In 1952 Jim Peters, the British marathon champion, world record-holder and pre-race favourite, was on the track at the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki, warming up for perhaps the most important race of his life, when he was approached by a wiry, balding man whom he had never previously met. The man thrust out a hand. “Hello,” he said. “I am Zatopek.”

Peters knew exactly who he was. Emil Zatopek was one of the great names in distance running, having won a gold, a silver and a wife in London four years earlier and a 5,000m and 10,000m double already in Helsinki. He was also the man responsible for Peters’s decision to specialise in the marathon, having in the last Olympics so emphatically humiliated the Briton over 10,000m that he never ran the distance again. But the Czech had never run a marathon in his life and was considered a rank outsider, while Peters had shattered the world record just weeks earlier. Not in the mood for idle chatter, Peters returned the handshake but did not extend the conversation.

An hour or so later, Zatopek approached him again. This time Peters was halfway through the race and in the lead, when the Czech appeared on his shoulder. “Jim,” said Zatopek, “is this pace too fast?” “No,” Peters replied. “It isn’t fast enough.” The Englishman later explained that he was actually perfectly happy, and had “said it was too slow just to kid him” – but Zatopek took him at his word and started to run faster. Soon he disappeared from view, and the next time Peters saw him he was two minutes ahead of anyone else and the Briton had succumbed to cramp and was hitching a ride in a bus full of journalists. When Zatopek crossed the line, looking as the Guardian reported “like a man who has had a brisk country walk”, the crowd chanted his name and he was carried around the stadium upon the shoulders of Jamaica’s victorious 4x400m relay team, having secured a long-distance treble that no one before or since has even come close to and with it an indelible place in sporting legend.

As Peters had discovered, Zatopek was an excellent conversationalist. One British athlete complained that he “never shut up”. He spoke six languages, and made more friends actually during races than most athletes did when socialising. He entertained himself for much of the second half of that 1952 marathon by chatting with a car full of photographers, and afterwards declared that “the marathon is a very boring race”.

Had the intelligence with which he planned and executed his races and accumulated foreign languages been more evident at school, Zatopek’s life – and the history of distance running – might have been very different. His ambition to become a teacher was thwarted by his own academic failings, and instead he considered himself fortunate to get an apprenticeship at the Bata shoe factory in Zlin, which also allowed him to continue his education in night classes. It was 1936, and he was 14.

Every year on the second Sunday in May, a race was held through the streets of Zlin, which Zatopek studiously avoided. “After all there were boys from all over the republic there, and some of them were very talented,” he said. “It was no place for me.” But when he was 18 his tutor ordered him to take part. Zatopek claimed he was ill but the tutor called his bluff and sent him to a doctor. Given a clean bill of health, he had little choice but to line up for the event. “I was angry,” he later recalled. “At this age you feel you are an adult and shouldn’t be compelled to do such things. But I had to and I thought: ‘Right, I’ll show him.’”

Zatopek came second and was invited to join the local athletic club, where he developed his own training regime that combined sprints and longer runs, based loosely on what he had read about the great Finn Paavo Nurmi. “Running is easily understandable: you must be fast enough and you must have enough endurance,” he said. “So you run fast for speed and repeat it many times for endurance.”

At the end of the war he joined the Czech army, who gradually gave him the freedom to spend more time training. By 1948 an average day included five 200m sprints, 20 400m runs, then five more 200m sprints. When this was successful he pushed himself harder – he did 50 400m runs, then 60, then 70. He discovered that the harder he worked in training the faster he ran on the track, so in the buildup to one record attempt he pushed himself to 100 400m runs a day – 50 in the morning, and another 50 in the afternoon, adding up to nearly 25 miles a day, with a couple of miles of sprints thrown in for good measure. “It is at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys,” he said.

In 1946 he competed in his first international race, an inter-Allied meet in Berlin. Stuck in Prague with no obvious way to get there he eventually decided to cycle, a 220-mile journey, and still won when he got there. “I started too fast,” he later recalled, “and the big crowd, maybe there is 60,000, they started to laugh. They thought I am crazy. Who is he, they are saying? He is crazy. Crazy. But I won this event, and it was a great inspiration for me.”

Encouraged, he redoubled his efforts over the following winter. He would run at night, carrying a torch. He would strap weights to his feet and then go cycling. He would make a cut-price treadmill by putting a layer of wet clothes at the bottom of his bath and running on them, one part athlete, one part washing machine. He ran in heavy army boots and embraced rain, ice and snow. “There is a great advantage in training under unfavourable conditions,” he said. “It is better to train under bad conditions, for the difference is then a tremendous relief in a race.”

His target became 5,000m gold at the 1948 Olympics in London. On 29 May, two months and one day before the Olympic final, Zatopek ran for the first time over 10,000m and found he was quite good at that as well. By the time he reached London his personal best was only 1.6sec outside the world record, and he had decided to compete over both distances.

As was traditional, the 10,000m was held on the first day of the Games. Zatopek’s aim was to run each lap in 71sec, world record pace. His coach sat in the stands with a stopwatch; if his charge was on target he would hold a white shirt, if he fell behind, he would raise a red one. On the eighth lap for the first time Zatopek saw red, and sped up. But for a short battle with Finland’s Viljo Heino, nobody came close to him again and his margin of victory was 48 seconds. The Guardian described it as “one of the greatest races of a lifetime”, adding: “What made this race even more extraordinary was the fact that Zatopek was easily the ugliest runner in it.”

