Jean Bouin

Jean Bouin
Jean Bouin (1913)
Full name	Alexandre François Étienne Jean Bouin
nation	France
birthday	December 21, 1888
place of birth	Marseille ,  France
size	172 cm
Weight	70 kg
date of death	September 29, 1914
Place of death	Xivray-et-Marvoisin , France
Career
discipline	Middle distance running , long distance running , cross-country running
Best performance	1500 m: 4: 14.4 min; 5000 m: 14: 36.7 min
society	US Phocéenne Marseille; Paris Jean-Bouin
Medal table
Olympic games 0 × 1 × 1 × Cross of Nations 3 × 2 × 0 ×
Olympic games silver Stockholm 1912 5000 meters bronze London 1908 3000 meter team run Cross of Nations gold Caerleon 1911 singles gold Edinburgh 1912 singles gold Juvisy-sur-Orge 1913 singles silver Derby 1909 singles silver Juvisy-sur-Orge 1913 team

Jean Bouin (center) running an hour in Colombes in 1909

Jean Bouin at the Nice-Monaco road race 1910

Jean Bouin (1911)

5000 meters Olympic Games Stockholm 1912: Shortly after the last corner, Bouin (right) leads in front of Kolehmainen

Bouin (right) is overtaken by Kolehmainen just before the finish

The finish from a different perspective

Jean Bouin at the Cross of Nations in 1913

Jean Bouin (born December 21, 1888 in Marseille , † September 29, 1914 in Xivray , Département Meuse , Lorraine ) was a French athlete who was successful in the years before the First World War . Despite his heavy weight of 70 kg and only 1.67 m tall, he had specialized in the long haul .

Records

Jean Bouin, who competed for the Phocée Club in Marseille and from 1910 for the CASG (today's name " Paris Jean Bouin ") in Paris , won Olympic silver and set numerous records:

• 22 French national records
• three world records
  • June 11, 1911 in Colombes : world record over 3000 meters in 8: 49.6 min. The previous best performance, set almost three years earlier by the Swede John Svanberg , was 8: 54.0 min. However, the record did not last long: just three months later, the Finn Hannes Kolehmainen reduced it to 8: 48.5 minutes.
  • November 16, 1911 in Paris: World record over 10,000 meters in 30: 58.8 min. This time meant an improvement of the previous record set by the Briton Alfred Shrubb (31: 02.4 min) from 1904 by 3.6 seconds. Only ten years later was Paavo Nurmi faster with 30: 40.2 minutes.
  • July 6, 1913 in Stockholm : world record in the hour run with 19,021 meters. Here, too, Alfred Shrubb was Bouin's predecessor with 18,742 meters from 1904. The world record lasted a good fifteen years until it was improved to 19,210 meters by Paavo Nurmi on October 7, 1928.

Career

Jean Bouin's sporting talent was shown in early youth. He practiced swimming , fencing , gymnastics and running . His teacher Joseph Pagnol, the father of the well-known dramaturge and writer Marcel Pagnol , was not at all enthusiastic about the latter , however, and tried to deter the boy from this sport with the prophecy that running would never bring him anything. He should have been very wrong.

After Bouin got an additional boost from the acquaintance of the marathon runner Louis Pautex, he founded an athletic school club. The first successes soon emerged: in 1906 and 1907 he finished fourth in the national cross-country championships.

In 1908, Jean Bouin was sent to the Olympic Games in London , where he worked with Paul Lizandier , Gaston Ragueneau , Joseph Dreher and Louis de Fleurac over 1,500 m and over five miles (a little over 8 km) - a distance that only in London was Olympic and was replaced from 1912 by the 5000 and 10,000 meter races - should compete. The 19-year-old was not a child of sadness, and that was his undoing when he went to a bar in Soho , London, over five miles the night before the final , got into a brawl and spent the night at the police station. Since that was incompatible with the dignity of an Olympian in the terms of the time, his permission to start was withdrawn without further ado. Fortunately, the 1,500 meter run had already taken place. There Bouin was the best Frenchman in 15th place, which was not enough for the finals, as only the winners of the eight prelims were considered qualified.

After returning from London, all signs were pointing towards success. Bouin's record was impressive:

• In 1909, 1910, 1911 and 1912 he became French Cross Champion.
• He won the state championship over 10,000 (1911) and over 5000 meters (1912).
• In 1911, 1912 and 1913 he won the Cross of Nations after finishing second in 1909, thus ending the longstanding dominance of the British in this discipline.
• In 1911 he ran two of his three world records.

In the meantime the star of the running miracle Hannes Kolehmainen had risen. The Finn, almost a year younger to the day than Jean Bouin, was to become the Frenchman's great opponent. Initially, Kolehmainen took over from Bouin as the world record holder over 3000 meters when he undercut the Frenchman's record by 1.1 seconds. But then Bouin struck back and in the same year was the first person to stay under 31 minutes over 10,000 meters.

