The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  By 1960, Mick was firmly ensconced on the market stall, which involved very long days. He would be up at five to go to the wholesale market, then prepare the wares on the stall, work there all day, and not return home until six or later. When Gay was not pregnant or caring for infants, she worked in the market café. Later, she would manage the Rotunda Café in nearby Preston Park, where a bronze statue of her son at his emaciated best – or in the style of Giacometti – now faces out towards London Road, the route to Crystal Palace, site of many of his popular victories.

  Mick was, by all accounts a fairly laid-back man, who nevertheless took the duty of care for his family very seriously. He was the breadwinner, but also a caring and supportive father. Much later, in 1976, he would drop his market commitments and fly off at a moment’s notice to Montreal when he realised from a depressed phone call that his twenty-year-old son needed the support that the British team was not offering a young athlete in his first Olympic Games.

  For all that she had a husband and three children, Gay Ovett seems to have been a solitary person who did not suffer fools gladly – a trait her first-born would inherit. Nor was she slow to make her distaste felt, in language that owed much to the market environment. Uncle Dave says, ‘She was an odd one. She didn’t like anybody. But she was good to him [Steve]. She was devoted, he never went without nothing. That was her life, wasn’t it?’

  Ovett’s detractors always point to an early manifestation of his innate contrariness, his admission that his first running experience came when he broke a milk bottle over a youthful peer’s head and ‘legged it’. He returned home to find the irate mother of his victim and swift retribution from Mick. But, fittingly, Pop was the first to see the glimmer of the young Ovett’s talent. As Uncle Dave recalls, ‘You always knew when my dad was coming, because you could hear him whistling round the corner. Anyway, he’d been to see Steve in the junior 60-metre dash at school. I heard him whistling, and he comes round the corner with such a face on him. I said, “What’s the matter, did he win?” “Did he win?” he says. “The gun went, and those little pair of legs went like that, and he was away. He won easy.” That was that. That’s how it all started.’

  Despite suffering from dyslexia, which was barely recognised back in the early sixties, Ovett passed the 11-plus to go to Varndean Grammar School, on the outskirts of Brighton. It was not far from his home; nor from Preston Park, where he would first train; nor from Withdean Stadium, where he would have his first club races. In fact, everything was close, primarily his family. The Ovett world revolved around a tiny nexus, yet he would draw enormous strength from it over the coming years.

  And there was Brighton to enjoy. The seaside town had long been a magnet for people from London and the rest of the south. Later, in a flight of literary allusion, a Scandinavian journalist would compare the assumed hardman Ovett to the psychotic Pinky Brown in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. But Ovett’s Brighton was a life-enhancing place, as he recalls: ‘I was so lucky, I had a wonderful youth in Brighton. It was a fabulous town to grow up in, from the Regency debauchery coming to the swinging sixties, the seventies, the mods, the rockers, the eighties. It was probably one of the greatest times to be a child, be an adolescent, so I had all that, I had all the facilities that Brighton had, the promenade to run along, the Downs to race and train on. I loved it.’

  The first serious steps towards competitive running came in 1968, and they were anything but tentative. While the athletics world was gearing up for the Olympic Games in Mexico City, a youngster who would be one of the stars of the show twelve years later took his first strides towards Olympic glory. It was his first school sports day at Varndean, and, in his own words, ‘Ovett Junior won everything.’

  What’s more, this was not simply running events. Ovett won the high jump and the long jump as well. In fact, he would go on to set Sussex county junior records, one of which, for the long jump (6.28 metres) lasted for close to twenty years. This catholicism is not uncommon in good young athletes; they seem to excel in all events. But the jumps are interesting for what was to come later. For both Ovett and Seb Coe excelled at something called a ‘sargent jump’. This is a gym exercise where you stand side-on to a wall, stretch your closer arm upwards, and make a fingertip mark on the wall. You then crouch and do a standing jump upwards, and tap the wall at the apogee of the jump. According to veteran coach, Frank Horwill, a seminal figure in the development of the British Milers’ Club, both Ovett and Coe were far above the norm as youngsters. This bounding capacity is crucial when developed in middle-distance runners. As Horwill recalls, ‘Twenty-three inches difference [between the lower and upper marks] is considered astounding. They went through the bloody roof, both Coe and Ovett. They could nearly touch the ceiling. In other words, the twenty-three inches was almost thirty-three. That showed enormous elastic leg strength. All good 800-metre runners have above-average elastic leg strength. They also have the ability to hop. I think Seb Coe would do twenty-five metres in eight hops. Ten was considered good on each leg. Nine is very good. But eight is like a kangaroo.’

