Was it really only three weeks ago? Everyone was there, it seems. Le tout monde, in glittering medals and jewels. And what a picture they made. Little Emma Bovary, waltzing with the Baron!
Seriously…that was one memorable gathering on October 30th. The CPTC 35th Anniversary Benefit, aka An Evening with Frank Shorter, Featuring Olympians Past and Future, to give it its working title. What s doubly impressive is how it was apparently organized in just a few weeks. Some of us didn t even get an invitation (via e-mail) until two weeks before the date, and sensibly assumed we were being snubbed. It hasn t been described here in the Journal so far, partly because the whole thing was just too much to take on in a few paragraphs. (Although Patrick Cowden s wonderful candid shots did get linked on the website s “splash” page.) And then came the sudden death of Ryan Shay on November 3rd during the Olympic Marathon Trial in Central Park. Rather awkward, you know, putting up a party-postmortem at a time like that.
And then there s the problem of giving due mention to the benefit s headline act, the Frank Shorter speech. Spanning the globe, spanning decades… from Frank s recollections of his prepschool days (coming to the city over vacation, getting a load on, and suddenly going for a wild nighttime run with friends through Central Park), on to details of his training in the months and years before the 1972 Munich Olympics. And somewhere in there we got a word or two about how Frank was portrayed in one of the Steve Prefontaine biopics. (CUT TO: Partygoers turn to each other, whisper. That s the Billy Crudup movie, right? Not the one with the other guy.) Emcee Joe Bolster, the guy who preceded Frank at the microphone and introduced the dozens of Olympians and Trials qualifiers, says he tried hard to follow Frank s speech, but missed a lot because people kept coming up to him and saying, Oh you didn t call out so-and-so s name. Or, This person s here too, you shoulda mentioned them.
Anyway, a wide-ranging talk, discursive and technical. You could only remember little parts, but like the curate s egg those parts were excellent indeed…and made good conversational fodder when we gathered around Frank at the open bar. One of the first training-related questions was, appropriately, whether alcohol was bad before a race. No no, said Frank; he never had any problem with it; why, he downed a half-liter of beer the night before he won the gold at Munich. “B-but, that s only like, a pint, right?” Somebody demurred, counting her double vodkas.
A few nights later Frank gave a briefer, breezier speech at the NYAC s Pasta Dinner. Afterwards Somebody told him it sounded a lot less in-depth than the CPTC talk. “Oh that talk was very different,” Frank laughed. “I felt I had to get technical, given the audience. When they had all those athletes come up to the front of the stage…it looked like half the people in the room were up there!”