The 1912 Olympic year dawned, and both Bouin and Kolehmainen announced their participation in the 5,000-meter run at the Stockholm Olympics . The tension increased when the two top runners met shortly before in Berlin at a meeting of the SC Charlottenburg , where a run over the German mile (7500 m) was on the program, and Kolehmainen won. Would Bouin get the revenge in Stockholm? At first everything pointed to a victory for the French. In the second half of the 5000 meter distance he took the lead, fended off an attack by Kolehmainen 500 meters from the finish and ran out a lead of three meters, which he was able to keep right down to the home straight. Then, however, happened what no one had thought possible: There were only about ten meters to run when the Finn, who seemed already beaten, caught up with Bouin using his last strength, took two steps past him and literally won the Olympic gold snapped from under my nose. The clocks stopped at the world record time of 14: 38.6 minutes. Bouin followed a tenth of a second behind. Then more than half a minute passed before the third runner, the British George Hutson , crossed the finish line, which shows the superiority of Kolehmainen and Bouins. The French battle-goers who traveled to Stockholm in large numbers did not spare their applause for Bouin, whose time, with only a tenth above the new world record, of course meant a French national record, but decided not to unroll the tricolor (the Russian flag was waved for Kolehmainen, since Finland was not at that time independent state, but part of the tsarist empire ).

Bouin also competed in Stockholm in the 1912, 1920 and 1924 Olympic cross-country races. There he had no chance against Kolehmainen, who finished the 12-kilometer route with 33 seconds ahead of unchallenged winner, and came in 35th among 45 participants.

Bouin was now beginning to prepare for his next encounter with Kolehmainen at the 1916 Olympics. He intensified his training and even gave up smoking. He was rewarded for this when he succeeded in improving the hourly world record to 19,021 meters in 1913 , with Olympic champion Kolehmainen in the field of the defeated. The record, however, should be seen in relative terms: more than 25 years earlier, in 1886, the Briton Walter George had covered twelve English miles (19,312 m) in 59 minutes and 29 seconds and was thus faster than Bouin. As the French national record, however, Bouin's performance lasted for 41 (!) Years - it was not exceeded until 1954 by Alain Mimoun , who had reached 19,365 meters in one hour.

Bouin had to be satisfied with this triumph over his Finnish competitor. The First World War broke out, which put an end not only to his sporting career, but also to his young life. Fighting in the ranks of the 163rd Infantry Regiment, Jean Bouin fell in the first weeks of the war while working as a frontline correspondent. He was buried in the grounds of the Bouconville-sur-Madt castle .

In 1925, the CASG, for which Bouin had last started, built a stadium that was named Stade Jean Bouin . It still exists today and is located right next to the Prinzenparkstadion (Stade Parc des Princes) between Avenue du Général Sarrail, Rue Claude Farrère and Rue Nungesser et Coli in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. With a capacity of 12,000, it is primarily used as the home ground of a Paris rugby team .

Training principles

Jean Bouin was not only gifted in sports but also intellectually. In addition to his work as a journalist (mainly for the daily newspaper "Petit Provençal"), he also wrote a book. It bears the title "Comment on devient champion de course à pied" (German: "How to become a master in running") and shows Bouin as a pioneer in the field of training theory .

He highlighted the positive effects of running on lung capacity, but advised against running performance-wise before the body had finished growing. What was new at the time was the realization that different disciplines required different training methods. Also, a runner should not only train to run, but should also include exercises to improve mobility and strength, which in Bouin meant climbing trees, throwing stones and hauling tree trunks. He had adopted these principles from the French association trainer George Hébert . He combined endurance training in the form of cross-country runs with speed training on the track. Before major competitions, he trained twice a day, increasing the length of the running routes as the competition approached, until a training volume of around 20 km per day was reached. The end of each training session was a two-and-a-half kilometer walk, which was intended to restore the organism to normal operation.

Bouin advocated training units with handicaps, such as particularly heavy shoes, in order to be able to mobilize reserves of strength in competition if the handicap was no longer applicable. On his menu were grilled meat and cooked vegetables, which he preferred to raw vegetables because they were easier to digest. He had put the alcohol down on a glass of hot gin fortified with sugar and lemon, which he took after training. Careful personal hygiene, which also included massages, was very important to Bouin. His ideas about foot care are a bit strange: Bouin advised not to bathe the feet, but only to rub them with a damp cloth in order to avoid softening the skin.

Jean Bouin's conviction that an athlete can only be successful if he leads a disciplined life and trains systematically was ahead of his time and characterizes him as a professional in the true sense of the word. With Arthur Gibassier, a newspaper reporter, he even employed a manager and consultant. But since Bouin lost more than Hannes Kolehmainen in the 1912 Olympic Games (albeit faster than the previous world record), his training continued (20 km and more daily, all year round, early specialization, no untargeted, but only targeted strength training) by.

literature

• Claude Droussent (Red.): The Olympic book. Athens 1896-2004 Athens. Delius Klasing, Bielefeld 2004, ISBN 3-7688-1545-5 , p. 60.
• Arnd Krüger : Many roads lead to the Olympics. The changes in the training systems for middle and long distance runners (1850-1997), in: N. Gissel (Hrsg.): Sportliche Leistungs im Wandel. Hamburg 1998: Czwalina, pp. 41-56.
• Wolfgang Wünsche: athletes, duels, records. Illustrated history of athletics. Südwest, Munich 1971, ISBN 3-517-00353-0 , p. 94f.

Web links

Commons : Jean Bouin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Jean Bouin in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Jean Bouin: "Comment on devient champion de course à pied" (French)