  A few more excursions like the annual school sports day persuaded the ever-attentive Ovett parents, Mick especially, that their talented son should join the local athletics club. Brighton & Hove AC was one of the better clubs in Britain, and still is. It has the considerable advantage of a well-run municipal stadium, formerly Withdean, now Brighton Sports Arena, and runs a wide variety of teams, from juniors through to veterans, with track and field events, road-racing and cross-country running. But, like most clubs, the organisation is largely, if not wholly dependent on amateurs and volunteers. Even nowadays, professional athletics is for the very few.

  Ovett soon impressed the older club members, but no more so than many other talented youngsters at the time. Reg Hook was the Brighton club president, and he was also a photographer and journalist for the Brighton Argus. He would be involved with the Ovetts in both capacities during the Brighton years. Hook still lives in Patcham, a village on the outskirts of Brighton, a few streets away from where the Ovetts lived, and a mile from Preston Park. He recalls, ‘I suppose he was thirteen, possibly only twelve, when he joined the club. He looked good. He was a tall, lanky athlete, long stride and naturally stylish, light on his feet. But you get athletes like this. They are good for a couple of years, and then they don’t appear, or they don’t fulfil their promise. Steve was one of those who did, and he made an immediate impression.’

  The admiration was not reciprocated, unfortunately. Mick Ovett and his young son were underwhelmed by their reception at Withdean Stadium, where they were pretty much left to their own devices. So much so that Mick began his son’s development with some rudimentary coaching of his own. Sensibly, though, Mick soon acknowledged that he didn’t know enough, and he asked at the club if anyone would coach his fourteen-year-old. Tony Tilbury was the team manager at the time, and asked his brother Barry to take a look at Ovett. Barry had recently moved about forty miles away, to Walton on Thames, but he had seen Steve win a cross-country race in Brighton’s Stanmer Park just the weekend before and had been impressed enough to agree.

  Barry Tilbury lives in a village not far west of Heathrow Airport nowadays, and he still coaches local athletes. A wiry man in his mid-sixties, he is the archetypal coach. I had to wade into his hallway through boxes of magazines and running kit. Pride of place in his living room, where the walls are covered with photos of athletes, is his computer, on which are his stats and training programmes, and articles for various running magazines, none of which pay, of course. He’s a coach, he doesn’t mind. All he needs is an occasional thank-you from the athletes he trains, and a bit of recognition.

  Unfortunately, Tilbury is suffering from a degenerative cognitive condition, and occasionally names and locations escape him, but the further back the incident, the better he remembers it, and he has various aides-mémoire, like letters and training schedules, to jog the failing memory. One thing that was not dampened was his ent
husiasm. Like I said, he’s a coach.

  After work one midweek day in early 1970, Tilbury drove to Brighton to visit the Ovett household. ‘The father said, “What do you think he could do in the future?” Now I understand when I look at people how good they are, and I said, “I can’t tell exactly what it might be, but I think he will get to the Olympics.”’

  This was more than satisfactory to Mick and Gay, and they agreed to let Tilbury coach young Ovett. The majority of the time, Mick would supervise local sessions laid out by Tilbury, and Ovett would occasionally go to Walton, stay with Tilbury, and train with the other youngsters at the local club. Whether the Ovetts believed Tilbury’s prescient forecast or not, they did their son a big favour. One thing that is obvious from the training and racing schedules, and from our conversation, is that Tilbury is not a believer in pushing youngsters too hard. That is a sure recipe for disaster, and a potential early end to a career. More than half of the winners of the Under-17 English national cross-country title never make it past twenty as elite runners. At this stage, Ovett was still running in sprints, 100 and 200 metres, as much as he was competing over 400 and 800 metres.

