The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  ‘Outstanding’ Irish Times

  ‘This book is a must for the coach and athlete interested in the minds of great milers . . . Butcher’s description of the heats and semi finals in LA is painstakingly accurate and dramatic’ Athletics Weekly

  ‘There are precious few good books on athletics but this study of the intertwined careers of Seb Coe and Steve Ovett is an exception . . . In addition to analysing the qualities of talent, ambition and ruthless determination that made them so special, Pat Butcher is excellent on the contrasts in their personalities’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Written as meticulously as the runner’s preparation for their record-breaking rivalry’

  Observer Books of the Year

  ‘Butcher relives a Golden Age’ Sunday Times

  ‘A superb book’ Athletics International

  ‘Fascinating . . . an inspiring read’ Runner’s World

  ‘Formidable’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘A beautifully researched account’

  Mike Rowbottom, Independent

  For Mum and Dad

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Diagrams

  1. The Great Tradition

  2. Rivals

  3. The Tough

  4. The Toff

  5. Mum and Dad

  6. Brief Encounter

  7. Genius

  8. Burn-Up

  9. Boycott

  10. Blown Away

  11. The Fatman

  12. Monster

  13. Eastern Block

  14. Hare and Hounds

  15. In the Zone

  16. Zen and the Art of Winning

  17. Run – and Take the Money

  18. Milers

  19. Fools’ Gold

  20. The Third Man

  21. Race of the Century

  22. Revenge

  23. Making History

  24. Legends

  Index

  About the Author

  Picture Section

  Copyright

  Total recall only happens in fiction. The events described here stretch back over three decades and more, and memory is not always reliable. Forgetting and fabricating are not always intentional, as the debates over retrieved memory suggest. In an interview more than twenty years ago with former 10,000 metres world record holder David Bedford, he broke off from recalling one of his feats to say, ‘It’s like we’re talking about another person’. It was his version of L. P. Hartley’s observation in The Go-Between – ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

  Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe, whom I cannot thank enough for their trust and their time, did things very differently – differently from each other, and differently from everyone else. Since I was there much of the time, this is an attempt to be a go-between – between them and you and that foreign country where they performed with such distinction.

  I have used Mel Watman’s invaluable Coe & Ovett File (taken from Athletics Weekly reports and interviews) as an aide-mémoire and as a source for the occasional contemporary quote. I have similarly used David Miller’s early volumes with and on Sebastian Coe, Running Free and Coming Back; and the autobiography Ovett, with John Rodda, as well as Steve Ovett by Simon Turnbull. But since this current volume is mostly from primary sources, any blame accruing is entirely mine.

  My thanks to the three score and more of my other interviewees whose demonstrable pleasure in recalling their involvement, however peripheral in a golden era for the sport, was so gratifying.

  Thanks too to my agent John Saddler, whose idea this volume was in the first place; to my editor Ian Preece; to my family, friends and colleagues for their support; to Kenth Andersson, Jörg Wenig and Andy Edwards for their help with translations; to Kevin Grogan and James O’Brien for their advice on specific chapters, and especially to Kevin for reminding me that Homer was the first athletics writer.

  Pat Butcher, London 2004

  . . . even so close behind him was Odysseus treading in his footprints before the dust could settle there, and Ajax could feel his breath on the back of his head as he ran swiftly on

