Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (46 page)

Dr. Owen then presented a seventeen-page report of his own.
³⁶
Repeating many of Pugh’s findings, Owen contradicted Pugh’s interpretation of them. Pugh had categorically asserted that the athletes’ responses to altitude were not “subjective.” Owen, however, claimed that the athletes’ symptoms, such as shortness of breath on exertion, “were undoubtedly psychological, although they were certainly physical as well.” “To a large extent competitors will suffer those symptoms which they have been told to expect,” he insisted.

Pugh had found no evidence that acclimatization reached a plateau even after twenty-eight days, yet Owen asserted that, after the first two to three weeks, acclimatization leveled off. Further improvements in performance, he said, were attributable to other factors, like improving fitness. The maximum acclimatization permitted, in his view, should be exactly twenty-four days. Staying longer would lead to “difficulties of a psychological nature,” such as “boredom” and “homesickness.”

The BOA was clearly determined to make as few concessions as possible to the anti-Mexico lobby, but the Medical Advisory Committee was not convinced that twenty-four days would be enough. After much debate they decided to accept Pugh’s conclusions completely, and called for the athletes to be given as long as possible to acclimatize—and a minimum of a month.
³⁷

However, sensitive to the desires of Duncan and Owen to tread carefully on this issue, the committee agreed not to release the reports to the public, but simply to pass them on to the BOA. The BOA then instructed Owen to write a new “comprehensive official BOA report,” “collating” all the results from Mexico, and, bypassing Pugh, they invited Pugh’s boss Edholm to edit the report on behalf of the MRC. This ensured that the uncomfortable facts would be kept out of the public domain for a few more months.

With the facts safely under wraps, Duncan felt free to announce to
The Times
that athletes competing in “explosive” events needed
only three weeks
to acclimatize, and endurance athletes needed a
maximum
of four weeks. The BOA then formally called on the International Olympic Committee to impose a four-week limit—disregarding Pugh’s and the Medical Advisory Committee’s conclusion, that all types of athlete should be given as long as possible to acclimatize.
³⁸

The BOA’s “official report,” which appeared three months later (with Pugh’s report discreetly tucked away at the back), proved to be a rehashed version of Dr. Owen’s original account, repeating his insistence that acclimatization tailed off after the third week, and that some of the athletes’ altitude symptoms were “undoubtedly psychological.” His final salvo was that: “Team officials should make sure that competitors are not worried about any possible effects of altitude, as symptoms will arise if individuals are led to expect them.”
³⁹

Pugh was intensely annoyed. “The association [BOA] have covered up the main results of the report with a mass of trivia,” he told James Coote of the
Daily Telegraph
,
and to the
Sunday Times
he declared that the BOA’s report “was packed with pompous nonsense and insignificant statistics.”
⁴⁰
Finally, in a letter to Sir Arthur Porritt, he complained that the report “contravenes decisions taken by the Medical Advisory Committee,” and he resigned—only to reinstate himself four days later.
⁴¹
He was reaching the breaking point.

If the BOA were trying to convince the athletes that most of their problems were psychosomatic, they were resoundingly unsuccessful. It was impossible to hide the fact that five other countries—Sweden, Japan, the USA, Germany, and Australia—had reported comparable findings to Pugh’s at an international conference in Switzerland.
⁴²

In the run-up to the final decision of the IOC, twenty-six of Britain’s most distinguished athletes and ex-athletes sent a letter to
The Times
declaring: “The International Olympic Committee must be brought to realise that its choice of Mexico City, made through giving undue weight to political and financial considerations, was a disastrous mistake and [must] be persuaded to do everything in its power to mitigate the effects.”
⁴³

