Few sportspeople have the luxury of retiring on their own terms but Carlos Lopes announced that 1985 would be his last season of international racing and he put away his racing shoes with his reputation very much intact and his legacy enhanced, becoming the first athlete in history to break the 2:08-barrier for the marathon.
Lopes was a latecomer to the marathon scene but eight years after winning Olympic silver in the 10,000m in Montreal, the Portuguese famously won the Olympic marathon title in Los Angeles at the age of 37 in 2:09:21 - remarkably the slowest time of his brief but venerable career on the roads.
His farewell tour in 1985 passed through Lisbon where he won the World Cross Country Championships for a third time in front of his raucous home supporters including his wife and two sons - a feat only surpassed by Kenyans John Ngugi and Paul Tergat and Ethiopia’s Kenenisa Bekele - to demonstrate he was in excellent shape one month prior to the Rotterdam Marathon.
Lopes followed up his Olympic triumph with a runner-up finish in the Chicago Marathon where he saw Steve Jones break clear and take the victory in a world best of 2:08:05. This mark was in Lopes’ sights and he succeeded in taking the mark down to 2:07:12.
In cool and breezy conditions, Lopes was escorted through the first 20 kilometres by Belgian internationals Vincent Rousseau and Luc Waegeman - Rousseau himself was to win in Rotterdam in 1993 and 1994 - and while Lopes maintained his pace well in the second half with even splits of 63:24/63:48, Lopes maintains he would have run much faster if he had some assistance or opposition past the halfway mark.
“If I'd had some companions in the second half of the race, I would have run two minutes faster,” said Lopes at the time. In a recent interview with World Athletics, Lopes still maintains he was in shape to run “around 2:05:45 to 2:05:50.”
But Lopes was by no means unsatisfied with his efforts and his winning time remained on the books for three years before Ethiopia’s Belayneh Dinsamo broke the 2:07-barrier for the first time on the same course with 2:06:50 - a mark which wasn’t broken until 1998.
This was remarkably Lopes’ final completed marathon of his career. He was already a veteran when he made his marathon debut in New York in 1982 where he dropped out before setting a European record - or a European best as marathon marks were referred to then - of 2:08:39 in the Rotterdam Marathon in 1983. With such extraordinary success at such a late stage of his career, why didn't Lopes make the move up to the marathon sooner? After all, Lopes was one of the finest cross country exponents of his day.
“I just turned to the marathon to become an Olympic champion,' he said. 'Athletics, then, was not as individual as it is today and neither was there quite as much money in the marathon as there is now. One thing is for sure: if I had turned to the marathon earlier, I probably wouldn't have gotten where I am. [My career] wouldn’t have lasted as long.”
Lopes’ splits in the 1985 Rotterdam Marathon
5km 14:5610km 30:04
15km 45:24
20km 1:00:10
25km 1:14:57
30km 1:29:56
35km 1:45:14
40km 2:00:34