Gerard Cote
1940, 1943, 1944, 1948
 The
Cote farmhouse in St. Barnabe, where young Gerard grew up,
stood by itself in the elegant Quebec farm country that lies
east of Montreal and south of the St. Lawrence River. High
elms swayed over fields of hay each summer, and in winter the
wind tossed snow in drifts and threw swirls of white at the
sky. The nearest town was St. Hyacinthe, ten miles down an
unpaved road. The village of St. Barnabe was half a mile away,
the river about the same distance and the school Gerard
attended a bit further. Life was utterly rural and
French-Canadian, consisting of the land, the family and the
Roman Catholic Church. Months would pass without a word of
English being heard in the entire village.
(a)
The Cote family was large, numbering about fifteen children.
Cote is no longer certain how many there were. At least three,
including twins, died in infancy and the count of those
remaining kept shifting as older children left home and new
additions continued to arrive.
Cote was somewhere in the middle of the family, born July 28,
1913. The date was recorded accurately but his birthday was
always celebrated July 26, a quirk traceable to his mother —
her way of paying tribute to Ste. Anne, the patron saint of
housewives.
When Cote's father was not
attending to the farm and the Cote herd of dairy cattle, he
worked as a bricklayer, building chimneys and repairing
fireplaces to pick up extra money for the family. Several
brothers had also been bricklayers.
No one in the Cote family
played sports, activity being focused instead on the farm.
Gerard, a small boy, was too slight for many of the tasks that
arose but he became proficient as an errand boy, fetching
butter from the village for his mother, cows from the field
for his father, wood for the kitchen stove.
"From age five to eleven I was
always on the go. I would always run, from home to the river,
home to the village, home to school. When I went for the cows
I used to go with my dog. We had about twenty-six cows to
milk. Horses we had too, seven horses. I wasn't afraid of
them. I wasn't afraid of anything.
"You know, when you're a kid
and they say, 'Go over there and get me something,' you get
rolling. You try to come back fast and prove that you're
good."
Cote's mother died when he was
eleven and his father moved the family to St. Hyacinthe where
he worked as a construction laborer. Gerard left school in the
fifth grade to help out, eventually finding work back in St.
Barnabe as a farm helper at twelve dollars a month.
"It was a pretty hard life,''
he says.
At fourteen he rejoined his
family in St. Hyacinthe, working first for a milk distributor,
rising before dawn to begin deliveries at six o'clock, and
later for his father when the elder Cote had established his
own construction business. Together they excavated basements
for contractors, strenuous work for a boy who still did not
weigh a hundred pounds. During slack periods Cote stayed at
home and served as the family cook.
Cote played baseball, softball
and hockey in St. Hyacinthe, a rambunctious participant whose
tenacity belied his stature, but it was another sport, boxing,
that attracted him most in the early years.
"I was interested in boxing
because, in St. Hyacinthe, there was more boxing at that time
than anything else, all kinds and weights. Some fights were in
the Armory, and some kids were fighting in back yards, small
promotions, you know. It was everywhere. One night there was a
fight over here, another night over there, and so on. Five or
six places around, in back yards, there used to be fighting
and wrestling."
Cote laced on gloves and stepped
in the ring.
"I was about eighty-five pounds at first. no bigger than that.
but I was very strong. There was no coach to help you. You
think you were doing good if you punch some guy in the nose,
or something, and then you get two or three in the face.''
Like Walter Young, Cote
discovered running through boxing, taking to the roads to
build up stamina for the ring and finding when he did that he
was fast on his feet. A man from Montreal, a stranger to Cote,
watched him run one day and advised him to forget boxing and
become a competitive runner. Professional footraces were
common in Quebec at the time and the thought that he might
convert sport to money appealed to Cote. His first race, which
did not involve money, was one he helped organize himself,
beginning about eleven miles outside St. Hyacinthe and
covering the distance back to town. About three dozen runners
competed and Cote won.
St. Hyacinthe later became the
site of several professional races and when the first took
place Cote showed up at the starting line eager to go. But
instead he was taken aside by another man who was favored to
win the race, a weathered veteran who had raced all his life.
He reminded Cote that competing in the race would make him a
professional runner, unable for the rest of his life to
compete in amateur races.
"I'm an old man,'' he said. ''I
don't care if you beat me, but you're young. If I were you I
wouldn't run this race.''
Cote took the advice.
The man was Edouard Fabre.
