A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
By one of those felicitous coincidences which gives rise to columns like this, the accreditation form for the world cross country champs in Poland in March arrived on the same day as news broke that Toyota was recalling millions of vehicles worldwide, due to accelerator pedals sticking to the floor.
Nothing felicitous about that, of course. The horrific result of such a malfunction in the USA was reported in one of the British papers this week. A man driving with a friend and his family made a panic stricken call to the 911 emergency service. “We’re in a Lexus…going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck….we’re in trouble…there’s no brakes…we’re approaching an intersection…hold on…hold on and pray”. The call ended with the sound of a crash, that killed all four in the car.
The last time the world cross was in Poland, in 1987, I was in a car which could have suffered a similar fate. Like many such incidents, it started innocuously enough. Two days before the championships, I came down to the lobby of our central Warsaw hotel, intending to go out for a run. A couple of IAAF officials who were heading out of town to inspect the course offered me a ride, so that I could run round the hippodrome rather than fight through the city traffic. I readily agreed, and we crammed into a tiny car along with an old Polish journo, who was our guide, and a driver .
An hour or so later, we were speeding back into the city on a highway, when we crossed a bridge over another major road, and our guide told us that that was the road to the then Soviet border. At which point the driver jerked his head round in the direction of the road, and I thought he was going to make some disparaging comment about the Soviets, since the Poles were no friends of their communist masters.
An instant later, I froze rigid. It probably helped that I had once worked with a guy who suffered from epilepsy, so I was able to recognise that our speeding driver was manifesting the first symptoms of a seizure.
Fortunately we were approaching some suburban roads, and he had begun to slow, but not sufficiently to convince us we were going to survive. Equally fortunately, he had taken his foot off the accelerator, because I often wonder what would have happened if he had floored the pedal under the influence of his epileptic fit.
As it was, I struggled free of the colleagues on either side of me in the back, leaned over and jerked the handbrake sufficiently hard to send us into a slowing skid up the pavement, careering to a halt on the grass verge just short of a tree. We got the driver out on the ground, and stuck a pen between his teeth, since one of the dangers of such a seizure is biting though the tongue. Giving us something like that to do probably delayed our shock; and when his fit had subsided, we wedged the driver in the passenger seat, and the old journo drove us gently back into the city centre.
Of course, the one thing I should have done, and never thought of in the heat of the moment (and I haven’t seen it mentioned in any of the articles on the subject of the recalled Toyotas) was to hit the keys, and switch off the ignition, kill the engine! But you’re not necessarily thinking straight in situations like that. However, unlike the poor folks in the Lexus, we’d survived.
That wasn’t quite the end of the story, because when our Polish journo colleagues got on the case, they discovered that the driver had been seconded to the championships committee for the week, from his regular job - as a school bus driver!
I don’t know what happened to him, but I feel sure the kids were spared his attentions after that. And the following day, we even got our appetite back sufficiently to enjoy one of the few perks of life in the Soviet bloc in those days, (two years before the Wall came down) - lashings of caviar and cheap, but very drinkable champagne. The day after that, the unheralded Annette Sergeant of France won the women’s race, and John Ngugi won the second of his five men’s titles.
People like me are always saying how much more exciting athletics was back in those days. But excitement like that car ride I can do without anytime.
