The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  A rare apposite example of the overused exclamation mark delineates a crucial stage in Ovett’s development. And this capacity to run over a wide range of distances would remain a feature of Ovett’s career. A 400 metres champion running one of the fastest times of the year for 1500 metres in his age group is extraordinary enough. This is the sort of thing that can happen in speed-skating, but not in athletics. It would be like Michael Johnson winning his speciality, the 400 metres flat, then turning out the next day and beating Hicham El Guerrouj in the mile. Yet, half a dozen years after that race in Crystal Palace, a week after winning the European Cup 1500 metres, and just a couple of weeks before the most decisive victory of his early career, demolishing Olympic champion John Walker and winning the World Cup 1500 metres, Ovett would decide on an impulse to run – and win against international specialists – a half marathon in 65 minutes. Thus, sandwiched between two 1500 metres races, he ran and won an international-class half-marathon – 13.1 miles – and he did it in a pair of shoes he’d borrowed from his training partner!

  The ground was being laid for such a feat by that Youth’s 1500 metres, which concluded a wonderful year, in which Ovett had started getting noticed beyond the confines of Varndean Grammar, Preston Park, Withdean Stadium and Crystal Palace. Everything was on course. He was receiving some sensitive direction from Tilbury, who would travel as often as he could to watch his charge race. Ovett was back living with his parents, who supported his fledgling career to a fault. Mick ferried him around, and Gay provided the rest of the back-up, which would later develop into a lifestyle – meals when he wanted them, as much sleep as he needed without interruption, laundry retrieved from where it had been dropped, and returned in pristine condition. In short, it was something that any proud, attentive mum would provide. But it was already becoming clear to outsiders that there was an edge to Gay’s involvement.

  Tilbury recalls that if anything needed to be discussed, it was always with ‘the mother. She was very, very strong.’

  Reg Hook, meanwhile, says, ‘His mother was very supportive. Sometimes it seemed that she was more supportive to him than to her husband, because Steve became the focus of her life. She was the driving force, because she devoted so much time to him. She was very protective of him, and she certainly wore the trousers. It was always easier to talk to Mick than to Gay.’ Whatever, it was working.

  Despite Dave Cocksedge’s evaluation of Ovett’s maturity, and what others would see as matiness among his peers, there was a private side to the youngster, on which eventually everyone would remark. As Hook says, ‘He wasn’t a great mixer, a little aloof. I think basically he was shy, and he’s always been this way. He’s not the easiest person to speak to; he would talk to you sometimes, but he’s not with it, he’s not thinking, he’s miles away. He wasn’t really an approachable athlete. I think he had this attitude that, I like running, I’m good at running, but that’s it.’

  ‘Good’ is hardly the word for it. Tilbury evaluated the young talent which he had been offered to mould as ‘brilliant’. And the progress he made the following year, 1971, was equally rewarding for athlete, coach, parents and an increasing band of admirers. Reg Hook suggests, ‘People in athletics don’t get the same sort of publicity as second-rate footballers. But I was writing for the Argus from the time he started, so I would have been highlighting his exploits from the time he started winning things. He would have been getting reasonably good publicity in the Under-15s.’

  A year later, the publicity was becoming even more deserved. In only his third race of the season, on 1 May 1971, his 800 metres personal best tumbled to 1 min 56.8 seconds. In the ensuing months, he also improved his 400 metres time, eventually running 50.4 seconds twice in that summer’s English Schools. (However, as if to confirm that he was mortal after all, he finished only third against boys a year older.)

  Extraordinarily, he was still competing in the occasional field event. One afternoon at Withdean, he set three personal bests: 200 metres in 23.5 sec; a 5 feet 5 inches high jump; and the aforementioned record-breaking long jump. This was just a prelude to a magnificent finale to his 1971 season. Inside a month, he brought his 400 metres best down first to 50 seconds flat, then won the AAA, the national clubs’ Youths title in Wolverhampton, in 49.8 seconds; then, in what Barry Tilbury termed ‘perfect conditions’ at Crystal Palace, he ran a national record for 800 metres as a fifteen-year-old, 1 minute 55.3 seconds.

  This was all happening with what seems ridiculous ease. Ovett himself cannot recall a time when the competition was ever hard. Yes, the training was hard, eventually. It had to be. But normally there comes a time in the career of every young, successful athlete when the ‘natural’ talent no longer suffices. Peers, late developers, start maturing, shooting up in size and seriousness. They begin to challenge. Some young champions resist, recognise the symptoms, and begin to train harder in order to stay ahead. Others wilt, succumb to outside temptations, or have simply trained too hard as youngsters, and become discouraged when former pushovers suddenly appear on their shoulders at decisive moments like avenging angels. This never happened to Ovett.

  To a large degree, he had been getting by on his relative physical maturity as a youth. He was big for his age, already taller than his parents, which, in tandem with their own youthfulness, caused many people to take him for a younger brother rather than their son. But the transition from youth to junior to senior seemed seamless. Reg Hook was a witness. ‘If there was a moment when he realised he’d have to train harder it came at the National [English] Schools Championships in 1971, when he didn’t even get a medal after winning the previous year.’ In fact, Hook mis-remembers, as Ovett won the bronze medal. But elsewhere Hook admits, ‘Steve never encountered the problems of stepping from junior to senior athletics. When he became a junior, he was better than the top athletes in Britain, and even as a youth, he was in effect a mature senior athlete.’

