Gerry Lindgren’s historic run against the Soviet Union to be commemorated during event at Rogers High School

Rather than being worth a thousand words, the picture eliminated the need for any.

When readers of the Spokane Chronicle unfurled their newspapers on July 27, 1964, the news of Gerry Lindgren’s miraculous run in that year’s U.S.-Soviet Union dual track meet was already 48 hours old – the hazard of afternoon publication with no Sunday edition. Nonetheless, there were three stories with fresh angles and reaction, and the Associated Press photo that rendered them all irrelevant.

It showed the 18-year-old boy wonder from Spokane passing veteran Leonid Ivanov barely halfway through the 10,000 meters, and the Soviet glaring across at Lindgren as if he was violating natural law.

And he was, in a sense.

Sixty years ago, this was a message that resounded all the way to Minsk and Moscow. On Wednesday at 7 p.m., it and other tales of the track will be relived at “A Legend’s Homecoming,” an anniversary program at the Rogers High School auditorium featuring Lindgren and Tracy Walters, the coach that set Spokane’s running legacy in motion.

Three generations have cycled through Spokane since a teenage Lindgren ran himself into an unlikely – and uncomfortable – celebrity. The time lag makes the context for his crowning achievement difficult to reconcile.

But then, it was for the protagonist even then.

“I didn’t know what to make of it,” Lindgren said over the weekend. “I was young and didn’t know exactly what was going on.”

Hard as it is to believe now, track and field in 1964 truly mattered as a spectator attraction, and not just at the Olympic Games. Earlier that year, Lindgren – not yet 18 – had introduced himself on a vibrant indoor circuit in front of crowds of 12,000 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, 17,000 at the Los Angeles Sports Arena and 15,000 at Madison Square Garden. At the Los Angeles Coliseum that July afternoon, 50,519 turned out to watch the Americans and Soviets go at it – and it was considered a disappointing crowd, as 80,000 had attended at Stanford two years before. Meet coverage ran for six pages in the Los Angeles Times. The photo of Ivanov’s gaping shock – an image that gives Walters a bigger laugh at age 93 than it did even at the time – appeared in newspapers across the country.

Cold War symbolism only added to the intrigue of a scoring competition between two world powers on the brink. The Cuban Missile Crisis came to a head just weeks after that 1962 Stanford meet. The Kennedy assassination and Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster bracketed the event in Los Angeles. The nations intensified the space race with Mariner 4 and Voskhod 1.

And the United States sent a 5-foot-6, 118-pound teenager to contest track’s most grueling race against the stolid Soviets.

“An 18-year-old schoolboy who has to stand on a chair to rob the refrigerator,” wrote legendary columnist Jim Murray.

It was a plan that seemed to land somewhere between blasphemy and surrender.

Soviet runners had won the previous two Olympic 10,000s, and had never lost the race in the USA series, which dated to 1958. Americans had won all of one Olympic medal in the 10,000 – a silver in 1912. And Lindgren, having qualified for the meet by taking second in the AAU championships at 5,000 meters, had run the distance only once, on June 12 in Corvallis – in front of Oregon State coach Sam Bell, who was serving as the team coach for the dual.

“No way you can beat them,” Lindgren recalled Bell saying when asking him to switch events, “but we can’t be lousy.”

A strategy would be required. Or two – one just for getting him to the starting line.

Lindgren made the trip by car with the entire Walters clan packed into the family station wagon – usually sharing space with 9-year-old Malinda in the back “teasing me about whether I wanted to grow up to be a veterinarian or a vegetarian,” she recalled. Once in L.A., Walters sent him on an easy run on the beach, with a designated rendezvous point. Only with the vagaries of big-city traffic, by the time Walters pulled up in the station wagon, Lindgren was gone.

“I ended up in Hermosa Beach,” Lindgren said. “It’s starting to get dark and I’m in a T-shirt with no shoes and no idea where to go. I finally got picked up by the police and sat freezing to death in a room with AC while they tried to get through to somebody. It was midnight before I got back to the dorm room.”

It turned out to be more of an ordeal than racing the Russians.

The seed for Lindgren’s tactics remains in dispute. The runner credits his coach. The coach said, “It was all Gerry’s idea.

“We knew the Russians would do a fast lap in the middle of the race,” Walters said. “We’re working at Rogers and Gerry said, ‘What if I let them do their fast lap and when they can’t see me coming, I’ll do my fast lap?’ And I said, ‘Great idea.’ ”

They set about training with afternoon intervals, generally a 70-second lap followed by another in 60 seconds, then a 70 – “over and over again,” said Lindgren, “until I was sick of them.”

But the fact is, Team Lindgren had tried this approach multiple times. In that previous 10,000 in Corvallis, Lindgren had killed off the competition with a 61-second lap in mid-race – one of the reasons Bell felt comfortable asking him to go longer against the Soviets.

In L.A., Lindgren and the Russians chugged through 14 laps at 71-second pace until Ivanov made the predictable burst and took a 20-yard lead. From his perch on the far curve, Bell shouted to Lindgren, “If you’re feeling OK, go ahead.”

He jumped the other Soviet, Nikolay Dutov, and quickly ate up the gap to Ivanov, turning a 69-second lap – not remotely as fast as his workouts. But he followed with a 68, and on the Coliseum track where the temperature hovered near 90 degrees, there would be no answer.

Which is not to say the final 21/2 miles were anticlimactic.

“I was sure they would come back and pass me,” Lindgren said. “I wasn’t supposed to win and it felt like I’d done something crazy going by them. My legs were buckling.”

But the crowd had come to its feet with his surge, and never sat down – or stopped roaring (“I was afraid of letting them down,” he said). He turned on the jets again for the last lap, certain he’d be run down. His final 400 meters: 63 seconds.

“Then I finally looked back,” he said, “and there was nobody on my side of the track.”

Ivanov was 120 to 150 yards behind, depending on the account. Lindgren began an obligatory victory lap before the Soviets even finished. Two world records that had been broken within minutes of Lindgren’s race – by Americans Fred Hansen in the pole vault and Dallas Long in the shot put – became footnotes. Lindgren’s new teammates were agog.

“I got more excited over his race,” said veteran miler Jim Grelle, “than I ever have in one of my own.”

There would be more triumphs on the track for Lindgren – 11 NCAA titles at Washington State, a world record – and disappointments, too, as at the 1964 Olympics, where a sprained ankle two days before his race resulted in a ninth-place finish. But there will always be the time he shocked the world.

As represented in the face of one stupefied Soviet rival.