10 Laura K. Davis

Identity and the Athlete
Alexander MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile”

Despite its title, Alexander MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile” is not an inspirational tale that celebrates the great feats of sports heroes who, in apparent defiance of human limitations, are able to overcome all obstacles and win glory. A tightly woven short fictional story about two young elite runners, “Miracle Mile” culminates with the race toward which it builds, yet it is far from a narrative about victory. As the narrator and protagonist of the story, Mikey, puts it, “The most interesting stories [. . .] don’t have anything to do with winning” (MacLeod 2010, 38).

The story is, in part, about how athletes might feel a sense of belonging in or exclusion from their own athletic communities. The protagonist, Mikey, like many athletes in competitive sports, feels a strange combination of rivalry and support for his fellow runner and friend, Burner. He is both a part of and apart from the running community he inhabits. Mikey’s friendship with Burner and his own self-understanding are necessarily impacted in complicated ways when Burner emerges as the more dominant athlete of the two. “Miracle Mile” explores this fraught friendship in order to examine larger questions about the complexities of identity and the nature of relationships between individuals and their communities: How do we understand ourselves and our private experiences in relation to public events and discourses? How do we identify ourselves in relation to other people? What is our place in the world and what does it have to do with the past? For both the narrator and the reader, the answers to these questions emerge in fragments to reveal a dark and layered sport story.

With the first sentence of his story, MacLeod grounds it in an (in)famous moment in sport history: “This was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear” (9). Mikey and Burner are in a hotel room watching the Tyson moment on TV, while waiting to leave for their race, and, by blurring the boundaries between the boxer’s act of violence and their wait in the hotel room, MacLeod deftly draws a connection between Tyson’s story and the one that Mikey is about to tell. Indeed, Tyson’s story is not separate from Mikey’s own. “Mike kept coming at us through the screen,” Mikey says, as if he himself were the object of Tyson’s attack, and the effects linger: “I turned the TV off but the leftover buzz hanging in the air still hurt my eyes” (10). Just as Mikey is seemingly assaulted by Tyson and mesmerized by the TV coverage, so too is Burner, who sits “staring straight into the same dark place where the picture used to be,” his eyes “kind of glossed over.” Like the boxer’s victim, or like Tyson himself, Burner has been “fading in and out,” as if absent, in a different world (10).

Mikey experiences Tyson’s violence as what Freud calls an “uncanny” moment—a moment in which one paradoxically experiences that which is both familiar and unfamiliar. In Freud’s theory, the uncanny is associated with the self and the home, and it is infused with the horrific (Freud 1955). Mikey describes watching Tyson’s act of violence on TV as repetitive and routine, yet he recognizes its horror: “If you look at the same pictures long enough even the worst things start to feel too familiar, even boring” (Macleod 2010, 10). Mikey’s recognition of the Tyson moment as familiar implies that he sees something of himself in Tyson’s act of violence. In the context of Freud’s theory, Mikey intuits a hidden truth about himself when he experiences the uncanny—the familiar, his own self, made strange in Tyson’s image. Later in the story, Mikey emphasizes the similarities between “freak show people” and competitive track athletes: “I used to think that’s what we were like, the track people. Each of us had one of those strange bodies designed to do only one thing” (25). MacLeod reminds readers of Tyson’s violence once again at the end of “Miracle Mile,” when he implies that Burner might commit a similar act to Tyson’s: “Burner had already closed the gap. [. . .] It all disintegrated after that” (44). Indeed, Tyson’s presence, invoked at the beginning of the story, haunts it throughout. The story thus suggests that there is a fine line between the competitor and the “freak,” the human and the monstrous.