Cote had two other brushes with
professionalism in his early athletic years, neither serious
enough to jeopardize his status as an amateur. The first was a
roller skating derby which he won and which was alleged to
have involved a small amount of money. It caused a brief stir
but was quickly forgotten. The second, potentially more
serious, was a ten-mile race advertising prizes based on gate
receipts. Fortunately for Cote the event was such a financial
flop that ticket sales totaled only three dollars and fifteen
cents. The event was cut to five miles and the winner awarded
one dollar and fifteen cents. Cote, who was second, was paid
off at the rate of twelve cents a mile, giving him a payday of
sixty cents and in purely technical terms making him a
professional. But he was absolved on the basis that he had
spent one dollar and sixty-five cents traveling back and forth
to the race. (62)
Cote ran dozens of amateur
races in and around St. Hyacinthe, some of the most memorable
being two-man relay events in which participants switched
every half-mile on the track. Crowds of up to two thousand
sometimes turned out. Clearer still in Cote's mind is the
first big race he ran in Montreal, a ten-mile event in March,
1932. Cote showed up in wool breeches, long underwear and
more— the laughing stock of everyone present.
"Imagine! All the other runners
were dressed lightly. Me? Two pair of socks, three sweat
shirts. Oh, was I sweating."
One of the people watching that
day was Pete Gavuzzi, a professional runner who two years
earlier, with Arthur Newton of South Africa, had run and won
the five-hundred-mile Peter Dawson relay race from Montreal to
Quebec City and back. Sponsored by Distillers Corp. Ltd. the
event featured ten thousand dollars in prize money. Gavuzzi
was surprised when Cote finished third in the Montreal race.
"Who is the little farmer?'' he
asked. "He is going to be a runner."
Pete Gavuzzi was an unusual
individual. A short slender man, he was born in Liverpool,
England, to an Italian father, who was once a chef to King
Umberto of Italy, and a French mother who had been a hotel
chambermaid in London. (63).
Gavuzzi spoke with a heavy British accent, his speech
punctuated with "blooming'' and ''blimeys'' that seemed not to
diminish in frequency through all the years he lived in
Montreal. The effect was even more bewildering when he
switched to French and turned his twang on Quebecois ears.
Always a professional runner,
Gavuzzi had a fearless appetite for competition and would
tackle any distance from a few to several hundred miles. He
ran each of the infamous Bunion Derbies, staged by American
promoter C.C. Pyle in 1928 and 1929, the first from Los
Angeles to New York and the other from New York to Los
Angeles. Gavuzzi lead the 1928 derby, a freakish road show in
which vaudeville acts and musicians entertained along with the
athletes, for a full three thousand miles before dropping out
with abscessed teeth. He placed second in 1929 — losing by two
minutes and forty-eight seconds.
Elmer Ferguson, sports editor
of the Montreal Daily Herald, recalled the 1929 race as one of
the epic sports sagas of the time.
"It carried runners from ocean
to ocean, over plains, hills, mountains, rivers, more plains,
across desert sands, and then more rockbound hills. It saw a
steadily-decreasing little band struggling grimly on, over
sunbaked roads, throats parched, agonized by endless effort,
feet burning, blistered, bleeding, lungs torn apart by the
effort, sand in their mouths. madness in their eyes. Before
them, like a mirage, dangled a fabulous purse as a reward for
this run that spanned the inroad continent, the purse they
never not."
C. C. Pyle, nicknamed cash and
Carry Pyle, was less a crook than a dreamer and schemer whose
reach exceeded his grasp. Andy Payne, a Cherokee Indian runner
from Claremore, Oklahoma, won the 1928 derby and collected the
twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize promised by Pyle but the
1929 derby ended in scandal.
Teetering on the brink of
bankruptcy and unable to pay the prizes as scheduled in Los
Angeles, Pyle handed one promissory note for $25,000 dollars
to the winner, New Jersey policeman Johnny Salo, and another
for $9,250 to Gavuzzi, each payable within six months. Each,
as it turned out, was worthless, neither runner ever
collecting a cent. Gavuzzi carrierd the note in his wallet for
years, creased with age, stained with memories, occasionally
drawing it out to gaze upon and reminisce. ''I might as well
have my amateur standing as be stuck with this thing,'' he
would say, his voice trailing away. "But I was never an
amateur." (64)
Distillers Corp. Ltd., a more
credible sponsor than Pyle, paid the prize it promised when
Gavuzzi ran his greatest professional race apart from the
derbies, the five-hundred-mile Peter Dawson relay race over
the Quebec countryside with Arthur Newton in 1930. They won by
more than two hours, defeating twenty-one rival teams from
across Canada, the United States, Finland and Australia. Their
elapsed time for six days: forty-eight hours and four minutes.
Gavuzzi never retired from
professional races. They retired from him, the sport fading
into non-existence. In later years, before he returned to
England, he worked at an estate at Cap St. Jacques where a
club had been started by Armand Vincent, the man who managed
both the Green Stripe Snowshoe Marathon and the Peter Dawson
Relay for Distillers Corp. Ltd. "Pete always ran, never
walked, on his duties," Elmer Ferguson wrote. "He went
trotting about the big grounds and along the beaches, mile on
mile, while checking up at all the points, by day and night.