The athletes demanded that all the races longer than 800 meters be held at a separate, low-altitude venue away from Mexico City. In the
New Scientist
, Roger Bannister predicted that the Mexico Games would “damage the Olympic concept of fairness more than anything else in the history of the modern games.” Demands that the venue be changed were now coming from all quarters. And yet, when the IOC met in Rome in July 1966, it insisted that Mexico would go ahead. “There’s no question of any change,” Avery Brundage declared. “The games belong to the world. Whether they’re held north or south, east or west, in hot countries or in cold, in wet or in dry seasons, at high altitude or at low is immaterial.”
⁴⁴

29

Going for Gold

The Mexico saga continued for three more years until the Games took place in 1968. During that time Pugh’s relationship with the BOA became so irksome to him that he was finally driven to resign from the MRC. Yet it was also an immensely productive period for his research.
¹

After the International Olympic Committee gave the Mexico Games the go-ahead, many countries, including Russia, the United States, Poland, France, and Germany, announced that they intended to take their athletes to Mexico at least four weeks before the Games, and to offer them sessions at altitude-training centers beforehand. One of their reasons was that it was well known that people acclimatized more easily on their second and subsequent visits to altitude. The IOC was not happy. They considered altitude training to be “not in accord with the amateur traditions,” and announced that any athlete who undertook more than four weeks’ altitude training in a calendar year would be disqualified from the Games. In 1967 the limit was increased to six weeks—but only for 1968, the year of the Games.
²

British athletes wanted to visit altitude-training centers too, but the BOA did its best to discourage them. Owen and Duncan issued off-putting communiqués warning that acclimatization wore off after only a few weeks. They gave lectures to athletes and officials, downplaying the impact of the altitude and the value of altitude training, and telling them that the worst problems in Mexico would be—in order of severity—boredom, sunburn, tummy upsets, and, lastly, “apprehension about the altitude.”
³

Their campaign reached its climax in May 1967 when Duncan set out the BOA’s “official viewpoint” in
World Sports
,
the BOA’s magazine.
Claiming that his conclusions were derived from the Mexico study “led” by Dr. Pugh and Dr. Owen, Duncan asserted that there was no scientific evidence that acclimatization was more easily achieved after repeated visits to altitude. “Our research,” he claimed, suggests that altitude training camps “give no great return.” It was not altitude but morale that would be the main problem in Mexico City. If the “wrong climate of opinion” prevailed, athletes would come to “believe many of the remarkable scares they may read . . . If they believe . . . certain things will happen, then they are very likely to happen. Such is the power of suggestion.”
⁴

Pugh, meanwhile, was appearing on television promoting the opposite view. Sponsored by Independent Television, he took three runners to Font Romeu—a newly opened altitude-training center in the French Pyrenees—to give viewers a chance to see what happened to running speeds at altitude.
⁵

The runners were timed running a 3-mile race at Crystal Palace, then repeating the race at Font Romeu, where their speeds dropped by similar percentages to those in Mexico.
⁶
Afterward Pugh wrote urging the BOA to change its stance and encourage British athletes to visit centers like Font Romeu. There would be both physiological and psychological benefits for the athletes, as well as opportunities to develop tactics to cope with altitude, he said. There was also a strong possibility that altitude training could produce improvements in performance at sea level.
⁷
Trying to cajole Duncan into action, he ended by pointing out that no less than fourteen other countries were sending their athletes to Font Romeu.

Even before the BOA had time to reply, Pugh gave an interview to Chris Brasher. “Shall I be blunt to the point of rudeness?” Brasher thundered in the
Observer
a few days later: “We are about to embark on the most monumental blunder that I’ve ever stumbled across in British sport. The greatest expert in the world on the effect of altitude on the human body sits in the laboratories of the Medical Research Council in Hampstead and says ‘I feel powerless. No one has yet come to me and asked me how to train for Mexico.’”
⁸

Pugh’s belief that “droves of athletes should be sent to Font Romeu
NOW”
was being flatly ignored, Brasher complained, firmly pointing the finger at outdated amateur values. “It is time we stopped being supposed gentlemen and became modern realists with a professional attitude.”