Zatopek’s awkward running style was to become legendary, being compared unfavourably even with that of the Scotsman Eric Liddell, who had won gold in Paris in 1924. The New York Herald Tribune described him “bobbing, weaving, staggering, gyrating, clutching his torso ... he ran like a man with a noose around his neck. He seemed on the verge of strangulation.” The New York Times felt his action was that of “a harried soul on the rack of physical and spiritual torture”. Another journalist suggested he looked “like a man wrestling with an octopus on a conveyor belt”. “Track and field is not ice skating,” Zatopek said. “It is not necessary to smile and make a wonderful impression on the judges.”

The 5,000m a few days later was uglier still. Having indulged in a totally unnecessary sprint finish with Sweden’s Eric Ahlden in his heat, Zatopek was perhaps weary even before it began. Run in pouring rain on a dirt track that had long since turned to mud, Zatopek’s famous endurance seemed to desert him. He all but dropped out of contention entirely, falling at one stage 100m behind the leader, Belgium’s Gaston Reiff. But then, over the final lap, Zatopek fought back, the crowd roaring him on. Gasping and flailing he closed the gap to 30m, then 20m, then 10. In the closing straight Reiff could hear his rival’s footsteps and feel his breath. Zatopek finished one pace and 0.2 seconds from gold. “It was,” we wrote, “a performance that would have made him one of the immortals of the track on its own.”

Also on the Czech team in London was the javelin thrower Dana Ingrova, who finished seventh. She happened to be precisely Zatopek’s age, both having been born on 19 September 1922. They knew each other already but the relationship blossomed in London, where they passed time playing a long-distance, high-stakes game of catch using her javelin. He bought two gold rings from a shop in Piccadilly Circus. “So, we were both born on the same day,” he told her. “What if, by chance, we were also to get married on the same day?”

They wed two months later. “I was surprised when I first saw how Topek lived for it, what he was ready to sacrifice,” his bride said, many years later. “But when I saw his successes, I realised: ‘Yes, that’s it.”’ The next four years were a story of almost unblemished success for both of them. Between 1949 and 1951 Zatopek competed in 69 long-distance races and won every one. But in 1951 he injured himself by skiing into a tree, and in the buildup to the 1952 Olympics he suffered from illness. Then, on the night before the 10,000m final, an Australian journalist barged into his bedroom at midnight and requested an interview. Zatopek spoke to him for 20 minutes, and then after discovering that the reporter had no hotel of his own, invited him to stay the night.

Still, he won the race easily enough and followed it this time with victory in the 5,000m – certainly the most dramatic of his Olympic victories, involving a stunning last-bend manoeuvre that took him past Chris Chataway, Alain Mimoun and Herbert Schade. Ten minutes after that race, Dana won gold in the javelin.

By then he was 30, and a new generation of athletes were coming through, and in the 1954 European Championships he was thrashed over 5,000m by a Russian named Vladimir Kuts. If that defeat hurt immediately, its full impact struck him only the following year, when a coaches’ conference was held in Prague and the Russians revealed that Kuts was running faster than Zatopek ever had, and with half as much training. “Oh, they were hard words for me,” the Czech recalled. “I couldn’t sleep without thinking why, why. I talked to Kuts. His training is developing in the opposite direction to mine. He runs only 20 times 400m but each year he runs faster. He develops quality instead of quantity.”

The truth was that Zatopek worked too hard for his own good, and he continued to do so. In the buildup to the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 he started doing cross-country runs with his wife on his back, developed a hernia, needed an operation and very nearly missed the Games altogether. He recovered to finish sixth in the marathon, but soon after announced his retirement.

He remained active in the sport, partly because his apartment in Prague became an open house for the world’s best athletes, who would never miss the opportunity when in (what was) Czechoslovakia to visit the gregarious former Olympian. Gordon Pirie, the Yorkshireman who had modelled himself on Zatopek and raced against him in 1952, described it as “the merriest and gayest home I’ve been in”.

In 1968 the Australian athlete Ron Clarke came to visit. One of the world’s fastest distance runners for a decade, Clarke had suffered from a string of bad luck at major championships, and in that year’s Olympics in Mexico City had collapsed and very nearly died from altitude sickness. For all his lack of success Zatopek respected him as an athlete and liked him as a person, and the two spent a pleasurable day together. When he dropped Clarke off at the airport, Zatopek embraced him warmly and handed him a small parcel. “Not out of friendship but because you deserve it,” he said.

Clarke kept the package in his pocket until his plane was in the air. “I wondered whether I was smuggling something out for him. I retired to the privacy of the lavatory. When I unwrapped the box, there, inscribed with my name and that day’s date, was Emil’s Olympic 10,000-metre gold medal. I sat on that toilet seat and wept,” Clarke said.

A couple of months before Clarke’s visit, Soviet forces had brought a bloody end to the Prague Spring, a period when Czechoslovakia had flirted with democracy and westernisation, with Zatopek a vocal supporter. The following year Zatopek was punished for his political infidelity. Over years of loyal service, he had risen through the army ranks to become a colonel. Suddenly he was stripped of his rank, expelled from the army and thrown out of the Communist Party, who declared that Zatopek “lacked understanding of the fundamental problems of the development of our socialist society, and the need to defend it on the basis of the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism”. He was put to work in Prague’s sanitation department, collecting rubbish, and went on to spend seven years working in a uranium mine. Typically he saw the bright side of that experience as well. “The earth is nice not only from above, but from inside,” he said.

Eventually he returned to Prague and to his wife, with whom he lived in modest contentment until his death in 2000, aged 78. Nearly half a century after his greatest sporting achievement, leading figures from the world of sport filled his funeral at Prague’s National Theatre, testament to his eminence not just as an athlete but as a human. Certainly those who knew him best were sure that Zatopek’s greatness had not been confined to the track. As Ron Clarke, who of course had a unique reason to remember him fondly, put it: “There is not, and never was, a greater man than Emil Zatopek.”