Tireless, graceful, smooth, Pete always ran. That's why he was
ranked as one of the all-time great distance runners."
(65)
When Vincent traveled to Europe
to manage a tour of National Hockey League teams Gavuzzi went
with him, lingering in Paris to train for the arduous
six-hundred-mile Tour de France bicycle race. He entered — as
a runner, later finding himself ensnared by the sweep of Nazi
troops through France in World War Two. He might have
bargained for freedom by presenting himself as an Italian, but
steadfastly refused. ''I am a British citizen," he declared
(66), waving his passport to prove
it.
Imprisoned, he was confined at
Sarthe, near Le Mans. Friends managed to send fruit, and
tobacco for his pipe, and Gavuzzi wrote letters of thanks.
After France was liberated, Gavuzzi went home to England where
visiting Canadian acquaintances would occasionally track him
down. One who did was Gerard Cote, who crossed the Atlantic
twice, first for the war and later for the London Olympics of
1948. Like Walter Young, Cote owed much of his success to
Gavuzzi.
Cote came under Gavuzzi's
tutelage in 1935, three years after the bemused Englishman
watched Cote labor sweatily to the finish in his first
Montreal race. Gavuzzi was working primarily with Walter Young
at the time but he saw promise in the cheerful little runner
from St. Hyacinthe and sometimes offered advice. Cote had a
carefree streak in his character, an appealing spunk that
showed in the eyes, flashing as they did with mischief and
laughter. As they got to know one another Cote traveled to
Montreal to train with Gavuzzi and Young, heading off with
them on long meandering jaunts. They were an arresting sight,
the wiry Englishman joined on one side by a tall taciturn
welfare recipient, loping silently along, and on the other by
a sturdy little French-Canadian, prattling a blue streak.
Gavuzzi's basic training
theories never changed — "three hours slow is better than two
hours fast"—and he never wavered from his belief in teaching
by example.
"You had to follow him if you
wanted to learn something," says Cote. '`He was not a fellow
to say, 'Gerry, you're younger than I am. We won't do the same
thing.' No way! Sometimes I was running with him thirty-five,
even forty miles."
On November 29, 1935, Cote ran
the biggest race of his life to that point, the Yonkers
Marathon, revived that year for the first time since World War
I. It was a tough hilly race that attracted the top runners of
the day and it served as Cote's introduction to the two men
who would prove to be his greatest rivals, Johnny Kelley and
Pat Dengis.
While it was not apparent that
year, when Cote finished twelfth and attracted little notice,
the Yonkers Marathon was to play a major role in his years as
an athlete. He ran the race again in 1936 and finished second
to a runner named Mel Porter, the first of what proved to be
four frustrating years that Cote was the runner-up at Yonkers.
In 1937, 1938 and 1939 he ran second each year to another
runner, Pat Dengis of Baltimore. The near misses were
especially disappointing to Cote because Yonkers was the
marathon recognized as the American Amateur Athletic Union
championship. Better days were ahead at Yonkers for Cote but
they did not come until first he tasted victory in the Boston
Marathon.
Like Young, Cote was also a
snowshoe racer in the winter. He lowered Young's world
snowshoe record for ten miles to 1:03:00 from 1:06:23 in 1938.
Because of his association with Young he sometimes raced as a
member of the Marathon Athletic Club of Verdun, started by
Herve Ferland after his successful foray into marathon
sponsorship in 1937 when the Verdun mayor financed Young's way
to Boston.
Donat Cadieux, who looked after
the finances of both the Marathon Athletic Club and the Verdun
Police and Firemen's Athletic Association, recalled Cote as an
athlete obsessed with the Boston Marathon, especially after
Young's triumph in 1937. Cote often proclaimed openly that he
too would one day win the storied footrace. He tried several
times in the late 1930s to live up to his prediction, his best
race over the course being a seventh-place finish in 1937. But
he finally made his dream come true in 1940, his fifth Boston
Marathon.
Cote trained especially hard
for Boston that year, expecting to be called into the Canadian
military any day because of World War Two and thinking it
might be his last opportunity. He spent several weeks before
the race with a cousin, Charles Goulet, in Central Falls,
Rhode Island, partly because the climate was warmer, partly
because of the terrain.
"You know what I was doing? I
was running twenty-six miles once a week, twenty-six hills in
twenty-six miles. Stronger hills than at Boston. And I was
training with a track suit and heavy running shoes. The track
suit, it stick to my body because it was too warm. I was
running 2:40. I knew when I got all that stuff off, wearing
just the small running shoes I used to wear, I knew I would do
okay.''