Duncan and Owen were furious. “A stupid article . . . since when has Pugh been an expert on athletic training!!” Duncan wrote to Owen.
⁹
Owen replied sarcastically: “I remember that the first time I met Pugh, he said, ‘They would never have climbed Everest if it hadn’t been for me, but Hillary got all the credit.’ I can just imagine him saying to Chris Brasher, ‘I am the greatest authority in the world on altitude, and nobody consults me on how to train!’”
¹⁰

The athletes, however, took Pugh’s advice. The International Athletes Club, sponsored by the
Daily Mirror,
the Sports Council, and the British Amateur Athletics Board took thirty “Olympic-possible” runners to Font Romeu with Pugh as an “observer,” paid for by the IAC. After the trip, the athletes issued a statement calling for team doctors and coaches for Mexico to be nominated without delay, “strongly” recommending that Pugh be included.
¹¹

Pugh now had so much support that the BOA could no longer ignore him. An uninvited Dr. Owen had turned up at Font Romeu when Pugh was there in September, and Duncan later found himself having to join the Sports Council and the Amateur Athletics Board in funding three further trips for Pugh.

Pugh may have triumphed in one sense but, back at the MRC, head-office officials were appalled by the spat between Pugh and the sporting establishment being played out in the newspapers and on television. “Adverse publicity may prove to be a serious setback in any important field of research,” they reminded Sir Peter Medawar. One official questioned whether Pugh should have leave to go to Font Romeu and was not altogether pleased when Medawar replied curtly that Dr. Pugh was “such an original that he ought more or less to be allowed to do whatever he wanted.”
¹²

By this time, Pugh’s problems with his boss Otto Edholm had reached the breaking point. Already infuriated by Edholm’s “editing” of the BOA’s Mexico report, Pugh found out that in April 1967 the BOA had secretly invited Edholm—who was not an expert on altitude—to become their official altitude adviser.
¹³
Edholm had agreed to step in behind Pugh’s back without even telling him.

After many years of simmering resentment, this was the final straw. Pugh sent Sir Peter Medawar a letter of resignation. In his letter Pugh explained how he was repeatedly being snubbed. People felt they could disregard his views. Organizations like the BOA and the Sports Council wanted to communicate with a departmental head rather than a subsidiary member of staff. “Difficult and embarrassing situations frequently arise because of my relatively subordinate position.”

Though sympathetic to Pugh’s problems about status, Medawar had always stopped short of pushing for him to get his own unit. When confronted with Pugh’s resignation, however, he took action. Extracting Pugh from Edholm’s orbit, Medawar offered him a one-man unit of his own. There would be no extra money, but Pugh leapt at the idea. Medawar pushed it through a doubtful head office by insisting that Pugh’s qualities as a scientist justified the promotion:

Pugh . . . is a man of real distinction with an international reputation in the field of athletic physiology. His level of distinction is entirely appropriate for the head of a Lab or Division. His being awarded relatively independent status would give him extra prestige and negotiating power with the bodies who do so much to sponsor his research, like the Sports Council, British Olympic Association and International Athletics Group.
¹⁴

At the end of November 1967, now nearly sixty, Pugh was at last in charge of his own tiny department, which he called “the Laboratory for Field Physiology.” With his newfound independence he continued working closely with the athletes and responding to the cues they gave him. In the process he made some pioneering discoveries which are still benefiting long-distance and marathon runners today.

One day Hyman chanced to tell Pugh how, when representing Britain in the 6-mile (10,000-meter) race at international “two-a-side” athletic events at the White City in the 1950s and early 1960s, he and his running partner used to take it in turns—lap on lap—to run directly in front of each other. They had a clear idea of how much energy they were saving by doing this—the equivalent of 1 second per lap. But, as Pugh realized, the energy-saving benefits of slipstreaming in running had not been measured before. Indeed, at the time, running behind a “pace setter” tended to be valued as much for its psychological benefits as for its potential for saving energy.