Furthermore, MacLeod emphasizes Mikey’s experience of Tyson’s act of violence as mediated—as an image (“Cameras showed it from different angles and at different speeds” [10]) and as a story open to interpretation (“Commentators took turns explaining [. . .] what it all meant” [10]). On the one hand, MacLeod blurs the boundaries between Tyson and Mikey, each a part of the other, an interpretation that is supported by the similarity of their names. On the other hand, he highlights the mediation and constructedness of Tyson’s story, and that too applies as much to Mikey as it does to Tyson. Just as Mikey views Tyson on TV, so we, the readers, read about Mikey in this story, a story in which Mikey is both character and narrator. MacLeod draws attention to Mikey’s reading of Tyson’s image on the screen; likewise, with his use of second-person narration, he draws attention to our reading of Mikey in the story: “You remember that” and “You know how it gets” (9, 10, emphasis mine). Therefore, the reader tends to feel a sense of discomfort similar to that which Mikey feels when he negotiates Tyson’s image on the screen. We, like Mikey, might recognize deep within ourselves, within our own human nature, the dark animalistic violence that Tyson represents.

If Tyson’s story is related to Mikey’s, then so too is the story of Roger Bannister and John Landy, who ran the Miracle Mile at the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver in 1954, “the Tyson/Holyfield of its time” (37). Mikey narrates both races—Bannister and Landy’s and his and Burner’s—moving back and forth between the two stories. Just as Landy takes the lead early in the 1954 race, so too does the runner Eric Dawson in Mikey and Burner’s race. And just as Bannister pulls ahead to beat Landy in 1954, so too does Burner pull ahead to beat Dawson in MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile.” Moreover, as mentioned above, Mikey and Mike Tyson share a name; in the same way, Bannister and Landy’s race shares the same name—the Miracle Mile—as Mikey and Burner’s. Thus, the legendary story of the Vancouver race and the story of Mikey’s race conflate: one folds into and becomes the other.

By juxtaposing these two stories, MacLeod probes the issue of recognition and fame in competitive running. Elite runners like Mikey and Burner strive for recognition and fame by excelling in their sport, yet that achievement depends on various factors, including historical time. Mikey and Burner’s story will never take on the significance of Bannister and Landy’s because they will not be the first ones to run a mile in under four minutes. Similarly, Mikey falls into Burner’s shadow in the race as Burner takes the lead. Burner is the one who experiences recognition and fame, even if momentarily, while Mikey does not: after the race, “[e]very eye was on Burner” (41). “Miracle Mile” demonstrates how athletes strive for recognition and public acknowledgement in sport, but it also shows how temporary and fleeting such fame is. After the story’s penultimate race, Mikey and Burner run to cool down in a suburban neighbourhood, on “anonymous sidewalks” (43) where “nobody cared” (42). The story presents and ponders the significance of public recognition and fame in the lives of professional athletes, showing how prominent fame can be for elite athletes but also how temporary and tenuous it often is.

MacLeod parallels the Bannister-Landy and Mikey-Burner stories not only to contemplate recognition and fame but also to draw attention to them as stories. He highlights the stories’ mediation. “That’s the story they tell,” Mikey says of Bannister and Landy, “but it’s not true” (37). The Bannister-Landy story becomes consecrated in time with a “famous statue” (37); similarly, after his race, Mikey feels that his past is “crystallizing [. . .] and freezing into permanence” (41)—like the statue itself. Significantly, in Mikey’s version of the Bannister-Landy race, there is an unnoticed presence, a “phantom” or “ghost” (37) that does not enter into the public domain, and yet the “phantom” is not who he appears to be. The official story maintains that Landy looked over the wrong shoulder and missed Bannister, “[a]s if Bannister was like some ghost, slipping past unseen” (37). But Mikey asserts that Landy knew Bannister was there and was looking for Richard Ferguson, the Canadian who came third, to see if he, Landy, could still make second place. “[T]he important missing character,” Mikey says, was Ferguson, “the one who didn’t make it into the statue” (38).

