Max Pearson
speaker
1,342 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 11 Apr
Max Pearson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It was a vehicle for international friendship.
I was very anxious to play football, but as I remember, I was able only to run around and not to hit the ball.
And our teacher once, he called me,
Boy, you are good in running, but useless to play football.
I need somebody to run, to bring me sandwich from a shop every day.
After the school, I went to work in the biggest shoe factory in Czechoslovakia.
After one kilometre, I came into the leading together with another boy.
Oh, it was nice.
Spectators around, plenty of applause and go, go, boys.
But a few seconds later, my friend started with a sprint and I came second.
He used to train in the woods and in the snow because he felt that if you can't deal with a bit of hardship in your training, then how are you going to cope in the heat of a race?
But he also was doing things like running on the spot on sentry duty and seeing how long he could hold his breath and sometimes passing out, or training by running on laundry in the bath for a couple of hours on end.
I think he always, right from the beginning, realised anything he wanted in life, he would have to work for.
Especially in those days, a lot of the athletes at the Olympics were just people blessed with natural talent and never had really had to give it much thought.
For him, everything he achieved came from just sheer hard work.
I think that's another reason why so many people warmed to him and sympathised with him.
He was in pain.
You could see everything he was going through and that made it terribly dramatic to watch.
He seemed to claw the air a bit as if he might be having a fit or one person said he ran as if like a man wrestling an octopus on a conveyor belt.
By 1952, Zatopek had become the fastest distance runner in the world, and he was so personally popular that all the other athletes in Helsinki wanted to meet him.
Showing 1041–1060 of 1,342 · page 53 of 68
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