  Tilbury’s meticulous racing log for the early teenage Ovett is telling. During the two years that Ovett trained under Tilbury’s guidance, the youngster improved from 2 minutes, 9 seconds for 800 metres, to 1 minute 55.3 seconds, which was a UK record for a fifteen-year-old. Steve’s uncle Dave has an interesting tale from those early years, one which reflects both the young Ovett’s talent and the incredulity which that talent engendered in time-serving officials. The extended Ovett family was very supportive, once they knew that they had a potential champion in their ranks. In early May 1970, Ovett ran an 800 metres at Crawley, a few miles inland from Brighton. The family travelled up for the race. The records state that Ovett won in 2 minutes 1 second, after a first lap of 57 seconds. But Uncle Dave remembers it differently. ‘Mick came over a bit annoyed. “Do you know what?” he said. “They’ve clocked him at two minutes dead, and they won’t give him two minutes, because they said that he’s too young to run two minutes. Nobody can do that at fourteen.”’ The matter was rectified two weeks later at Walton track, where Tilbury coached. Ovett won another 800 metres. After a slightly speedier first lap of 56.5 seconds, he was clocked at exactly 2 minutes. So that settled that.

  As far as Ovett’s character was concerned, Tilbury recalls a well-behaved youngster who did everything that his coach asked. Tilbury was already convinced that Ovett was going to be an 800/1500 metres runner and was obviously inculcating that belief in the youngster, too. But, first, he was to prove himself at the shorter track distances. Although he was still running 100s and 200s, which would be invaluable for that devastating ‘kick’ finish for which he would become famous, he would lose as many sprints as he won. But as soon as it got to 400 metres, one lap of the track, his strength would tell. And it was at 400 metres that he had his first national success. In early July 1970, the Ovett family packed up the car, got relief for the market stall, and drove the 200 miles to Solihull in the West Midlands.

  The English Schools Athletics Championships are legendary throughout the national athletics community. They are the cradle of the sport, with over 50 per cent of Britain’s elite athletes since the 1950s coming through their ranks. They are also awesome in their organisation, with hundreds of qualifying heats being run with military precision. On the other hand, if a battalion of teachers can’t organise a timetable, who can? They are the initial goal of every youngster aspiring to become an Olympic champion. As proof, Britain’s Olympic gold medals in Moscow were forged largely in the English (or National) Schools Championships. Ovett, Coe and Daley Thompson (Allan Wells, a late developer was the sole exception) all competed, and won, at the English Schools.

  Ovett’s road to Olympia began in the heart of England. Solihull was once one of the richest boroughs in Britain, thanks to the Rover car factory. But the British car industry was in rapid decline, and the Midlands had suffered badly by the early seventies. In contrast, British middle-distance running, which had been in decline for a decade or more, was getting its first proper view of a youngster who would usher in a golden age. Aged fourteen and nine months Ovett was entered for the Boys 400 metres. He was one of the favourites, since he had won the Sussex Schools title in 51.6 seconds, a county record. In Solihull, he won his heat, placed third in the semi-final, easily qualifying for the final, which he won in 51.8 seconds. He still recalls it as one of the highlights of his career. ‘The first English Schools victory at 400 metres was a marvellous feeling, with the family there, me turning back, looking back in the home straight, and they were literally screaming and shouting. That was probably the most emotional race of my life, because, as a child, you’ve done something. And you never get that again; you get a bit blasé.’

  Apart from his family in Solihull that July afternoon, there was another spectator who had made a special trip from almost as far south to see the young Ovett. Dave Cocksedge is an athletics enthusiast, and a member of an organisation called the National Union of Track Statisticians.’ No body ever rejoiced in a better acronym – NUTS. Back in 1970, Cocksedge wrote a regular column for Athletics Weekly called ‘Spotlight on Youth’. Now in his mid-fifties, Cocksedge lives in semi-retirement in the coastal town of Pattaya in Thailand. One of his other preoccupations is crime, and he does occasional historical pieces for a couple of the English-language newspapers in Thailand. He recalls Solihull, he says, ‘Vividly. Barry Tilbury had been writing to me about this kid who had run 53.1 seconds at the age of thirteen, which was pretty extraordinary and I was putting him in my column. I’d only seen his times and read what Barry had sent me, but Barry had said, “Watch this kid. He is going to be something special.” He won the 400 final in a championship record. It was considered pretty good then. I went up to meet this kid, interview him. He was gangling and he had long hair down to his shoulders, but I was amazed by his maturity. He was saying, “Yes this is OK, but I want to run the 800 and 1500 in years to come.” He was talking like an eighteen-year-old or something. I’ve never met a fourteen-year-old with so much self-assurance. He had this long hair and buck-teeth. He looked quite weird. But I had feelings that he obviously was a real future star.’