Thus, MacLeod, through Mikey’s narration, challenges the “truth” of the historical narrative, the accepted public version of the race: he opens it up to a different possible interpretation. Referring to Herb Wylie’s work, Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Josef Grubisic explain that Canadian historical novels have a “double-sidedness” (2010, xii), “a skepticism toward historical master narratives and simultaneous reluctance to dispose entirely of communally informed historical consciousness” (xiii–xiv). This is true of MacLeod’s story as well, which challenges the publicly accepted version of the Bannister-Landy race and yet relies on it to create and propel the story of Mikey and Burner’s race. As Georg Lukács argues, “what matters” in a historical narrative “is not the retelling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events” (cited in Cabajsky and Grubisic 2010, vii). MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile” is a “poetic awakening” for Bannister and Landy (since it offers an alternate interpretive possibility) and for Mikey and Burner (since it relies on the historical narrative to imagine the new one).

During the ultimate race in MacLeod’s story, Mikey makes clear that he and Burner are acutely aware of each other. At the beginning of the race, he tells us, “I came up behind Burner and put my hand on his back, just kind of gently, so he’d know I was there” (MacLeod 2010, 34). And when, later in the race, Burner comes up behind him, Mikey feels “this hand reach out and touch the middle of my back [. . .] just a tap” (39). This mutual physical acknowledgement legitimizes and solidifies their presence for one another. However, Burner, as winner of the race, might be remembered, as Bannister is, whereas Mikey, like Ferguson in the Bannister-Landy narrative, is the “phantom” (37): he is out of the public picture. As Mikey anticipates earlier in the story, “I knew I wouldn’t be close enough to be in the photograph when the first guy crossed the line” (15). Thus, MacLeod’s story is self-reflexive, a metanarrative that examines the parts of stories that get told—“freezing into permanence” (41)—and those that do not. In such stories, writes Richard Lane, “the grand narratives of truth and reason are no longer believed in, or regarded, as universals, and are replaced by local expressions, little stories or narratives” (2011, 180). MacLeod juxtaposes those “little stories or narratives”—Ferguson in the Bannister-Landy race, Mikey in the Burner-Dawson one—in order to expose the mediation, chance, and constructedness of storytelling itself.

Yet the boundaries between the “grand narratives” and the “little stories” are not always easily defined. For example, on one interpretation, Burner, as the winner of the ultimate race in the story, enters into public discourse, whereas Mikey does not and falls into Burner’s shadow, yet neither Burner nor Mikey really becomes legend, since, unlike Bannister and Landy, they are not the first runners to break the four-minute mile. On this interpretation, Mikey and Burner are the shadows of the former racers. The race that really matters—in terms of the public imagination—is the one at the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver in 1954. Therefore, what makes a sport story meaningful is not victory but the breaking of human barriers, in the time and at the place where those barriers matter.

In a 2013 interview, John Landy stated that at the time of the Vancouver race, “people really questioned whether a four-minute mile was humanly possible” (Commonwealth Games Federation 2013). While both Landy and Bannister had run a mile in under four minutes weeks before the Commonwealth Games, the Miracle Mile race in 1954 was significant, since it would be the first time after those runs that they would compete against each other. In MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile,” when Burner wins the race, Mikey says that “everyone [. . .] was trying to find a place for it in their own personal histories” (MacLeod 2010, 41). That statement is true not only for the Mikey-Burner race but also for the historical Bannister-Landy one. It signified breaking both the four-minute-mile barrier and, more generally, human boundaries of all kinds. In that way, the race came to signify nothing less than hope itself.

Mikey and Burner are the shadows of Landy and Bannister, and Mikey, as the narrator of “Miracle Mile,” is Burner’s “phantom” throughout the story. When the two of them are on the bus to the race, Mikey interprets Burner’s erratic behaviour to one of the other athletes: “I said ‘Nerves’ as if that single word could explain everything about Burner” (24). Mikey is like the commentators broadcasting Tyson’s violence, “explaining what was happening and what it all meant” (10). In both cases, MacLeod foregrounds the inability to narrate what cannot be completely understood—Tyson’s violence and Burner’s strange behaviour. Before they go to the race, Mikey names each racer, and after each one, Burner responds by describing “the guy’s weaknesses”; with the speaking of each name, Burner defines himself as the winner against those who are not (15). Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, Mikey performs this ritual act of naming: “I just released the words into the air” (15). His “release” of words brings Burner and the other athletes into existence; similarly, for Mikey, Burner’s “release” from the tunnel when they race the train brings Burner back to life. Likewise, Burner’s “release” across the finish line at the final race of the story brings him into the public eye. Ultimately, Mikey is the narrator, Burner’s “phantom,” who creates and sustains Burner’s character throughout the story. In this way, MacLeod conflates himself as author and Mikey as narrator of the text he writes.

The race itself is narrated by both Mikey and the sports announcer. While Mikey is the vehicle by which we come to know the story of the race, we hear the commentator’s voice too, overriding the narrator’s. In an uncanny moment, as Mikey listens to the commentator speak about him, he feels unfamiliar to himself: “Even as it was happening, the voice said, ‘There goes Michael Campbell, moving into second place. [. . .]’ It was like being inside and outside of yourself at the same time” (35). As he listens to the commentator speak about Burner, he again feels unfamiliar to himself—as if he and Burner are one and the same: “I heard the voice say something like ‘Jamie Burns is safely tucked in at fifth or sixth place.’ I remember this only because the announcer used Burner’s real name and it sounded so strange to me” (35). In these instances, MacLeod suddenly foregrounds Mikey’s role as character rather than narrator. One might say that Mikey has “lost control of the story” (40), since the “voice”—which parallels MacLeod himself—has taken control. Mikey’s loss of control of the story finds its epitome at the end, when he has left both the sport of running and the ability or the willingness to continue to narrate Burner’s fate. W. H. New explains that “postmodern techniques in the 1970s and 1980s emphasized the power of the storyteller to disrupt illusions of reality” and instead to “highlight the artifice of narrative” (2003, 347), a statement that easily applies to “Miracle Mile.” In this instance, though, MacLeod highlights Mikey’s receding voice. Mikey loses his narrative power to the commentator and author during the race, as the story moves into the public sphere and is no longer just his own. Indeed, in this scene, MacLeod foregrounds and undermines Mikey’s role as narrator, simultaneously emphasizing both Mikey’s authority to tell the story and the tenuousness of that authority.

Mikey does not seem to race against Burner but for him. When Mikey narrates Burner’s win, he describes it as his own, as if he and Burner are one: “I knew I had never wanted anything more than this,” Mikey tells us; “this little victory [. . .] mattered to me in some serious way” (40). Moreover, he describes his experience of watching Burner’s win as a spiritual one: “I was caught up, caught up for the first and only time in my life, in one of those pure ecstatic surges that I believed only religious people ever experienced” (39–40). That experience, for Mikey, results in a kind of revelation, not about Burner but about himself. He states that his wish for Burner’s win “told me something I had never known about myself before. We are what we want most and there are no miracles without desire” (40). The outcome of the race is a win for both Mikey and Burner, but in different ways. Burner wins by crossing the finish line first; in contrast, Mikey wins by experiencing an awakening to philosophical knowledge about possibilities. For the first time, he realizes that deep desire and caring can result in significant and unexpected outcomes, that “wishes” and “miracles” are connected, and that one can indeed lead to the other.

This moment situates “Miracle Mile” as metamodernist rather than postmodernist. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker define the metamodern as “constituted by the tension, no, the double-bind, of a modern desire for sens and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all” (2010, 6), a tension that is manifest in the oscillation between “a modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness” (5–6). In MacLeod’s story, Mikey’s spiritual and intellectual experience is a turn toward the modernist desire for meaning and can be read as sincere. Nevertheless, his epiphany is tempered by the fact that his race does not hold meaning or have historical weight in the way that the Bannister-Landy race does—nor does it, to the same extent, enter into the realm of public or historical discourse. “Miracle Mile” thus vacillates between the achievement of meaning and purpose and the possibility that such meaning cannot be sustained: Mikey and Burner have missed the moment when the four-minute mile had meaning and purpose because they ran years too late.

Both Mikey’s conflation with Burner and his spiritual experience at the moment of the race parallel his previous experience running with Burner in the train tunnel. Mikey runs the tunnel first, and when he finally sees Burner come through it, the train close behind him, he yells, “Come on, come on” and waves his “whole arm in a big circle, as if I could scoop out that space between us” (22). Mikey’s attempt to reduce any space between him and Burner implies a oneness between them. The description of the tunnel as the underworld—a dark place in which there is “straight fear” and “rats” and from which one emerges “on the other side” (19)—also implies that Mikey and Burner could each be a part of the other. Within a Freudian framework, we might interpret Burner as Mikey’s id, a part of Mikey himself, a “repressed impulse” that “can exert driving force without the ego noticing the compulsion” (Freud 1989, 634). Mikey is unaware of Burner until he emerges on the other side of the tunnel; in the same way, the ego, according to Freud, is unaware of the driving force of the id in one’s own unconscious. The drive of the id is represented by the motivation and speed that is Burner as he runs through the tunnel. In addition, Freud’s id is a base, animal-like instinct, and Burner himself is described as an animal: he “had this long line of spit hanging out of his mouth like a dog and the look on his face wasn’t fear but something more like rage” (MacLeod 2010, 22). This description recalls Tyson’s animal-like act of violence and anticipates the inconclusive end to the story, where the reader is invited to consider that Burner himself might commit such an act. Whereas Mikey is the shadow of Burner at the ultimate race, Burner is the shadow of Mikey—deep within the underworld or his unconscious—in the race against the train. Mikey and Burner vacillate, taking turns mirroring and upholding the identity of the other.

It is significant that Mikey has a spiritual experience in both of these moments—the final race of the story and the race against the train. He explains the dangers of racing the train: “The other thing they always talked about was the light. They said that if the light ever touched you, if that big glare of the freighter ever landed on you, then that would be the end” (20). Here, Mikey’s explanation is literal—to view the train’s headlight is to be crushed by the train—but it is also metaphorical: it suggests the witnessing of God or the spiritual at the moment of death while also signifying a moment of enlightenment or knowledge. Already waiting outside the tunnel, Mikey sees the light of the train as Burner emerges from it: “I saw the big round light and it touched me and filled up the whole space, illuminating everything” (21). At the race, Mikey comes to understand that a wish or deep desire can produce results; at the tunnel, he sees the light, an image of that understanding or illumination. In both cases, MacLeod describes the moment of epiphany as both intellectual and spiritual, a “miraculous desperation” (40).

MacLeod puns on the words “training” and “train” when he indicates that Mikey and Burner are “training” together when they begin to race the “train” (17). Likewise, he hints at the expression “light at the end of the tunnel” when Mikey narrates his witnessing of the “light.” Indeed, that “light” refers both to Mikey’s new intellectual or spiritual awakening and to Burner’s “release” into first place at the final race. That MacLeod draws attention to the meanings of words and phrases here suggests that the “light” could also signal the spark of the imagination, the creation of meaning by the storyteller. This reading is supported by the ways in which the author foregrounds Mikey as the narrator of the story and posits “Miracle Mile” as a metanarrative. It also marks the story not only as metamodern, as discussed above, but also as historiographic metafiction—fiction that, according to Linda Hutcheon, brings together the historical and the literary and foregrounds both as “linguistic constructs, highly conventionalized in their narrative forms” (1988, 105). MacLeod’s story addresses the historical through extensive references—to Mike Tyson, Bannister and Landy, the 9/11 attack, and the Canadian runner Ben Johnson (MacLeod 2010, 9). “Miracle Mile” also emphasizes the telling and retelling of those histories, and the “light” that is the act of creation itself.

Not only does the author draw attention to and blur the boundaries between meanings of words and phrases; he also blurs the boundaries between worlds or modes of being in the story. The boundary of the finish line is perhaps the most important example, and this boundary gains special significance for the person who crosses over it first, as Burner does in the final race of the story. As noted above, Burner’s win at the race results in his entrance into the public realm. As Mikey puts it after Burner wins, “Other people, strangers I had never seen before, were coming around slapping him on the back and giving their congratulations” (41). Interestingly, though, Mikey and Burner’s last run through the train tunnel has just the opposite result—a deliberate avoidance of the public eye, of what could be the so-called official story. “We knew they’d be making their calls and trying to track us down,” Mikey tells us, referring to the train driver and engineers who had witnessed their race against the train, “so we spent the next half an hour running and hiding behind a few dumpsters and trying to make our way back to my car” (22). In contrast to Burner’s public win in the ultimate race, Mikey and Burner’s race through the train tunnel is to be hidden, kept unseen and unknown. It is the journey into the underworld, the id or the unconscious, and the coming through “on the other side” (19).

In addition to blurring the boundaries between Mikey and Burner, the public and the private, the ego and the id, MacLeod blurs the lines between the human and the so-called superhuman, the “regular guy” and the hero or villain. For instance, he uses hyperbole to describe the elite athletes on the bus: “The long jumpers could leap over a mid-sized station wagon and the shot putters could bench press it” (26). Alongside such descriptions, however, Mikey notes the athletes’ vulnerable, human-like qualities, pointing out that “some of those hundred metre guys are built up like superheroes [. . .] , but when the race gets close, every one of them is scared” (23). Similarly, he discusses the athletes who “cross over” (29) such boundaries, using drugs to test the extent to which they can push the limits of what is humanly possible. Mikey and Burner get “giant horse pills” (29) from a vet who works on race horses, and Mikey gets six cortisone injections in five months, despite knowing that “you’re only supposed to take three of those in your whole life” (30). The reference to Mike Tyson, as discussed earlier, epitomizes this notion: he has “crossed over” into an act—the biting off of an opponent’s ear—that evokes the villainous, the inhuman, the incomprehensible. In a particularly gothic image, Mikey describes what athletes call “‘rigging,’ short for rigor mortis,” the process at the point of exhaustion by which the muscles in the body constrict one by one, “dying right underneath you” (37). MacLeod explores the idea that humans can break barriers and overcome setbacks of any kind, inspiring hope, yet he simultaneously emphasizes the dark side of that equation. To “cross over” might be to become not human but animal, not hero but villain. Hope and inspiration, the author suggests, can be overridden by the ugly and the horrific.

Although Mikey strives to be superhuman, he is also consistently reminded that he is not, since he suffers from a recurring injury to his Achilles tendon. Like Achilles himself, a warrior in Homer’s Iliad, he is courageous and loyal, yet he suffers from one weakness, his Achilles heel, which makes him human and separates him from the gods. The attributes that make the characters human in both The Iliad and “Miracle Mile” invoke the reader’s understanding and sympathy. MacLeod thus questions the extent to which it is desirable to exceed human boundaries. Should we attempt to be god-like by pushing the boundaries of what is humanly impossible? Or does the breaking of such boundaries, the desire to be “flawless,” hover dangerously near the inhuman, oppressive, and violent? “Miracle Mile” seems to offer both possibilities. In addition, MacLeod situates his own character within literary history by aligning him with Homer’s. Thus, through his narrator, the author enables a “poetic awakening” (Lukács again) of history in the realms of both sport and literature: in sport, Mikey’s race is the shadow of the Bannister-Landy race, and in literature, Mikey is the shadow of Homer’s Achilles. Once again, MacLeod intertwines history and fiction and emphasizes Mikey and his story as literary artifice.

MacLeod also extends the blurring of boundaries to include space and time. The tunnel through which Mikey and Burner run, for instance, spans the distance from Detroit, Michigan, to Windsor, Ontario, and therefore crosses the border between the United States and Canada. Similarly, after Mikey and Burner finish their race, they run to cool down in a suburban neighbourhood, crossing the boundary from one kind of geographical space (the public race) to another (the private, domestic space)—“past all those houses where nobody cared” (42).

Just as national and geographical boundaries are crossed in the story, so too are boundaries of time. The story and its references, for instance, cover a wide span of time, from Homer’s Iliad, probably composed during the eighth century BC, to the Bannister-Landy race at the Commonwealth Games in 1954, to June 1997, when Tyson bit Holyfield’s ear and the fictional characters of Mikey and Burner ran their race on 28 June 1997. Mikey and Burner simultaneously wait, filling in a seemingly endless amount of time, and speed, racing against their own times and the times of others. Mikey notes that his and Burner’s lives “kept rolling along, filling in all this extra time” (22), yet when they are racing, there is real significance in just a few seconds, “the difference between 3:36 and 3:39” (16). Furthermore, the narrator not only oscillates between waiting and speeding, slow time and fast, but also captures the past and the future in a single image. Mikey imagines a future in which he has a kid who enters school track meets, painting a rosy and nostalgic picture of the scene that seems to be both a remembrance of his own past and a projection into the future (27–28). Finally, he conflates not only the past and the future but also, with his use of second-person narration in this scene, himself and his readers. “You,” as a school-aged child, are “holding all your first-place ribbons in the middle of a weedy field” (28, emphasis mine). The narrator juxtaposes the “ribbons,” a symbol of hope and happiness, with the “weeds,” a representation of the ugliness of life. In “Miracle Mile,” then, MacLeod brilliantly collapses space and time in images that obscure the distinction between the past and the future, the moment the story is written and the moment it is read, the good times and the bad, hope and despair, happiness and ruin.

MacLeod’s story thus suggests that private experiences relate in significant ways to public events and histories, that individuals in the present gesture back to those in the past. In order to make meaning, the story implies, we continually forge such connections, assessing and evaluating how moments in our lives relate to those that have already entered the public realm, “freezing into permanence” (41). Athletes consistently attempt to measure up against the last race or the top record holder, yet “Miracle Mile” suggests that this act is not limited to the athlete but is common to all who engage in acts of creation. Therefore, Mikey celebrates Burner’s “release” (15) into first place because he is not only his competitor but also his creator, “illuminating” (21) his character as he pushes Burner into public discourse, which is the story itself. In this way, “Miracle Mile” is aligned with and draws upon other stories, both literary and historical: from Homer’s Iliad, to the story of Mike Tyson, to Landy and Bannister’s Miracle Mile. MacLeod’s story tests its literary identity in the same way that Mikey and Burner test their identities against one another and, relatedly, against their own fragmented, inner selves.

“Miracle Mile” adheres to the tendency in Canadian literature to contemplate the present in relation to the past. In Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory, Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty argue that memory is the impetus of contemporary Canadian literature: “Articulations of a retrievable or ‘forgotten’ authentic memory, often linked to ideas of national commemoration, have in more recent years been supplemented by critical attention to instances of counter-memory or ‘memory from below,’ which considers communities that have been omitted from official discourses of historical commemoration” (Sugars and Ty 2014, 4). Certainly, MacLeod’s story presents “memory from below,” at once tying the present to a known and unknown past: the author interrogates the validity of athletic heroism (with reference to Ben Johnson and others), and he questions the intertwining of violence and sport (with reference to Tyson’s act of violence during a boxing match). Moreover, he presents an alternate interpretation of the Landy-Bannister story by introducing a “phantom” (MacLeod 2010, 37)—that “counter-memory” or version that lurks in the shadows, just about to take form and substance. The way in which “Miracle Mile” intertwines the present with the past implies that memory is the substance of identity. While the story momentarily engages in nostalgia, it ultimately posits athletic identities as “imbued with simultaneous resonance and ambivalence” (Sugars and Ty 2014, 9). The telling of sport histories are nonetheless reiterations of stories. And perhaps they end, as Mikey’s and Burner’s identities do and “Miracle Mile” itself does, with a closing of “the gap” and a disintegration (MacLeod 2010, 44). Ultimately, then, MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile” upsets and complicates our common and easy perceptions and understandings of sports, memories, stories, and identities.

WORKS CITED

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Commonwealth Games Federation. 2013. Ten Commonwealth Games Moments: The Miracle Mile. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7dROEOn_20.

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