In Boston, Cote stayed at the
Lenox Hotel where the manager, Walter Seaver, who had taken a
personal interest in Cote in previous years, provided a free
room. Cote liked Boston. He was comfortable with the city
after all the times he had raced there and he was comfortable
among the runners he raced against. They sometimes made fun of
his English with its clipped sentences and scrambled verb
tenses but he knew he was welcome in their midst.
"There is a saying that the
Irish don't like French-Canadians. It's not true. They like a
person who is like them. If you joke with them and so on they
enjoy it very much. When they try to explain something to you
they're worse than the Frenchman, always speaking with their
hands. So you laugh."
Johnny Kelley, sportsman that
he was, tried to laugh on Patriot's Day in 1940 but it wasn't
easy with yet another Canadian relegating him to second place.
Fortified by a pound of beefsteak, two potatoes, bread and tea
eaten three hours before the start, Cote won the race easily.
The lowest he stood at any point was fifth.
The defending champion in 1940,
and the runner many sports writers favored, was Ellison
(Tarzan) Brown (b), a
mercurial Indian runner from Rhode Island. An impulsive man,
Brown did not always train seriously for Boston, and in the
race itself he was apt to do anything. On one occasion,
running with the leaders and looking the fittest of the lot,
he spied a lake at Natick and dived in, happily waving goodbye
to the field as he bobbed in the water. The lake was more
inviting than a further sixteen miles of running
(67). In 1940, also in the thick of
the fight, Brown gulped down two ice cream bars in the Newton
Hills, then promptly fell ill and dropped out.
Cresting Heartbreak Hill at
twenty-one miles in the 1940 race, with throngs gathered and
screaming as usual, the leaders were Kelley and Rob Rankin of
Toronto with Cote biding his time in third. Descending the
long slope beyond, Kelley aggravated a tendon in his left leg
and fell back momentarily, allowing Rankin a slight advantage.
But Kelley won back the distance on the flat beyond, pressing
past Rankin and into the lead at the same time that Cote was
preparing to challenge them both. Kelley's hopes soared
briefly as Rankin began to slow but Cote had begun to move.
His legs still full of running after climbing with ease up the
Newton Hills, he overtook the faltering Rankin and then closed
in on Kelley. Past Cleveland Circle, at the intersection of
Beacon Street and Dean Road, he swept by the lanky American
and the race was over.
At Beacon and Washington Cote
led by seventy-five yards, at Coolidge Corner by a quarter
mile, and at St. Paul Street he was half a mile in front, his
step quick, light, sure. When he flashed through Kenmore
Square his pace was the fastest it had been all day. Turning
up Exeter Street he sped through an outstretched strand of
yellow yarn at the finish line in 2:28:28 3/5, a new course
record. Kelley was second in 2:32:00, Don Heinicke of
Baltimore third in 2:32:21 and Rankin a distant eighth in
2:37:34.
Cote wore the laurel wreath at
last and Boston in turn beheld the new champion who had been
thrust into the limelight, surprised at the style and flair he
exhibited in victory, especially in his choice of clothes.
"Never has there been a more
dapper appearing marathon victor than this debonair
French-Canadian,'' said the Boston Post. "Nonchalant, relaxed,
he came up the stairs to the rotunda of what is the new Soden
building, looking as if he was stepping off to the horse races
at Narragansett. His polo coat was of the newest cut and
finest material. Beneath it he wore a light worsted suit of
the latest model, combining well with the beige of his polo
coat. His dark brown felt hat was an expensive one. His tan
shoes, in keeping with the whole, were of a notably soft
leather to favor his running feet. He wore a Scotch tie of
red, green and white plaid that was like a headlight. He could
not name its clan but it lighted up his lean hawk-like face
and his dark-brown eyes, and gave his white teeth, which are
especially handsome, quite a set-off."
(68)
That night Cote celebrated by
dancing until close to dawn at Boston clubs, yet he was up at
seven in the morning for a walk about the city, returning
afterward to a full breakfast in his room at the Lenox.
Reporters were admitted and, lighting his pipe, he sat on the
bed and answered questions.
"I feel fine today. In fact I
could go out and run another marathon and I think I could hold
up with any of them. l don't know whether I will ever win
another one but I've won once. That will hold me fore while."
(69)
In his next race, the Salisbury
Beach Marathon on May 30, 1940, Cote was badly beaten by
Tarzan Brown and he managed to fare no better than third at
the Port Chester, New York, marathon in October. But the story
was different when Cote returned for his fifth test in the
Yonkers Marathon on November 10, 1940.
There was a poignancy about
Yonkers that year. Pat Dengis, the defending champion, the man
who had won the race the last three years and set a course
record in 1939, was absent, killed the previous December when
a small plane in which he was flying sputtered and died over
Baltimore, nosediving into a field (70).
