Knight heard the announcer say that while there had been ties in judged Olympic events like gymnastics in the past, and a tie between two American swimmers at the Sydney 2000 Games, there had never been a tie in any track event at any modern Olympics. The announcer said that the referees would examine photos as well as take the time down to the thousandth of a second.
Knight watched referees huddling by the track, and saw the tallest of them shake his head. A moment later, the screens flashed ‘Official Results’ and posted Shaw and Mundaho in a dead tie, with a time of 9:382.
‘I decline to run another heat,’ the referee was heard saying. ‘I consider that to have been the greatest foot race of all time and the timing stands. Both men share the world record. Both men win gold.’
The stadium rocked again with cheers, whistles and yells.
Through his binoculars, Knight saw Shaw gazing up at the results and then over at the referee with scepticism and irritation. But then the Jamaican’s expression melted into a grin that spread wide across his face. He jogged to Mundaho, who was smiling back at him. They spoke. Then they clasped hands, raised them, and jogged towards their cheering fans, holding the flags of Jamaica and Cameroon above their heads in their free hands.
The men took their long victory lap around the stadium together, and to Knight it was as if a pleasant summer shower had come along to wash foul smoke from the air. Cronus and the Furies now seemed not as powerful a force at the London Olympics as they had been just a few minutes ago.
The sprinters running together in a grand display of sportsmanship was their way of telling the world that the modern Games were still a force to be reckoned with, still a force for good, a force that could demonstrate shared humanity in the face of Cronus’s cruel assault.
Shaw said as much when he and Mundaho returned to the finish line and were interviewed by reporters. Knight saw it all up on the big screens.
‘When I saw the tie, I could not believe it,’ the Jamaican admitted. ‘And to tell you the truth, my first response was that I felt angry. I had beaten my own record, but I had not bested everyone as I did in Beijing. But then, after all that has happened at these Games, I saw that the tie was a beautiful thing: good for sprinting, good for athletics, and good for the Olympics.’
Mundaho agreed, saying, ‘I am humbled to have run with the great Zeke Shaw. It is the honour of my life to have my name mentioned in the same breath as his.’
The reporter then asked who would win the 200-metre final on Wednesday night. Neither man needed an interpreter. Both tapped their chests and said, ‘Me.’
Then each of them laughed and slapped the other on the back.
Knight breathed a sigh of relief when both men left the stadium. At least Cronus had not targeted those two.
For the next hour, as the men’s 1,500-metre semi-finals and the 3,000-metre steeplechase final were run, Knight’s mind wandered to his mother. Amanda had promised that she would not turn bitter and retreat into herself as she had after his father’s death.
But Knight’s past two conversations with Gary Boss indicated that was exactly what she was doing. She would not take his calls. She would not take anyone’s calls, even those who wanted to help arrange a memorial for Denton Marshall. According to her assistant, Amanda was spending every waking hour at her table sketching designs, hundreds of them.
He’d wanted to go to see her yesterday and this morning, but Boss had urged him against coming. Boss felt this was something that Amanda needed to go through alone, at least for a few more days.
Knight’s heart ached for his mother. He knew at a gut level what she was going through. He’d thought that his own grief for Kate would never end. And in a sense it never would. But through his children he’d found a way to keep going. He prayed his mother would find her own way apart from through work.
Then he thought of the twins. He was about to call home to say goodnight when the announcer called for competitors in the men’s 400-metre semi-finals.
People were on their feet again as Mundaho appeared in the tunnel from the warm-up track. The Cameroonian jogged out, as confident as he had been before the 100-metre event, moving in his characteristic loose-jointed way.
But instead of taking those explosive kangaroo hops, the Cameroonian began to skip and then to bound, his feet coming way up off the track surface and swinging forward as if he were a deer or a gazelle.
What other man can do that? Knight thought in awe. Where did the idea that he could even do that come from? The bullets flying at his back?
The Cameroonian slowed near his blocks on lane one, at the inside rear of the staggered start. Could Mundaho do it? Run a distance four times longer than what he’d just sprinted in world record time?
Evidently Zeke Shaw wanted to know as well because the Jamaican sprinter reappeared in the entry linking the practice track to the stadium and stood with three of the Gurkhas, all looking north towards the runners about to compete.
‘Mark,’ the official called.
Mundaho set his race shoes with their tiny metal stubs against the blocks. He crouched and tensed when the official called: ‘Set.’
The gun went off in the near-silent stadium.
The Cameroonian leaped off the blocks.
A thousandth of a second later a blinding silver-white light blasted from the blocks as they exploded and disintegrated, throwing out a low-angle wave of fire and hot jagged bits of metal that smashed into Mundaho’s lower body from behind, hurling the Cameroonian off his feet and onto the track where he lay crumpled and screaming.
Part Four
MARATHON