Ralph the Rapscallion

As he lopes around the track, Ralph Doubell has the distracted look of a man talking to himself. And so he is. To ease the loneliness of a distance runner, the Australian ace provides his own moment-to-moment commentary and, when need be, his own cheering section. Late in the 800-meter finals of the 1968 Olympics, for instance, Doubell told Doubell: "You're going to win! You can feel it in your muscles!" Then, as he took the lead coming down the stretch, he shouted to himself: "You've won it! You've won it!" Doubell professes to care little for glory or gold medals--or even that his Olympic time of 1 min. 44.3 sec. equaled the world record of New Zealand's Peter Snell. "From the moment I touched the tape," he says, "it was all downhill, anticlimax, God Save the Queen and all that. Who needs national anthems?"

A virtual unknown before the Olympics, Doubell, 25, has since proved that he is the finest runner to come out of the Antipodes since Snell and Fellow Aussie Ron Clarke. So far this season, he has won 14 out of 15 races, losing only the 600-yd. dash in the Los Angeles Times games. At that it took a virtual dead-heat world record performance (1 min. 8.7 sec.) by Martin McGrady and Lee Evans to defeat him. In the longer distances, Doubell has been unbeatable. In Albuquerque last month he ran 1,000 yds. in 2 min. 5.5 sec., shaving half a second from Snell's eight-year-old world indoor record. As usual he pooh-poohed the stopwatch: "The most important thing is winning. I don't give a damn what the time is."

Interval Training. Doubell's coach, Austrian-born Franz Stampfl, understands completely. A Svengali-like figure who preaches mind over matter, he has helped such runners as Roger Bannister and Chris Chataway to world records. "Most Olympic athletes have equal physical capacity," says Stampfl, "but it is Doubell's mental attitude that enables him to produce an inspired performance."

It takes a little sweat, too. Stampfl espouses "interval training," alternating a lengthy series of full-blast sprints with periods of restful jogging. Using cardiographs and checks on pulse, respiration and blood pressure, he gradually expanded Doubell's training program to the limits of the athlete's physical capacity. After five years, Doubell now runs six miles every morning; in the evening, he runs three miles and follows that with a series which can consist of 50 sprints over 100 yds., or 30 over 220 yds., or simply five half miles. Beyond that, Stampfl says he teaches his runners "to be complete masters of themselves. I try to lift them beyond themselves--for immortality may be only a lew minutes away."

Such monastic concentration suggests that Doubell, a systems analyst for Shell of Australia, is Ralph the Robot. Far from it. Decked out in an antelope suede jacket, black hip-hugging bell-bottoms and tan suede shoes, he is more Ralph the Rapscallion, enjoying "the usual recreations of a young man." As speedy behind the wheel as he is on the track, he was hauled in last year for gunning his Chevelle Malibu down the San Diego freeway at 100 m.p.h. Two weeks ago, after setting a meet record in the half mile at Manhattan's Millrose Games, he jetted to Mexico City to visit a girl, returned just in time to set another meet record for 1,000 yds. in Toronto's Maple Leaf Games.

Spiritual Uplift. Though he dismisses some of Stampfl's spiritualism as "crap," Doubell totally agrees with his taste in tipples. Both prefer champagne, though Doubell hastily adds: "I only drink champagne when it's available. I don't discriminate. I'll drink anything." Recalling one evening when he "got stoned" on champagne, he says that he went out the next morning "with a hideous hangover and ran the fastest 220 of my life in 22.2. Of course you can't do that all the time. Just about once a fortnight, I reckon."

If any of Doubell's rivals reckon that his high living will soon make him an easy mark, they had better reckon again. According to Stampfl, Ralph is responding so well to his program of "stress adaptation" that he fully expects him to be a topflight competitor "at least until he is 40."

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