Cote was favored to win in his place.
The race began with a loop of
the Empire City racetrack, setting off on a rambling route
through the surrounding towns of Chauncy, Elmsford and
Hartsdale, and ending back at the track with four one-mile
laps before assembled spectators. Victory turned out to be
easy for Cote but he claimed it in a gallant manner, the
memory etched in the minds of all who saw.
Dengis' widow, there in his
place, followed the race by car, watching as Cote took command
and pulled away into an insurmountable lead. As he neared the
Empire City track for the finish, the last of the long
punishing hills behind, his nearest rival being Lou Gregory of
New York far to the rear, the car pulled alongside and Mrs.
Dengis stood up and shouted.
"Turn it on, Gerard!'' she
called. "You'll beat Pat's record."
(71)
Cote was wearing a wrist watch
and knew she was right. It was obvious as he swung onto the
track, and the car carrying Mrs. Dengis headed for the finish
line, that he could wipe away the record of the man who had so
bedeviled him. But he chose not to.
A softness crept into Cote's
stride as he started the final four miles, the softness
becoming a perceptible slowing and then dissolving to a lazy
lope. Lou Gregory hove into view and circled the track in
chase, the gap between them narrowing steadily. Cote checked
the hands of his watch and glanced alternately over his
shoulder, still cantering at the same lackadaisical pace. A
few yards from the end the record ticked from reach. Cote
crossed the finish line in 2:34:06, twenty-one seconds short
of Dengis' time, a mark which stood until 1955.
Cote recalls the day clearly.
"It was not a big thing but
they mentioned it. I was really rolling. l could have made
about 2:30, I think."
For winning America's two
oldest marathons (c), Cote
was awarded the Lou Marsh trophy, presented each year by The
Toronto Star in memory of its renowned sports editor. The
ceremony took place in the book-lined, picture-hung Star
library and was presided over by E.R.E. Chevrier, a bilingual
justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
"You have been found worthy of
being proclaimed the most outstanding athlete of the year
1940," Chevrier said. "Forever remember this day. Be proud of
it. You have brought fame to yourself, to the Canadian world
of sport, to Canada's young manhood, to your province.''
J.E. Atkinson, president of the
newspaper, spoke of the universal qualities inherent in all
high achievement.
"Success is not won in
competitive sport without the possession of qualities of
character that are in fact the foundation of success whatever
activity men engage in. In business or profession, in trade or
craft, he who would reach the top must possess certain
qualities. He must have ambition that drives him year after
year and a firmness of will that keeps him at it when the
ceaseless labor of preparation would weary and weaken his
purpose. And with this there must be sound judgment, what with
regard to Mr. Cote is called 'good timing,' knowing when to
exert his strength and when to save it. These are the sources
of success, not only in the kind of marathons which Mr. Cote
has won and we are applauding this evening, but also the
secret of success in the marathons in which we all in one
sphere or another are engaged." (72)
Nora McCarthy, the women's
figure skating champion of Canada, was runner-up to Cote for
the trophy. Cote appeared at her side as she was putting on
her coat to leave, grasping her hand and wheeling with a
flourish toward the cameras. Flash bulbs flared as they posed
smiling broadly.
Cote was also a hero in St.
Hyacinthe. Before the Boston Marathon of 1940 he had been
making his living as a newspaper distributor. Afterward, a
grill was named in his honor and he was hired to mingle with
customers, lending the establishment the status of his
athletic celebrity. Cote would light his pipe or puff a cigar
and quaff beer with customers. But the job came to an abrupt
end when Quebecers voted in the next election.
"At that time when the
government changed they changed licences. The fellow that give
me the job was Bouchard, one of the ministers there in Quebec.
When they changed they lost the licence. It was (Maurice)
Duplessis' time."
Cote married Lucille Lemoine of
Montreal in 1941 and they began to raise a family. He had
expected to be called into military service in 1940 but the
call did not come until 1942. When it did he was stationed
first at Valleyfield, Quebec, as a physical education
instructor, and assigned later to war duties in a munitions
plant at Ste. Therese, supervising the loading of
five-hundred-pound, cordite-packed bombs onto trains. He lived
in Montreal and sometimes ran the twenty-five miles to the
munitions plant.
The early 1940s were a period
of mild athletic decline by Cote's standards. He ran third at
Boston and fourth at Yonkers in 1941 and placed sixth and
third respectively in the two races the following year. But by
1943 he was back in form with a vengeance, winning them both
once again.
Cote went to Boston in 1943 as
Sergeant Gerard Cote, the Canadian Army's most accomplished
athlete. He was rated among the favorites with runners like
Johnny Kelley, then a U.S. Army private, and Les Pawson, a
Providence, Rhode Island, shipyard worker. All three were
former Boston winners, Pawson twice. Cote and Kelley once
each.