  Although Cocksedge was several years older than Ovett, he would get to know the youngster quite well over the next half a dozen years, often going to stay with the Ovett family in Brighton, partying with the increasingly mature and seemingly self-confident youngster. Ovett, similarly, would visit Cocksedge and his mother at their home in south London, not far from Crystal Palace, which was to become a happy hunting ground for the talented teenager.

  The Crystal Palace area of south London is the very antithesis of its title. It was named after the glass construction that was originally erected in London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The crystal palace was dismantled and moved to Sydenham Hill in 1854, where it became part of a Victorian theme park, which was dedicated to the greater glory of the British Empire. But the palace burned down in 1936, and the rest of the area gradually followed its demise. Some neighbouring parts are quite elegant, and Dulwich just down the hill has its famous college, where P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, among many others, were schooled. A couple of their creations – Bertie Wooster and Philip Marlowe – could be said, at a stretch, to prefigure Coe and Ovett. As for the attractions of Crystal Palace, the look on the face of Alain Billouin, the chief Olympic correspondent for the French sports daily L’Equipe, when he landed there for the first time in the late seventies told the tale. With the admiration that L’Equipe writers somehow retain for all things English – on the basis, I believe, that ‘we’ had created sport single-handedly – Billouin thought that such places only existed either in North Africa or immediately on the other side of the Paris périphérique.

  On a personal note, it was a poor performance at Crystal Palace in early 1972 which persuaded me that I was never going to make it to the
international level on the track. I’d won a medal at the national indoor championships that year, and harboured a belief that I might even qualify for the Munich Olympics in the steeple-chase. I ran like a hack, and after a listless warm-down I decided to catch a bus back to north London, rather than the train. My depression was heightened by the meandering trip through the dingy south-east London suburbs, with drably dressed people going about their business oblivious to my demise. Two teenage girls got on and chatted away animatedly just in front of me. They didn’t have a care in the world, whereas I felt like the Leonard Cohen songbook.

  Two years earlier, Ovett would have a very different experience at Crystal Palace. He had already run there a couple of times in early 1970, but the winter meeting in mid-December, a couple of months after his fifteenth birthday, was to be a preview of many such races there over the next decade. Cocksedge was primed and on hand to report on the race. It wasn’t Ovett’s first attempt over the metric mile – that had been earlier in Crawley when he had recorded an unspectacular 4 minutes 43 seconds. That wasn’t unusual. Here he was, at best an 800 metres runner, but essentially a 400 metres man. On 16 December 1970, he ran his second race at the distance at which he would become a master. Dave Cocksedge recorded the event for Athletics Weekly:

  The form horse was Southern Boys champion, Paul Williams, who had run 4.12.2 for the distance. They set off quickly in the still conditions, with a lap of 61.2 before slowing to 2.12.6 for 800m. Now was the time for Williams to run away from them, and he did so on cue, with shouts of encouragement from his father Ray and coach Frank Horwill. But Ovett, supported by parents Mick and Gay and coach Barry Tilbury, moved into Williams’ slipstream and followed easily. Ovett was racing over his known distance, but seemed quite untroubled by the pace.

  Williams floored the gas pedal approaching the bell and drew well away from all but the Brighton youngster. Then he raised the pace still more into the final backstraight, but was powerless to respond when Ovett suddenly exploded into an all-out sprint with roughly 150m left. Williams chased gamely but could not close the sudden gap Ovett had opened. The winner sped through the finish line in 4.10.7 – a personal best by almost 33 seconds!