Carlos Lopes - Career

Career

His 1976 campaign began with a victory at the prestigious IAAF World Cross Country Championships in Chepstow, Wales. Competing in the 10,000 meters at the Montreal 1976 Summer Olympics, Lopes set the pace from the 4000m mark, and the only athlete to follow him was defending double Olympic champion Lasse Virén. Virén passed Lopes with a lap to go to win the gold medal, and Lopes finished a comfortable second. Lopes ran the first 5,000 metres in 14 minutes 8.94 seconds, and the second 5,000 metres in 13:36.23, a remarkable proof of his ability to steadily accelerate his pace. What he generally lacked in the track races, however, was an ability to sharply increase his pace in the final lap or so (see, for example, Antero Raevuori, ed., "Lasse Virén: The Guilded Spikes" / Lasse Viren – Kullatut piikkarit, Helsinki: Weilin+Göös, 1976).

He failed to regain his Cross-Country title, in Düsseldorf (1977), finishing second.

After the superb 1976 season, Lopes slipped back into the same relative obscurity in which he had been before 1976, failing to qualify for the Moscow Olympics due to several injuries.

In 1982, he returned to top form, and in Oslo, he broke the 10,000 m European record—27:24.39—which belonged to his teammate Fernando Mamede. After setting the pace from 6,000 metres at the 1982 European Athletics Championships 10,000-metre race, he finished fourth in 27:47.95 (see, for example, Markku Siukonen, ed., "The Big European Championships Book" / Suuri EM-kirja, Jyväskylä, Finland: Sportti Kustannus / Publishing Ltd., 1990). In 1983, he finished second in Gateshead.

Lopes attempted his first marathon at the end of 1982 (New York), but he did not finish due to an accident in which he crashed into a spectator. The following year, he made his second attempt at the marathon, this time at (Rotterdam). He finished a close second in a European record time of 2:08:39, just two seconds behind the race victor, Rob de Castella of Australia. Lopes decided to run a 10,000 m at the first World Championships, in Helsinki, where he finished a disappointing sixth. After that he decided to concentrate on the marathon.

1984 was Lopes' greatest year. In New Jersey, he regained his cross-country world title in front of thousands of ecstatic Portuguese emigrants. In Stockholm, he helped teammate Fernando Mamede to break Henry Rono's 10,000 m world record of 27:22, with Mamede winning in 27 min 13.81 s and Lopes finishing second in 27:17.48.

An accident almost prevented Lopes from participating in the 1984 Olympics when, a week before the Games, he was run over by a car in Lisbon. Amazingly, he was not hurt. The Olympic marathon at Los Angeles was run in very hot and humid conditions, and as the favorites gradually fell away, it was the 37-year-old Lopes who led the field into the stadium and won the gold medal with a 200m advantage and in an Olympic record 2:09:21. With this victory, he improved his reputation as a runner, because he could run the last 7.2 kilometres at an average speed of 2 minutes 55 seconds per kilometre, a remarkably quick pace at the end of a fast marathon (see, for example, "The Big Olympic Book" / Suuri Olympiakirja, Helsinki: "Runner" / Juoksija magazine, 1984). Portugal erupted in celebration of its first ever Olympic gold. Lopes' Olympic record stood until the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, when the young Kenyan sensation Sammy Wanjiru broke it in dominating fashion with a time of 2:06:32, bringing home to Kenya its first gold medal in the Olympic marathon.

Portuguese prime minister, Mário Soares, decorated Lopes with the Grand-Cross of the Order of the Infant (Grã-Cruz da Ordem do Infante).