Cote strained an Achilles
tendon five days before the race, his heart sinking when it
happened, but he breathed not a word to anyone, going to
Hopkinton on Patriot's Day as though prepared for the race of
his life. He was in agony from the moment the gun sounded but
betrayed no sign of pain, afraid it would give his rivals the
confidence to break away if he did. The Newton Hills were
especially difficult but Cote found himself with the leaders
as he ran through them, the competition coming as expected
from Pawson and Kelley. Pawson fell back as they climbed the
grades but Cote and Kelley were still side by side as they
crested Heartbreak Hill and pushed into the city along Beacon
Street. Once again, though, Kelley had exhausted himself on
the hills. When he wavered, Cote was gone.
Cote ran the final four miles
without once changing expression or glancing behind, crossing
the finish line to victory in 2:28:25 with the tendon
complaining so hotly he could scarcely withstand it. A knot of
exuberant Army pals swept him off his feet, as Kelley arrived,
second again, in 2:30:04 with Fred McGlone of Boston, the U.S.
national champion of the day, crossing the line third just
thirty-five seconds later.
"I have never felt such pain,"
Cote said. ''Going out to the start I was only with my wife. I
did not want to talk to anyone. My wife did not have much to
say either but I knew she was thinking of me. I felt every
step." (73)
The Yonkers Marathon that fall,
November 7, 1943, was taxing in another respect, the fierce
competition. The top five runners crossed the finish line
within a minute of each other, making it one of the closest
marathon races ever. Cote edged Fred McGlone 2:38:35 to
2:39:08 to win.
Cote's army superiors basked in
his success. He had worn army colors and photographs of the
accomplished sergeant were published across the country. But
the army's attitude changed quickly when complaints rolled in
from the families of other servicemen, most convinced that the
runner was being given special treatment. An edict followed
forbidding soldiers to compete in athletic events outside the
army, thus placing Cote in a quandary when it came time to
defend his title in the Boston Marathon of 1944. He solved the
problem by taking personal leave, hanging up his army colors
and traveling to Boston privately, his expenses paid by
Montreal sportsman Frank De Rice, a restaurant owner who
accompanied him.
The 1944 race was another
dramatic struggle between Cote and Kelley, a neck and neck
race to the bitter end with Cote winning by a sprint. Just
thirteen seconds separated the two men at the finish line,
Cote crossing in 2:31:50 and Kelley following at 2:32:03.
Kelley slumped in the BAA Clubhouse, unable to believe the
jinx that was upon him. For the sixth time he was second.
Charles Robbins, with the U.S. Navy in Sampson, New York, was
third in 2:38:31.
The Boston Record described the
struggle between Kelley and Cote.
''At Coolidge Corner Kelley
suddenly found another reserve of strength and pulled away a
few yards. Then Cote showed that he too could fight back, that
he would not quit. He recovered the grim little distance that
stood between them so that they raced through Kenmore Square
shoulder to shoulder as packed thousands cheered. Somebody had
to break sooner or later and it was the frail Kelley who did
so. Suddenly he could stand it no more. Suddenly the
accumulation of the strain was too much to bear. Suddenly he
faltered and in an instant the unbreakable Cote was five yards
in front, dousing his head with water and looking back over
his shoulder at the man who had challenged once again, and
once again had failed."
When Cote returned to Quebec,
now stationed at St. Jerome, he was greeted not by acclaim but
an angry blast from the army, the fact that he had won the
marathon impressing no one any more than did his idea of going
privately to the race with De Rice An army general in Ottawa
ordered Cote sent overseas for violating regulations.
He was transferred to England,
deprived of the chance to run Boston in 1945 and attempting to
duplicate Clarence DeMar's feat of three straight Boston
victories (d). One who did
not mourn his absence from the race was Johnny Kelley who
finally won the marathon again, ten long years after having
tasted victory the first time. In England, Cote found that the
transfer was the extent of his army punishment. Once there he
was allowed to train and race as much as he liked, the army
satisfied that no one could complain as long as he was
somewhere across the Atlantic. Cote won three marathons in
England before the war ended and he was discharged from
service in 1946.
He returned to St. Hyacinthe
and found work, first as a security guard and later as an
orderly at a veterans' hospital. He settled with his wife and
family, three girls and one boy, in nearby Ste. Rosalie. The
hours were long and it was difficult to train as he had in the
army but Cote never stopped running. For a while, when he
worked a split shift, he ran in the afternoons. When his hours
were more normal he ran early or late. Often a car would round
a turn on the road to St. Damas, south of St. Hyacinthe, and
the headlights would catch the figure of a small man running
alone. It was Cote, always Cote.
