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Carlos Lopes
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Carlos Alberto de Sousa Lopes, GCIH, pron. , (born February 18, 1947) is a former Portuguese long-distance athlete, winner of the marathon race at the 1984 Summer Olympics, in Los Angeles. He brought home Portugal's first ever Olympic gold medal along with a new Olympic record - 2:09.21
Born in Vildemoinhos, near Viseu, Portugal, Carlos Lopes worked as a stonecutter's helper. He wanted to play football at the local club, but his father opposed this, so he turned to other forms of athletics.
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Encyclopedia
Carlos Alberto de Sousa Lopes, GCIH, pron. , (born February 18, 1947) is a former Portuguese long-distance athlete, winner of the marathon race at the 1984 Summer Olympics, in Los Angeles. He brought home Portugal's first ever Olympic gold medal along with a new Olympic record - 2:09.21
Born in Vildemoinhos, near Viseu, Portugal, Carlos Lopes worked as a stonecutter's helper. He wanted to play football at the local club, but his father opposed this, so he turned to other forms of athletics. In 1967 he was personally invited to join the remarkable athletics team of Sporting Clube de Portugal, and remained there until the end of his career in 1985. He was a average quality long distance runner, until he made an astonishing breakthrough in 1976, aged 29.
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.
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. 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 the 10,000 m world record—27 min 13.81 s—finishing second.
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. 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 long-overdue first gold medal in the Olympic marathon.
Award
Later, Portuguese prime minister, Mário Soares, decorated Lopes with the Grand-Cross of the Order of the Infant (Grã-Cruz da Ordem do Infante).
Last race
A year later, he won the cross-country world championship, held in Lisbon, for the 3rd time.
In the last major competitive race of his career, the 1985 Rotterdam marathon, Lopes took 53 seconds off the world's best marathon time, setting a new standard of 2:07.12, and becoming the first man to run 42.195 km in less than 2 h 8 min.
- L'Équipe: "Fantastic! Extraordinary! There aren't enough strong words to label Lopes Rotterdam achievement. In less than 3 years, he became the first man to approach the unreal. Who would think, 20 years ago, that a man would run the marathon at 20 km/h?"'
- Rotterdam press: "With his magic talent, Carlos Lopes took 54 seconds off the previous world best. With his fabulous pace he reached the world record with apparent ease. It's said he received US$150,000 just to come to Rotterdam, plus US$67,000 in prizes. A lot of money for a single man. But, in marathons' fantasy world, only a man—aged 38—is able to run it in 2:07.12: Carlos Lopes".
After this, he went to Japan ran Tokyo's marathon, in honor of his late master Koboyashi, but (out-of-shape) he quit early. That was his last marathon, as he was later injured and said goodbye to Athletics, in late 1985.
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