Ten Notes on the Men’s 20KM Race Walk of the 1984 Summer Olympics, As If It Were Now

The pandemic has ruptured our physical proximity to other bodies. A byproduct of this distancing has been the near-complete cessation of sporting events. Throughout the recurring lockdowns, I have been watching archival replays of sporting event footage, from other times that were not plague times. In doing so I posed an experiment: to develop a set of notes directed towards a piece of this out-of-time footage, thereby attempting to emotionally and affectively engage with the event as if it remained in its original, intended, live state.

I have been watching a lot of race walking events. I am drawn to race walking because of its emphasis on repetition and constraint, and because of the unique postures this sport asks a participating body to produce. I have Tourette’s Syndrome. This condition causes my body to move in unexpected ways without me explicitly wishing for those movements to occur. I have been thinking through the ramifications of this impairment by considering physical gesture and constraint in other contexts. Tourette’s, in a sense, demands a set of gestures from my body that are determined by the condition’s arbitrary demands. I’m interested in how this system of constraint, demand, and gesture relates to sport insofar as an activity like race walking is also that of a body moving according to specifically delineated constraints and rules. This adherence (in the case of sport, a voluntary adherence—an important difference to note when drawing a connection to disability) shapes the body that is subject to those rules, forming that body’s gestures and the shapes it makes as it moves.

Two rules form the shapes a body makes while that body race walks. First, during the extension of the stride, the toes of the foot in the rear are not permitted to lift from the ground before the heel of the forward foot has landed. The other rule determines that as the heel of that front foot touches down, the leg attached to it must straighten underneath the weight of the torso and remain erect like that until the bulk of the body glides overtop. These rules can be read as the material contours of the sport’s two simultaneous and, therefore, paradoxical fixations—maximum velocity and the prevention of embodied flight.

The event replay I am watching is an ABC broadcast of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles featuring the Men’s 20KM Race Walk event. The clip is eight minutes and fifty-one seconds long, whereas the event itself took approximately an hour and a half for the walkers to complete. I watched the footage fourteen times in writing this and, in doing so, extended the duration of the severely truncated clip to nearly correspond to the original length of the live event.

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At 0:08 the footage is all boiling forms. The walkers assemble themselves at the start line, pacing and bending, jumping in place. Many partake in a popular stretch wherein the body folds over all floppy from the hips, the head lolling down toward the feet—its weight rolling around down there drunken-like, making the rest of the body it is attached to stretch full up the backside.

0:14 The preparatory jiggling of the walkers is obscured underneath an overlaid infographic. The infographic is a text describing two previous all-time records for this same event. The first is for the preceding Olympic Games held in Moscow in 1980, and the other for a certified world record from earlier in the same year: 1984. From my own position of relative contemporaneity, I can read these records as proofs of old velocities, as if the speeds reached in these past walks were sediments of speeds-achieved, left to be covered over with other records of athletic hurry that eventually, in their accumulative puffy layers, reach me in my present tense of watching the walkers go.

By 2:16 the race walk has begun with the athletes immediately rounding the first arc of the track. Here the footage briefly loses comprehensive fidelity. The walkers go all light and slim, seeming to stretch—skeletal, turning see-through like cartoon ghosts under the strain of their activity and the weight of that sunny day in Los Angeles.

To me, the walkers look like sunlight itself, like moving allegories for the breeze and heat of the beach near where they are walking now—the walkers a series of lean mirrors reflecting the slinky glow from other sunny spots. In fact, if the walkers changed course, they could reach a beach. They could speed along from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to Venice Beach. A digital map tells me it would take four hours to do so, however, it would cost these powerful walkers far less time to reach those waters and balmy sands.

After a review of the rules, I attempted the movements myself. I tried walking like a race walker walks today in the park. A kind of sympathetic embodiment via private mimicry. The results were startling, exhilarating. The gestures, when brought about in my own body, felt somehow pictorial, as if I was inhabiting some other image. I was a kind of fleshy, breathing footage of my own making.

I have been watching the walkers in the footage closely. Increasingly, to me, their stupendous gait looks like the imitation of some other action or event wholly unrelated to walking itself. Like an elaborate act of pantomime cor- responding to another thing totally unknown. But the efforts of their expression go on, building upon themselves in these circuits all around sunny Los Angeles in 1984.