  Homer, The Iliad

  Illustrations

  1. ‘The Mighty Atom . . .’ Peter Coe

  2. ‘Did he win? . . .’ Reg Hook

  3. ‘Seb at 16 . . .’ Peter Coe

  4. ‘Nature Boy . . .’ Getty Images

  5. ‘A rare shot of Ovett . . .’ Reg Hook

  6. ‘Family Debate . . .’ Mark Shearman

  7. ‘Ovett’s first international title, 1973 . . .’ Associated Sports Photography

  8. ‘Running Dialogue – coach Harry Wilson . . .’ Associated Sports Photography

  9. ‘The future Olympic 1500 metres champion . . .’ Mark Shearman

  10. ‘Student in form . . .’ Mark Shearman

  11. ‘Olaf who? . . .’ Mark Shearman

  12. ‘Zurich 1979 . . .’ Associated Sports Photography

  13. ‘After the Moscow 800 metres . . .’ Mark Shearman

  14. ‘. . . treading in his footprints’ Sports Agence magazine, Paris

  15. ‘Ecstasy . . .’ Associated Press & Getty Images

  16. ‘Peter Coe and Seb . . .’ Peter Coe

  17. ‘And another. Zurich 1981 . . .’ Getty Images

  18. ‘Coe begins 1983 . . .’ Getty Images

  19. ‘A year later he climbs Richmond Hill . . .’ Mark Shearman

  20. ‘Don’t look back . . .’ Mark Shearman

  21. ‘The finest, maybe the final flowering of the great tradition . . .’ Getty Images

  22. ‘After the Olympic 800 metres, Los Angeles . . .’ Getty Images

  23. ‘1989 – “Didn’t you used to be . . .?”’ Mark Shearman

  1

  The Great Tradition

  They said you could hear the roar out in Santa Monica, a good ten miles away. Yet the three men easing away from their pursuers at the centre of the cauldron were only dimly aware of the crescendo. They were edging towards their own limits. And the howls of close to a hundred thousand spectators, most of them now on their feet in the sun-drenched stadium had as little impact as the advice from the millions at home yelling at their televisions. The British public had never seen anything like it. Nor had the rest of the world. It was a sporting moment for the ages, worthy of nearby Hollywood. It was the penultimate bend of the 1500 metres, the Olympic Games’ blue riband event, and the predatory trio moving swiftly up to the shoulder of the unwilling pacemaker were all Brits. They were the finest flowering of the Great Tradition.

  Sebastian Coe, the defending champion, was leading. His lifelong rival, his nemesis, Steve Ovett, was bringing up the rear. Sandwiched between them was Steve Cram, the youngster who would eventually upstage them both as the best miler in the world. The eyes blinked, the cameras clicked, and for a sublime moment frozen in time this was the apotheosis of the institution that was the rivalry between Coe and Ovett. A dozen years had elapsed since they had ploughed through the fields of west London, each unaware of the other, each dreaming of a moment like this. Four years had gone by since they had ‘swapped’ Olympic titles in Moscow. They were just forty seconds from the finish line, moments away from triumph for one and a race to a hospital bed for the other. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  2

  Rivals

  A quarter of a century ago, Britain was a nation divided. It was not the split between those who loved the newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with a strange passion, and those who hated her with visceral contempt. It was not the ever-widening gulf between the haves
and the have-nots. It was not the traditional rift between the north and south. But it was all of those, and more. It was Steve Ovett versus Sebastian Coe.

  Although they had met, unknown to each other, in a schoolboy race in 1972, the rivalry between Coe and Ovett began in earnest in 1978. Since Ovett, already a star, had not spoken to the media since 1975, he was portrayed as brash, arrogant, a bully-boy. Moreover, his behaviour in races did little to dispel the image. He was ruthless towards his opponents, whom he seemed to taunt, firstly by tracking them with contemptuous ease as they tried to pull away, then by gliding past them, barely acknowledging their presence, and ultimately by waving casually as he crossed the line – first, of course – with a grin on his unstrained face. Curiously, for the press who loathed him, the crowds loved him.

  Then Coe appeared, as if from nowhere. And he quickly became equally good on the track, but in a different way: he dominated races right from the gun. Belying his frail frame, Coe would shoot to the front from the off, daring anyone to follow. They could not. He became so good that his only opponent became the clock. Pacemakers were enlisted to ease his path, and he shattered world records with graceful ease. What’s more, he was a darling with the media. Well spoken, eloquent, the only problem was that he could be a little stiff at times, but then he was still young. There were a few who detected an element of smugness, but they were dismissed as the ‘Ovett camp’. It was like that. You were either for Ovett, or you were for Coe. There were no agnostics. But the story was not quite what it seemed.

