Kotelko Olga - What makes Olga run?: the mystery of the ninety-something track star and what she can teach us about living longer, happier lives

U-Turn:

What If You Woke Up One Morning

and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright 2014 by Bruce Grierson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Henry Holt and Company, LLC, New York. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Grierson, Bruce, author

What makes Olga run? : the mystery of the 90-something track star, and what she can teach us about living longer, happier lives / Bruce Grierson.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-307-36345-9
eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-81245-2

1. Kotelko, Olga, 1919. 2. Kotelko, Olga, 1919Health. 3. Track and field athletesCanadaBiography. 4. Sports for older peoplePhysiological aspects. I. Title.

GV1060.72.K68G75 2013 796.42092 C2013-900757-1

Cover design by Kelly Hill
Cover image: Patrik Giardino / The New York Times Magazine

v3.1

To Jennifer: For the Long Run

The water doesnt know how old you are.

D ARA T ORRES

E VER SINCE SHE turned 90, Olga Kotelko has presented a problem for organizers of the track meets she enters: Whom does she compete against?

The issue surfaced prominently in the 60-meter-dash final at the World Masters Indoor Athletics Championships, in Kamloops, British Columbia, in 2010. Olga found herself, well, in a class by herself. There just arent many nonagenarian sprinterseven when you draw from the whole planet. The next-oldest woman in this meet, Californian Johnnye Vallien, was 84.

So there Olga was, 91, bespandexed and elfin, lumped in with the men.

In lane one stood Orville Rogers, 91, a long-striding retired Braniff Airways pilot and the world-record holder in the mile for men over 90. Next to him: Belgian Emiel Pauwels, 90, another world-record middle-distance man (1,500-meter), in bright orange track spikes, who would later make everyone nervous as he ran most of the 3,000-meter final with his left shoelace untied. Front and center: Ugo Sansonetti, 92, a former frozen-food magnate from Rome, in a blue sleeveless skinsuit, his tanned biceps bulging like small baked potatoes.

Olga drew the inside lane, rounding out the field. She wore black tights and a long-sleeved white shirtthe modest uniform she wears no matter the weather.

Shed been worried about her start. Shes not a good starter. She can get rattled. Sometimes, when the gun sounds or even a fraction of a second before, she takes a step backward. But today she started clean and mechanically strong, piston-pumping her arms, generating enough wind to pin her hair back a bit.

Its no longer strange to see geriatric runners: every big-city marathon has its share of valiant, white-haired competitors who spark bursts of applause as they shuffle past. But it is strange to watch 90-year-olds sprint. Kids and dogs and young adults run full-out. But old folks? The incongruity of that image inspired a television commercial that Ugo Sansonetti shot for Bertolli margarine not long ago. A runaway baby carriage is seen careening through the streets of Rome, until a fissure-faced old bystanderUgosprings into action and chases it down.

Sansonetti crossed the line first at Kamloops, in a world-record time of 11.57 seconds. He bounced around in the runoff area, arms overhead in triumph, as Rogers glided in behind him at 12.82. Olga came third, at just over 15 seconds. She looked concerned for Pauwels, the Belgian, who had caught a spike and crashed down hard, then picked himself up and limped in last.

She was cool with running against the guys. That one fellow was pretty fast, she said, on the way to the changing area. She had gotten used to this. When youre the fastest 91-year-old woman on the planet, either you compete against younger women or you run against the guys.

J UST how good is Olga? There are a couple of ways to put her in perspective.

She currently holds twenty-six world records. She set twenty world records in a single year, 2009. She hits these totals in part by entering more events than everybody else, including a couple that nobody else in the world her age attempts. She will often do six throwing events, three sprints, and three jumps. (At age 88, she considered adding the pole vault, but was deterred by practical considerations. What do you do with the polestrap it to the roof of the car? Check it on to the plane?)

Track records, at the elite level, tend to fall by fingernail parings of time and distance: fractions of seconds, portions of inches. At the 2009 World Masters Athletics Championships in Lahti, Finland, Olga threw a javelin almost twenty feet farther than her nearest rival. At the World Masters Games in Sydney, Australia, in 2009, Olgas time in the 100-meter dash23.95 secondswould have won the womens 8084 divisiontwo age brackets down.

Olga stands five feet and a half an inch. She weighs 130 pounds. For her sizeand this may be the most curious thing about hershe has extraordinary power. It can be surprising, after her slo-mo windup, to see how far the things she throws go.

On the hammer throw pitch in Kamloops, she took her place with the other competitors. Big guys with leather gloves paced around, shaking their hands out. Olga removed her glasses. There was a sudden and brief sense of menace; when a little old lady starts swinging a three-pound cannonball around her head, a good outcome is not guaranteed. But the thing sailed, straight and true. If I spun I could throw it farther, Olga says, but after watching somebody very old fall that way she has decided not to risk it.

Olga got more leg into the second throw. But the trajectory wasnt what she liked. She made a little swans head gesture with her hand, to remind herself. Routinely, Olga performs better on every subsequent attempt as she recalibrates and tries again. Its like watching a marksman bracket the bulls-eye and then draw in: 12.72 meters. 13.37. 13.92. In ten minutes she added four feet of distance. New world record, a disembodied voice said over the loudspeaker.

There is a formula called age-grading thats used to put the performances of older athletes in perspective. Age-graded scores tell us how impressed we should be by what a masters athleteplaced in categories from ages 35 to 105just did. A set of tables plots a given performance against the expected decline of the human body, and expresses it as a percentage. So, theoretically, 100 percent is the high-water mark for a human being of that age.

But a number of Olgas marksin shot put, high jump, 100-meter dashtop 100 percent. In Sydney she threw the shot put 5.6 meterswhich age-grades out at 119 percent. If you plug Olgas 23.95 100-meter-dash time from Sydney into the tables, you find its exactly equivalent to American Olympian Florence Griffith Joyners prevailing, suspicious, and thought-to-be-untouchable world record of 10.49 seconds.