Cote won the Yonkers Marathon
once more, in 1946, matching the three victories by Pat Dengis,
if not the late runner's course record, and so also did one
more win await at Boston, the last and most controversial of
his conquests over the road from Hopkinton.
The year was 1948 and Cote
almost came to blows that Patriot's Day with the man he
defeated en route to victory, Ted Vogel of Watertown, New
York. Vogel was the Yonkers champion of 1947 and the reigning
U.S. marathon champion. Again, as so often, the Newton Hills
figured strongly in the outcome, Cote and Vogel fighting each
other up each asphalt rise. A hot exchange of words took place
in the course of the struggle, out of earshot of reporters
covering the race, and Vogel momentarily doubled a fist. But
the race went on. The American clung to Cote's heels up the
last steep hill to Boston College but drained his body doing
so. When Cote surged soon afterward on the flat along Beacon
Street Vogel lacked the strength to follow. Cote ran on to
easy victory, spying a friend in the window of the Lenox Hotel
as he coasted up Exeter Street to the finish line.
"Charlie,'' he called out,
"Come down here, and bring me a beer."
Cote triumphed in 2:31:02,
defeating Vogel by forty-four seconds. As he followed Cote
across the finish line, the American stormed angrily into the
BAA Clubhouse to complain.
"Once he stepped on my heel in
the race,'' Vogel alleged. ''Then he kept crossing in front of
me. He took a paper container of ice water and threw it over
his head onto my legs. The final thing was when he ran right
across my path in Newton. I told him I'd slug him if he tried
it again." (74)
Cote maintained innocence.
"You tell me that I bumped into
Ted Vogel while we were running. It's true. We bumped a little
bit twice but it was an accident. Also, I have a habit, as you
could see, of sprinkling myself with water during the race.
Once when I did this some of the water fell on Vogel's legs.
That made him a little mad, I guess, but it was nothing but an
accident." (75)
There was no changing the
outcome, however. Cote had his fourth victory and if that left
him second to Clarence DeMar's unmatchable tally of seven Cote
could at least claim one distinction. All four of his
victories stretched the full marathon distance of 26 miles,
385 yards. Four of DeMar's wins occurred before the course was
lengthened to the recognized international standard.
(e)
Probably no athlete in all of
Canadian sport had so excelled at his discipline as had Cote
in the fickle, fatiguing marathon. In sheer performance, so
many victories over so many years, Cote was indeed without
peer, concluded Elmer Ferguson. Yet Cote, because marathoning
had fallen out of favor with the public at large, was among
the least acclaimed of all Canada's champions at Boston. The
contrast between his homecomings and those of other returning
sports heros was noted by Ferguson in his long-running column,
The Gist and the Jest of It.
"This is a tale of two
athletes,'' Ferguson wrote.
"Barbara Ann Scott is here,
awaiting her engagement at the end of the week in the
Kinsmen's sell-out skating show at the Forum. Barbara Ann is
the greatest girl skater that Canada has ever sent into
international competition. This lovely little sprite of the
ice is living en suite at a local hotel, showered with gifts,
with flowers and candy, with offers to go into the movies, or
into the big ice shows at fabulous figures. Movie and ice-show
representatives are knocking at her door, their hands almost
literally crowded with bills of large and coarse denomination.
Barbara Ann can just about name her own figures to sign any of
these proffered contracts on the dotted line.
''That's one side of the
picture. On the other, Gerard Cote, a Canadian Olympic
certainty, came quietly into the city last night, after
scoring his fourth triumph in this continent's classic of
distance running, the Boston Marathon. There was no organized
reception for Cote. There were no movie offers, no gifts. A
few friends met him. Perhaps a civic reception will come
later. He ate a steak with friends, went on local radio, went
home. That is the way Cote would like it. For he is a quiet
chap, in the best French-Canadian tradition, and has been
around sports long enough to know that glamour is a passing
thing, that you're a hero today, forgotten tomorrow."
(76)
Because of the war, the Olympic
Games that were to have been held in 1940 and 1944 were
cancelled, depriving Cote of the chance to run for Canada as
an Olympian. So he set out at age thirty-five to make the team
for the Games of 1948 at London. His victory at Boston
notwithstanding, Canadian organizers insisted that he qualify
in the national marathon trial that June. Cote had no
objection but there was a personal problem that interfered.
When he won at Boston in April,
he also won passage to a marathon in May at Los Angeles and he
had promised his wife they would make the trip, even if it
meant competing in too many marathons before the Olympics.