  Ovett and Coe. Coe and Ovett. They were as distinct as Apollo and Dionysus, and as famous as Laurel and Hardy, and for the longest, brightest moment in the history of track and field athletics, they were as familiar as bacon and eggs. In fact, whatever your breakfast, you could barely open your newspaper in the decade following the Montreal Olympics of 1976 without finding something about one or the other. Or both. For they were inextricably linked. And have remained so.

  Ovett and Coe. The Tough and the Toff. Coe, slight, elegant, intense, fear of failure investing his every move. Ovett, the barrel-chested bruiser, strolling around the track like the very incarnation of Kipling’s dictum to accept victory and defeat with equal panache. Hollywood could not have conceived it better. Sebastian Coe, looking and sounding as if he had sauntered off the pages of an Anthony Powell novel, or stepped off the set of Chariots of Fire. Steve Ovett, in contrast was the comic-book anti-hero. His alter-ego was Alf Tupper, the 1950s icon of ‘Tough of the Track’ in The Rover. They were the sparring, inseparable twins of the premier Olympic sport. Their stand-offs in Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 relegated the rest of the Olympic Games to a side-show. They kept us on the edges of our seats, either in the stadium or in front of the television, for the best part of ten years.

  Between them they won three golds, two silvers and a bronze at the Olympics, and a sackful of European and Commonwealth medals. Together they tore up the middle-distance record books, setting close to a score of new standards, and elevating athletics from a once-every-four-years Olympic occasion to a daily feast of professional excellence. They were the moving forces for an unprecedented period of British hegemony in international middle-distance running, a decade when British athletes won every major international title at 1500 metres, and held every world record from 800 to 5000 metres.

  They may not have been the first to receive payment for running, but they created the sport as we know it today. And they did it by clambering from the most ordinary of English beginnings to the most extraordinary international finale – a riveting and desolating climax in front of 100,000 spectators and a TV audience of hundreds of millions in the rococo splendour of the Coliseum in Los Angeles.

  They were the beginning and the end of an era in more ways than one. Amateur athletics had been born a century before them, out of the corruption of professional match races, where ‘fixing’ was common, as was running under assumed names. But the last gasp of that colourful era came in the mid-1880s, with two equally dominant characters, the professional runners or ‘pedestrians’ Walter George, a Wiltshire pharmacist, and Wille Cummings, a publican from Preston. They were Coe and Ovett a century beforehand, and they ran two series of three races, which resulted in a world mile record that lasted for thirty years.

  A hundred years later, the amateurism with which an Oxbridge elite had rescued athletics and given it a Corinthian veneer had become redundant; and the era of Thatcherism ushered in the new professional sport. Ovett and Coe were in the vanguard of that transformation; indeed, their rivalry virtually created the new professionalism. By the late seventies, athletics was practised in over 200 countries. It had more world-wide penetration than any other sport, including football. And, as with football, Britain, which had created athletics as a ‘modern’ sport, had been gradually pushed further and further into the background, while the superpowers – the USA and the Soviet Union – were using the Olympic arena as their Cold War battleground. Yet, in the wake of a single bronze medal for Britain at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, two athletes from the same tiny island were suddenly dominating the sports news, not only of athletics but of every sport world-wide.

  Prime Minister Harold Wilson was convinced that had England beaten Germany in the 1970 Football World Cup, he would have won the election which followed. Coe and Ovett did provoke a similar ‘feel-good’ factor, way beyond their sport, and in a manner which was accessible to everyone. In an era of strife and social division, they gave Britons something to be proud of, and something that the rest of the world could immediately identify with – excellence. Again and again and again. They rebuffed challenges from all-comers, Americans, Russians and the newly emerging Africans, who now carry all before them, yet still talk about Ovett and Coe in hushed terms, as the men they set out to emulate. In 2001, Alan Webb became the first US schoolboy to break four minutes for a mile in almost thirty years. His inspiration was a photograph on his bedroom wall. It is the snapshot with which we opened this story, of Coe and Ovett (and Cram) going into the final lap of the Olympic 1500 metres in the Los Angeles Coliseum, the year before Webb was born.

