SUN LIFE GREAT RACE
What became of the marquee British running event that aimed to rival cycling’s Tour de France?
It’s a little after 11.30am on Sunday 23 September, 1990. Bright autumnal sunshine filters through the grand edifices of Westminster and lights up the cordoned-off streets. It’s dry, not too warm – perfect running conditions. A race is imminent: advertising hoardings, admin tents and temporary grandstands are in place. Officials fuss around, walkie-talkies crackling. Just over 80 runners are assembled, their kaleidoscopic vests an arresting counterpoint to the austere grey of central London’s roads.
From a distance, this could be the preamble to any urban road run. But closer scrutiny reveals some striking differences. Familiarity, for one. The runners josh and joke; they greet one another with backslaps and banter rather than cursory handshakes. Manifestly, this is not a group coming together for the first time. Furthermore, beneath the bluster there’s an unmistakable air of fatigue. Creaking joints; injuries being nursed. To see these runners together, you might well conclude that this is less of a start than a culmination. And you’d be right.
Nine laps of a 1.1-mile quadrangle await: round the tip of Trafalgar Square, beneath Big Ben, past Downing Street and the Cenotaph. But this will be no fizz-supping procession through the capital, a la Tour de France – the inspiration for the groundbreaking race that today reaches its climax. It’s going to be a dogfight; a final opportunity to boost overall standings and prize money; to put on a show for the crowds that have gathered, if not in their thousands, then at least on a scale not seen in any of the preceding 19 stages.
At exactly 11.45am, the gun goes, and the runners flow over the line. A hierarchy quickly emerges. The two front runners are impossible to ig nore. One, a tall figure with a pleasingly fluid running style and bleached blonde locks who brings to mind a youthful David Beckham. This is Paul Evans from Suffolk – a relative unknown until a couple of weeks before. He pushes hard, arrow-heading a breakaway g roup whose ferocious pace belies the pulverising attrition of the past three weeks.
‘They’re surely running in the 4:40s per mile,’ muses commentator Tom McNab, author of 1982 bestseller Flanagan’s Run, based on the trans-American races of the 1920s and 1930s that this race also seeks to echo.
‘Definitely 4:40s,’ agrees fellow pundit Ian Stewart, the Saltire-swathed middle-distance giant of the previous two decades who’s helped craft the 240-mile course.
Just behind Evans, Delmir Dos Santos is poised. It’s nine stage wins and counting for the Brazilian prodig y with the broad smile and the frightening conditioning, honed on the mountain trails of Colorado.
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