes are gold-standard experimental subjects who produce remarkably consistent performances, so the research results are not distorted by the day-to-day variations that afflict lesser runners. Hyman could judge the pace at which he was running, lap by lap, to the accuracy of a second, without a watch.

Pugh was also deeply impressed by the runners’ remarkable constitutions and often came home talking of their extraordinarily large hearts and blood volumes, their slow pulse rates and impressive lung capacities. So powerful were they that his usual exercise experiments on the stationary bicycle in his lab, which had never failed to bring a climber or a scientist to the point of total exhaustion, proved incapable of exhausting them.

After the four-week study, Pugh’s party left for Mexico City in early November 1965. They stayed at a “comfortable” hotel near the British embassy in the center of town, in an area of wide, tree-lined boulevards, grand squares, parks, and fountains; the traffic, however, was horrendous, and the atmosphere smoggy. They spent the next four weeks carrying out more research at a running track 20 minutes’ drive from their hotel and in a makeshift laboratory nearby.

The tests and experiments mirrored those the athletes had already undergone in England. They included four 3-mile running trials at weekly intervals and three sessions of 1-mile trials. At the laboratory their maximum work capacities and breathing rates were tested on the stationary bicycle with all the paraphernalia of mouthpieces, tubes, and Douglas bags. Their maximum heart rates, the levels of oxygen in their blood, their hemoglobin levels, pH levels, blood volumes, and many other variables were closely monitored before, during, and after exercise, which meant needles, more Douglas bags, wires, and electrodes. The athletes also kept records of their sleep patterns, pulse rates, food intake, and training schedules.

Most of the athletes found Pugh’s tests onerous, intrusive, and unpleasant, but Pugh—a single-minded taskmaster—seemed blithely unconcerned about how his “guinea pigs” might be feeling. If an athlete collapsed from exhaustion, developed an unusual heart rhythm, or started hyperventilating in the middle of an experiment, the unfortunate man soon learned that he couldn’t expect much sympathy from the physiologist. Pugh was more likely to look rather pleased and exclaim: “Oh, how very interesting, I must write that down at once.”

Toughness, single-mindedness, and the ability to endure discomfort were the stock-in-trade of the distance runner, however, and Pugh generally got on well with the athletes, especially Hyman and Turner, who spent many hours discussing the mechanics of performance with him.
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Turner had read an article by an American exercise physiologist claiming that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the warm-up exercises practiced assiduously by most athletes were actually of little use.
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Experiments had shown, the physiologist said, that warm-ups did not increase the temperature of the muscles nearly as much as athletes imagined. Skeptical about this, Pugh picked up a piece of wire used for measuring temperatures and pushed it clean through the bicep of his right arm, remarking as he did so that it only hurt when he pushed it in and not when it emerged on the other side. Holding a weight in his hand he then exercised his arm for 3 minutes while Turner watched the temperature monitor rise by 37°F, contradicting the recent claim. They repeated the exercise with the left arm and got the same result. It was the simplicity of Pugh’s approach—the experiment that seemed completely obvious when Pugh thought of it—that impressed Turner.

On another occasion Pugh asked Hyman why, when distance runners often suffered from the heat, it was generally accepted that they ought to wear hats in hot, sunny conditions. Hats might be adding to their heat problems, he said. Obviously they wore hats to keep the sun off their heads, but Hyman had never given it much thought.

He, Pugh, and a few other runners then went to the running track, where Pugh measured how hot their heads became when running in the sun with and without hats, and found that they were 41°F hotter with hats than without them. It was enough to convince them either not to wear a hat when competing in the heat, or to wear a peaked hat with a crown made of mesh that the air could pass through.

When they first arrived in Mexico, all the athletes had felt tired and unfit. They suffered from shortness of breath, tight chests, dry mouths, and exceptionally high pulse rates when they took heavy exercise. It was several days before they felt able to resume normal training. In the first 3-mile trial, on the fourth day, they averaged around 8 percent slower than at sea level. After four weeks of acclimatization they all felt much better and their performances had greatly improved. Nevertheless, in the last 3-mile trial on the twenty-seventh day, they were still on average nearly 6 percent slower than at sea level.

If Pugh got on well with the athletes, his relationship with the BOA was quite another matter.
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The BOA had sent out a chaperone to keep him in hand: Dr. Raymond Owen, a GP with a special interest in obstetrics and the BOA’s honorary physician. Owen and his good friend, Sandy Duncan, the BOA’s powerful general secretary—who had been a long jumper and captain for England in the 1938 Empire Games—were both convinced that the “alarmist press reports” had grossly exaggerated the altitude issues. They believed the research project would confirm that the athletes’ main problems would be psychological rather than physical.