  Their attitudes, origins and very ways of competing contributed to the polar perceptions which made the rivalry so exciting and interesting to the millions around the world who hung on their every result. They were nature and nurture writ large, the ‘natural’ versus the ‘mechanical’. And they pushed middle-distance running – the main focus of athletics – into a new dimension, a golden age. In Britain, they were the principal peaks which drew up a mountain range of middle-distance talent around them – Steve Cram, Dave Moorcroft, Peter Elliott, Jack Buckner, Tom McKean, Tim Hutchings. And in peripheral events, we had the giant figures in the wider athletics world, too: Daley Thompson, Allan Wells, Tessa Sanderson and, later, Linford Christie. But all these great talents were no more than minor planets revolving around a binary system – two suns, two stars – Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe.

  3

  The Tough

  Considering the importance accorded to genetic inheritance nowadays, it would hardly seem that Steven Michael James Ovett had the most auspicious start in life. Born in Brighton on 9 October 1955, he was the son of a roof tiler with a serious smoking problem and his sixteen-year-old wife. But Steve Ovett was a massive and precocious athletic talent, with a startling range. As a fifteen-year-old, he ran the 400 metres in under 50 seconds, to win the English Youths title; by the time he was seventeen, and less than twenty years after Roger Bannister’s mind-expanding ‘first’, he ran a 4-minute mile; he then won the English National Under-20 cross-country championships over 10 kilometres by almost a minute. He was, it seems, marked for greatness right from the gun.

  ‘I suppose I was lucky to be born really,’ Ovett mused to me once, ‘given the attitudes back then [in the mid-fifties], I could just as easily have been aborted.’ There’s a possibility to ponder. However, shortly after Steve’s birth, his father Alan, known universally as Mick, went into the Royal Ai
r Force to do his national service. He did a bit of sprinting in the RAF, but any benefits would have been more than offset by his smoking, at least a couple of packs a day, which he kept up even through a later heart-attack and subsequent triple bypass operation.

  Gay Ovett, née James, cannot have had an easy time as a teenage bride and mother. She had been an only child herself, the daughter of a local undertaker and a housewife, and it was with them that she and baby Steve lived while Mick was in the RAF. It may have been Mick’s absence in young Steve’s early years which engendered the closeness the child shared with ‘Pop’, his paternal grandfather Albert. Pop had started the family stall, which still exists on Brighton Open Market, just off the London Road. Steve helped out there in his early teens, working for 80p an hour, according to his uncle Dave.

  The mutual affection between Pop and young Steve resulted in an unusual move when the child was just four. Dave Ovett, the youngest of the three brothers – Mick was the middle one – recalls how it happened. Dave, instantly recognisable despite the stockier figure, with his Ovett male-pattern baldness, broke off from selling the eggs and bacon on the Ovetts’ stall to perch on a makeshift coffee table, where the traders take their smoke breaks. ‘My dad was working here one day,’ he recalls, ‘and I think Steve was only just over four, and one of the stall-holders said, “Albert, your grandson is sitting up the top of the market.” He’d come along the main road, and waited for his granddad. And my dad took him home, and he lived with him after that.’

  He was to live with his grandparents for the best part of a decade, but his parents lived close by – Mick was back at home after three years in the RAF – and he would see them almost daily. His sister Sue was two years younger, and a brother, Nicky, would be born another seven years later. But Steve was effectively brought up as an only child, with all the affection that an older couple could bestow. As he acknowledges, Pop doted on him. And the old man would have a lot to be proud of when Steve started running.