The 1982 Boston Marathon was great theater: two American runners, one a renowned champion and the other a gutsy underdog, going at each other for just under 2 hours and 9 minutes. Other famous marathons have featured narrow margins of victory, with the suspense developing late in the race, the product of a rapidly fading leader or furiously closing challenger. At the '82 Boston, by contrast, Dick Beardsley and Alberto Salazar ran in each other's pockets the entire 26.2 miles, with no other competitor near them for the final 9 miles. They were so close that, for most of the last half of the race, Beardsley, while in the lead, monitored Salazar's progress by watching his shadow on the asphalt.Neither man broke, and neither, in any meaningful sense, lost. The race merely came to a thrilling, shattering end, leaving both runners, in separate and ultimately pyrrhic ways, the winner. Since Beardsley was just 26 and Salazar 23, everyone assumed that this would be the start of a long and glorious rivalry, one that would galvanize the public and seal American dominance in the sport through the 1984 Olympics and beyond. But rather than a beginning, Boston '82 represented a climax - it exacted such an enormous toil that neither man ever ran as well again. If the glory of their marathon bore a heroic quality, so did their suffering and deliverance afterward: Beardsley, the most innocent of men, fell into felony drug addiction; and Salazar, the toughest of men, fell prey to depression. Powerful, unconscious forces brought these two great athletes together at the Boston Marathon and drove their lives in the years that followed.Duel in the Sun captures the delicate balance between hope and desperation that characterized Dick Beardsley, Alberto Salazar, and America's greatest marathon. Read Less