The British Olympic authorities, whom Owen and Duncan represented, were more adamant than most that the protests against Mexico should not succeed. Most adamant of all was the chairman of the BOA, the Marquess of Exeter, another veteran of the 1924
Chariots of Fire
Olympics. Exeter was also president of the UK Amateur Athletics Association and a long-serving member of the International Olympic Committee. In the eyes of such establishment figures, any capitulation to the anti-Mexico lobby would open the floodgates to professional athletes who were more concerned with money and medals than with playing the game as best they could wherever they were called upon to do so.

“I cannot really feel that a physiologist is going to have much purpose,” Owen had confided to Duncan before the BOA commissioned Pugh’s research. Owen had been angling to carry out the research himself with a view toward obtaining the results that the BOA wanted: “If I went out myself with an athletics coach and 4–6 athletes, I could find out most of what we require to know. We would look at this thing in a practical way . . . rather than in a purely scientific way, and I am sure the results would be of more practical value to the governing bodies.”
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But he failed to convince the Medical Advisory Committee, who feared the project would not carry sufficient weight with the public unless undertaken by an expert.

Finding himself relegated to chaperoning and “assisting” Pugh, Owen regarded him as “simply a bloody nuisance,” and referred to him scornfully behind his back as “the boffin [scientist].” The dispatches he sent back to London reveal that he disliked Pugh and was deeply skeptical about his ability to find out anything useful. Determined to downplay the physical problems and highlight instead the psychological problems athletes were likely to face in Mexico, Owen assumed that psychology was completely beyond the understanding of “the boffin.”
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The BOA had resolved to keep tight control over the publicity surrounding Pugh’s project. A directive had been issued early on, stating that in London only Sandy Duncan and Arthur Gold, chairman of the Amateur Athletics Association, were permitted to speak to the press. In Mexico only Owen would be allowed to talk to journalists.

However, well before Pugh left London—indeed, as soon as the BOA announced his research project—the press descended on him in droves. Ignoring all instructions, he allowed TV crews into his laboratory to film the athletes and gave interviews to nine separate media organizations, including the BBC, the Press Association, Granada Television,
and
United Press
International.
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Duncan remonstrated with him but only succeeded in giving him the impression that the BOA wanted to hush up his research, then use it to cover up the altitude problems. Pugh reacted furiously, and Duncan had to pacify him.
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Similar disagreements arose in Mexico. Two weeks after Pugh arrived a story appeared in
The
Times
quoting him as saying that “anybody who did not spend a month out here before the Olympic Games would have no chance at all of winning a gold medal in anything over 800 metres.”
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Sandy Duncan protested directly to Pugh in a letter from London.
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But Pugh was unrepentant.
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Years earlier,
The Times
’s
Everest contract had expressly forbidden Pugh—and the other team members—to speak publicly about their roles on the expedition. Now, toward the end of his career, he was no longer willing to keep silent, and began to reveal a surprising talent for using the media to get his voice heard.

Pugh flew back to London in early December. Having already completed his preliminary report and sent it to the BOA, he felt no qualms about telling the reporters who met him at the airport that even after four weeks the athletes in the study “were never able to run as fast as they had in England.” He wasn’t sure, he added, if they would regain their sea-level form even if they remained in Mexico for six months or a year.

Pugh’s words did nothing to alleviate the anxiety among athletes waiting to find out what the BOA intended to do to help them. But the BOA would only comment that “a very considerable amount of data” had been collected, which would require “considerable study before final conclusions can be reached.”
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A few weeks later, writing in the
Observer
on January 2, Christopher Brasher, Olympic gold medalist in Melbourne in 1956, and an influential member of the International Athletes Club, furiously accused the BOA of trying to hide the results of Pugh’s research
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Mexico was a “ghastly mistake,” he roared. “The whole situation is beginning to border on farce.”
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Pugh, meanwhile, was quoted in the
Illustrated London News
as saying, “It’s high time those who plan these games should stop using athletes as pawns.
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Finally, on January 19 the BOA’s Medical Advisory Committee met to discuss the Mexico study.
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Pugh, whose report was a pithy six pages, spoke first.
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He had found no evidence that the athletes would die, he told the committee, but they would be slow. After four weeks of acclimatization his athletes were running 3-mile trials on average 5.7 percent slower than at sea level. Their performances had improved on average by 2.8 percent during the four weeks, and were still improving at the end—though there were individual variations. That 2.8 percent might not seem dramatic, Pugh pointed out, but in a 3-mile race it amounted to roughly 20 seconds in time, or 120 yards, “which would cover most of the field in a 5,000 metre Olympic final!” It could make the difference between coming first and coming last. In the 1-mile trials, performances had also improved, but to a lesser degree. The fact that the runners were still improving suggested they should acclimatize for a minimum of four weeks before the Games, and preferably for longer.