They went and he ran, adding yet another triumph to his string
of marathons, but he remembers the race more for its slapstick
finish than anything else. Workers closed the gates when
marathoners departed the Los Angeles Coliseum and were slow to
open them for their return. Cote had to fight his way inside
and then found himself tangled up in a hurdles race. He
finished in 2:42:07, shaking his head as he lighted a cigar to
celebrate.
Exhaustion did not strike Cote
in the Canadian trial, run June 12, 1948, at Hamilton
(77). He won without difficulty in
a surprisingly slow time of 2:46:06. But the strain of the
three spring marathons caught up to him when the Olympic
marathon was run August 7,1948, over what Cote rated as the
toughest course of his long career, the hills through the
British countryside dwarfing those of Boston and even Yonkers.
He ran seventeenth in 2:48:31.
Cote ran competitively for
another eight years but there were no more major marathon
victories. In the British Empire Games at Auckland, New
Zealand, in 1950, he was eleventh, and four years later when
the same games were held in Vancouver he dropped out of the
race with a sudden illness, the only marathon in his life he
failed to finish.
When he stopped racing in 1956
he had run two hundred and fifty-six races, including
seventy-five marathons. They encompassed an astonishing one
hundred and twelve firsts, fifty-six seconds and twenty-six
third-place finishes, his standing in none dropping lower than
twenty-third with the exception of the marathon in Vancouver.
The year he retired he was also named a member of Canada's
Sports Hall of Fame.
The veterans' hospital at St.
Hyacinthe closed down in the mid-1950s, again leaving Cote to
search for work. Resilient as always he showed up on the
advertising staff of a St. Hyacinthe weekly newspaper, a trade
that occupied him until retirement in 1981.
Cote was invited back to Boston
by the BAA in 1980 on the fortieth anniversary of his first
marathon triumph, the day Bill Rodgers swept to his fourth
Boston title. The two four-time champions held arms aloft on
the podium at the finish line for cameras. But the day was not
the joy it should have been. Cote also watched a fellow
Quebecer, Jacqueline Gareau, the first Canadian woman to win
at Boston since the addition of a women's division in 1972,
fall victim to an imposter named Rosie Ruiz.
Jarring as well to Cote was the
shift of the finish line. His beloved BAA Clubhouse was gone,
replaced by the concrete Boston Public Library, and the race
no longer ended in the familiar aisle of Exeter Street but at
the foot of the tall icy Prudential Centre on Boylston.
"It's not the same. It's too
big. Maybe there are too many faces, too many runners. There's
thousands and thousands. You don't know how to take that. You
go inside of that Prudential, down in the garage. It's
impossible. It makes no sense at all. It's full of water, it's
dirty, it's full of runners. It would make a good race with
about two thousand, the best runners. Now it's not the best."
Cote is a realist, however. He
knows his vision of the Boston Marathon has passed into
history and he has never been one to dwell on the past, a fact
evident from what has become of his Boston medals.
The diamonds have been removed
from three of them, converted into a ring that glitters on the
hand of his wife. The remaining medal, the one he won in 1948,
is stored in a tin box he pulls from a closet. On special
occasions he wears it on a chain around his neck. Rattling in
the same storage place are a handful of other medals,
including one from Yonkers. A large cabinet stretches across
one end of the Cote kitchen, filled with trophies. Most could
use some polish, including the Lou Marsh trophy. Cote sighs at
the work it would take. There are photographs and a scrapbook
bulges with newspaper clippings. Only now and then, when
visitors come to see, does he pull them out.
The widespread publicity of
running in the 1970s and 1980s has rekindled interest in Cote
and his achievements. Loto-Quebec, the provincial lottery,
features Cote at races it sponsors, and Ste. Rosalie has named
a modem recreation pavilion in his honor. He continues to run,
covering five or six miles a day, winter and summer. The years
have slowed his pace but he still runs hard, needing the feel
that exertion brings. A slower gait would do for health but
it's not his nature. In his lifetime Cote has run more than
one hundred thousand miles.
Once, a long time ago when he
was at the height of his athletic powers, he was asked the
meaning of victory. He spoke instead of the meaning of defeat.
"If I am beaten the next time I
run, I do not mind. If you have a salad that is all one thing,
all lettuce, it is not good. It has no flavor. So victory,
always, would be flat. You must mix it with defeat to gain the
flavor."
Footnotes
(a)
Portions of this chapter are based on an interview with Cote
at his home in Ste. Rosalie, Quebec. on January 19, 1982. (b)
Brown won the Boston Marathon in 1936 and 1939.
(c) The Boston Marathon
was started in 1897, Yonkers in 1907.
(d) DeMar won the 1922,
1923 and 1924 Boston Marathons. Bill Rodgers equalled the feat
in 1978, 1979 and 1980.
(e) Bill Rodgers equalled
Cote's achievement with wins in 1975, 1978. 1979 and 1980. |