3:06 provides a panoramic view of four event officials, with a fifth possibly emerging towards the upper left of the frame—though I can’t be sure due to the crumbly fracturing of the footage. Fanned out in perspective like this on the pastoral ground of the track makes them like a living variant of some painting.¹ If I titled this painting for the world of this frame that these figures make and are, I would name it The Marmalade Men and their Many Sore Burdens. I would title the painting like this for the officials’ matching marmalade sport-jackets, khaki trousers, their merry fedoras, and the shimmering spaces of their mirrored black sunglasses. The glow of their costume oddly meets with their endless irritability and impatience, with the agitated labour they enact in attempting to contain and direct the wobbly euphoria of the walkers doing their thing.

I have experienced, through repeated and unfortunate epi- sodes, the bad reactions of some viewers when confronted with the movements and noises of my body as my body is animated by the symptoms of Tourette’s Syndrome. These reactions move between revulsion and laughter, as my spectator (presumably) traverses between a horror of unknowing and a comedy of apparent gestural errors. Race walkers seem to attract a similar kind of attention when moving in the way that race walking would have them move. The remarks of the event commentators from 2:17–3:33 reveal this: “…more than any other event in the sport, uh, this is more…closer to a religion than a sport…these, guys, when they’re out training on the roads are always getting persecuted so to speak, people see them walking down the road…and they go through that every day.”² Followed later, at 3:01: “…as they came into the stadium to warm up, there was this big burst of laughter…well sure, it’s a funny-looking gait they maintain….”³ I would like to share some theories about these reactions to the race walkers:

A: Might the race walkers’ movements carry some innate erotic charge causing this inexplicable disquiet in a generic onlooker? The rocking undulation of the hips and the ass caused by the extreme quality of the walkers’ gait, suggesting an almost psychedelic genital sway, a sway that is transmuted to the entirety of the walking body—rendering a total and gyrating sex moving at great speed through the glare of the sun?

B: Could the clear desire for total speed when paired with the arbitrary constraints enforced by the restrictions of the race walking method cause a kind of reflective tension in those who spectate those methods? Could this frustrated system of gestures form a tautness in another body that demands an ugly release that the sickly euphoria of derision or laughter provides?

At 6:52 a rapid pan between scenes is marked with a glowing vertical line crowned with the Olympic rings crossing the frame horizontally from left to right. The action of this graphic divides the beginning of the race walking event and the beginning of the end of that event. It is the object that marks the truncation of a physical effort that took one and a half hours to complete being cut down to fit within a segment just under nine minutes long. So, the footage is a truncation holding another truncation, the second being the conscious restraint the walkers apply to their legs in order to prevent themselves from breaking into a jog. In this way, the clip becomes a paradoxical object with the footage itself and the actions it is meant to exhibit both locked between sensational expression and restraint.

7:07 concludes the first-place walk with Ernesto Canto winning the gold medal on behalf of Mexico. As celebrations grip the stadium, the camera pans and manages to catch a racist attack in progress as a spectator rips the Mexican flag from someone’s hands—this is described as a “…little fracas…” by the commentator.⁴ The camera moves off and again finds Canto, whose legs now move around like gorgeous jelly after his massive exertion. He paces across the track now—though with a moderate gait—no longer concerned with those fantastic speeds.

Derek Coulombe is a Toronto-based PhD candidate at York University working within the Visual Arts department. His research interests circulate around found photography, writing, and relationships between visuality, physicality, and disability.

Feature image: Derek Coulombe, Walker Still 3, 2021. Digital image.

1. Georges Seurat, “Study for ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,’ 1884,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed November 20, 2020, https://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437658.
2. 1984 Olympic Games Track and Field – Men’s 20 Kilometer Walk, (1984: ABC), video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzOCAB6EzZQ&ab_channel=westnyacktwins.
3. 1984 Olympic Games Track and Field – Men’s 20 Kilometer Walk.
4. 1984 Olympic Games Track and Field – Men’s 20 Kilometer Walk.

This article is published in issue 38.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue