Goldengirl

Dr. Serafin appeared in shot again. ‘The electronic timing gives us 11.17 seconds. If achieved in competition, that would rank her in the top half-dozen women sprinters of the world this year. It is right to mention that this film was made at an altitude of 6,000 feet and that the thinner air is advantageous to sprinters. Against that, one might set the absence of starting blocks and, of course, competition. If I state that in Mexico City in 1968, at an altitude of 7500 feet, Miss Wyomia Tyus, of the United States, set the Olympic Record at exactly eleven seconds, it puts this time in perspective.

‘Allow me to conclude with a simple mathematical observation. If you study the heights of the world’s leading twenty-five women sprinters, you will find that the average is 172.3 centimetres, almost 16 centimetres less than the young woman you have just seen. Now, it is a fact that the maximum force a muscle can produce is proportional to its cross-sectional area. If, as I contend, her muscularity is in direct proportion to her height, and the ratio between the average height and hers is called r, then the ratio between any two corresponding areas of muscle will be r2, as will the maximum forces those muscles can produce. The ratio between our young woman’s height and the average is one point zero nine to one; the ratio of muscular strength is correspondingly one point nineteen to one. In other words, she is nine per cent taller than the average of the world’s best, and her muscular strength is greater by as much as nineteen per cent.’ Serafin spread out his hands. ‘You may begin to understand why we have called her Goldengirl.’

The film concluded with a repeat of the sequence of the girl’s first, untimed run, but in slow motion, so that the minutiae of each stride, the ripple of thigh muscles, the hair’s fluidic rise and fall, took on their own fascination.

As he watched, Dryden reflected wryly on his assumption after the first few frames that he was watching a skinflick. The notion that these people were going to invite him to promote porn had leaped so readily to mind that it had taken more than a minute of the un-seductive Dr. Serafin to shift it. Now, as the film purred through its remaining footage, it was confirmed as a product launch. Dick Armitage’s story had held up: there was actually an unknown girl who appeared to run like a dream. How she measured up to Olympic standards it was impossible to tell. There was only Serafin’s word that she had covered 100 metres in whatever he had said. It could still be an elaborate con. Camera-work can make diamonds out of drops of water.

For the present, it didn’t matter whether Serafin was on the level. Armitage believed he was. Valenti believed it, too. They had backed Goldengirl and they wanted to squeeze the maximum from their investment. This was not the moment to raise doubts about her. He would have to discuss his possible involvement on the basis that Goldengirl was just as brilliant as the film suggested. He could still provide a plausible argument for refusing the commission.

There were four sportsmen on the Dryden books in the superstar bracket — Dick Armitage, Jim Hansenburg, the world champion racing driver, and the two golfers, Marler and Patrick, who between them in 1979 had wrapped up the PGA, the Piccadilly World Match Play, the U.S. Open, and the Masters. Now that they were walking corporations with their own investment managers and tax consultants, people looked at their success and assumed every clean-living kid with muscles could do as well. The plain fact was that merchandising opportunities didn’t arise for people in sports till circumstances contrived to put them in a situation which held the world by its short hairs in front of the TV screens.

For a track and field athlete, there was only one route to Madison Avenue, and that, in 1980, was via Moscow. But these days even an Olympic gold medal didn’t get your face on a cereal box. You had to beat the world in storybook style — falling flat on your face, getting up and still winning. Goldengirl — with no competitive experience — had it all to do.

And Dryden had to spell this out to the people who were behind the girl. When they had put so much already into the sales pitch, they weren’t going to take kindly to being told they didn’t have a marketable commodity.

It was a prospect that came uncomfortably closer when the film ran out, the screen ascended smoothly out of sight, and Dr. Serafin turned his chair to face them, a propitious smile on his lips.

Three