Soaring to a higher plane

High jumper John Thomas was known for his great rivalry with Valery Brumel

Valery Brumel was just beginning to find success as a high jumper in the Soviet Union when he read in a Russian sports newspaper that a 17-year-old American had jumped 6 feet 7 inches (2.06 metres) –  higher than Brumel’s best leap. He said he told himself, “You’re not so hot.”

So began one of the great rivalries in track and field. The American, John Thomas, who died last Tuesday, would become a spectacular high jumper. He was the first to jump 7 feet (2.13 metres) indoors. He held the world outdoor record three times, cleared 7 feet 191 times and lost in only eight competitions. Thomas died while undergoing vascular surgery, his family said. He was 71.

Twice – in Rome in 1960 and in Tokyo in 1964 – Thomas was favoured to win an Olympic gold medal. In both Summer Games, he jumped high enough to have won any previous Olympics. Both times, he was edged by Brumel.

The rivalry was so intense that Brumel could not stand to watch Thomas jump. He would turn the other way. “Why get yourself excited?” he told Sports Illustrated.

The competition transcended sports. It came at the height of the Cold War, when sport was often another arena for ideological struggle. Tens of thousands of partisans cheered on Brumel and his teammates at Lenin Stadium in Moscow; tens of thousands rooted for Thomas and his teammates at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Television magnified the phenomenon.

Brumel ultimately won their epic battle. He held the world record six times, was ranked first in the world among high jumpers from 1961 through 1965 and lost only once to Thomas. And yet Thomas and Brumel became lifelong friends. Brumel died in 2003.

“John Thomas and Valery Brumel were Bird versus Magic, Borg versus McEnroe, capitalism versus communism,” Wayne Coffey wrote in The New York Daily News in 2011. “They competed all over the world with massive political overlays. Brumel thoroughly dominated, but the theater was impossible to beat.”

Some US sports commentators who had trumpeted Thomas’ invincibility did not forgive him for his defeats.

“These are the people I consider armchair athletes,” Thomas told The Daily News in 2004. “Do good, and they are with you, and do bad, and they turn against you.”

The criticism stung. “John took some heavy blows, and he took it to heart,” Phil Shinnick, a long jumper in the 1964 Summer Olympics, told The Daily News. “People were really hammering him, and it was distasteful to him.”

Brumel, for one, defended his friend, telling Sports Illustrated that “the torrent of abuse” was unfair.

John Curtis Thomas was born in Boston on March 3, 1941. His father was a bus driver. John became an Eagle Scout and a star athlete in high school and at Boston University, from which he graduated in 1963.

In 1959, he was a 17-year-old freshman at the university when he became the first person to jump 7 feet indoors, clearing the bar at the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden. The games’ organisers selected it as the most thrilling moment in the event’s history. Thomas won five more Millrose titles, and the high jump event was named for him.

Two months after the Millrose moment, Thomas mangled his foot in an elevator accident. He recovered to compete in Boston in January 1960 and win. By the time of the Rome Olympics, he was considered the surest bet for a gold medal. After placing first in the qualifying event, he finished third in the final, taking the bronze medal behind another Soviet competitor, Robert Shavlakadze, who won the gold medal, and Brumel, who won the silver.

“Losing didn’t bother me,” Thomas said in an interview with The New York Times in 1982, “but what did bother me was, a lot of people who were around me suddenly disappeared.”

In 1964, he had sustained a hernia when he won a silver medal in the Tokyo Olympics on a countback after clearing the same height as Brumel but kept it a secret for years.  “He was hurt by those losses to Brumel,” his coach, Tom Duffy, told The Associated Press after the Tokyo games. “He was too young for that kind of competition. But when you’re the best your country has, what can you do?

“And make no mistake,” Duffy added, “he’s the best this country has.”

Thomas’ marriage to Delores Souza ended in divorce. In his later years, Thomas worked in sports administration, public relations and advertising. He also coached and retired as athletic director of Roxbury Community College in Massachusetts. By then, the anguish he had felt from his narrow defeats had long passed, he said.

“The pain is getting old, and not being able to do it anymore.”