  Mick Ovett gradually became more involved in team management at the Brighton club, which included the sort of rudimentary advice to youngsters that he had originally given solely to his son. Having been around the club for a couple of years, he would have picked up coaching tips from others, but no one ever viewed him as a coach, as Reg Hook confirmed. Nevertheless, he was becoming increasingly involved in his son’s training schedules, which led to a couple of ‘discussions’ between Gay and Mick (in that order) and Tilbury.

  Things came to a head at the end of the 1971 track season, when the club athletes embarked on their regular short relay season, which usually takes place on the roads, as a precursor to winter cross-country. The same thing happens in springtime, between cross-country and track. Prior to the marathon boom, which began a decade later, the relays were an integral part of the athletics year. Tilbury rang Ovett one Monday evening in late September to discover that Mick had arranged for Steve to race at Camberley the next weekend, whereas Tilbury had no plans for him to race there or anywhere else.

  Tilbury wrote to Mick, outlining his grievances. The letter, reproduced below, illustrates Tilbury’s concern and training philosophy in terms which do him justice, but also highlights the recurrent problem of parental meddling in promising sporting careers.

  Your increased involvement at club level has brought about a set of circumstances that apparently prevents you from divorcing Steve’s training and racing programme from your club loyalty.

  Your probable reaction to this is, ‘What difference does a 1 mile race make?’ and the answer is, treated in isolation, none. But this could easily escalate into running more regular races at up to two miles. I think I am in the best position to judge what races he needs, but I am sufficiently club-oriented to make sure that all his races this winter are major events of a team nature. The boy is only 16, and needs a careful, progressive build-up each winter, particularly this year, as he will be undertaking weight training as well.

  Perhaps the most annoying aspect in this case is one of ‘principle’. I do not consider myself u
napproachable, and have always been prepared to listen to a helpful suggestion in regard to his coaching. I rarely ever take a major decision without first consulting the athlete, and I expect this to be reciprocal . . .

  Being a team manager myself, I can fully understand the problems of getting out a strong weekly team, but as I have stressed many times before (with your agreement), we must not allow this to interfere with Steve’s prospects for international status.

  Perhaps the most revealing comment in Tilbury’s letter comes at the end. The prospect of Ovett becoming an international athlete and an Olympian had been an article of faith throughout the Tilbury years. His parents were telling him that, his coach was telling him that, he was telling himself that, all the time, day after day, session after session, such that it was taken for granted: ‘You shall be an international athlete.’ It is a crucial part of the young athlete’s development. And it would happen with his great rival too. It would make an indelible impression on both of them. When, as so often happens, so much else in a youngster’s life is criticism and condemnation, no matter how self-assured the child, assurance from outside, from responsible adults is invaluable, and formative.

  Tilbury concludes with an apology for writing rather than speaking face-to-face, but suggests that he did so to avoid a potential argument. The relationship would last only a few more weeks. Behind the scenes, it seems that Gay had been as instrumental in the break with Tilbury as Mick, if not more so. The coach had been sanguine about the great leap forward that Ovett had made with his 800 metres record just before they stopped, or were stopped from, working together. ‘That wasn’t a great surprise to me. I knew he could do that from his 49.8 second 400 metres. There was no doubt in my mind that eventually he could also be a 1500 metres runner, because anybody who does 800 metres can usually do 1500 no trouble. [But] the mother got involved, she said, “No, he won’t be a 1500 metres runner.”’ Thirty years later, Tilbury says with a wistful smile, ‘He ended up breaking the world record, didn’t he?’

  Ultimately, there are no great secrets in athletics training. Yes, of course you need a modicum of talent, and Ovett had enough of that to fill the Brighton Pavilion. But ‘will’ is probably the most important element in the make-up of a champion: the will to work hard, coupled with the sort of bloody-mindedness that comes from self-belief. All you need after that is a bit of common sense.

  Ovett’s dyslexia meant he was never going to shine academically; he admits his scholastic work was poor at Varndean. But school is not only for academic work. He’d found something he was good at, he was smart enough to recognise that he had a special talent, and that if he persevered, he could become a champion. He had been good enough at football to be considered for Brighton Schools, but he astounded and angered his teachers at Varndean by turning down the opportunity, even refusing to play further at school. The more perceptive masters understood when they saw him run.

  Now that his mother is dead, and he hasn’t lived close to his father for twenty years, his wife Rachel is the person who knows him best. ‘Steve has this steely determination. If he decides to do something, he does have the ability in whatever he chooses to see it through; he is very good at finishing things. He can be totally and utterly focused. And he will just get on with it, he doesn’t make a fuss or a noise, he just does it.’

  Tilbury’s best advice had been caution, and Ovett and his family were smart enough to know that what Tilbury had been advising had worked, and was still working. He had given them the blueprint, so Steve and Mick followed the instructions themselves for the next few months, with the occasional aberration. Ovett himself had started reading about athletics, not just in Athletics Weekly, the British bible of the sport, but in biographies of the stars. He was particularly attracted to the Jim Ryun Story, which described how a gangling Kansas schoolboy became the world mile record-holder through assiduous training. One of the drawbacks about impressionable youngsters is that they are likely to go out and try to emulate their heroes. Accordingly, since Ryun would run 440 yards 40 times – that’s to say, 40 fast laps of the track, with an interval jog between each lap – the sixteen-year-old Ovett would do the same. Well, he’d try. It is testimony to his talent – he would also do impromptu 10-mile runs on his own – that these ‘experiments’ did not ruin him. Nor did they deter him. An excellent run in a national schools cross-country race in early 1972 underlined that. But that race was crucial for another reason. Unbeknown to him, he would, for the first time, cross paths with someone who would ultimately become the most important person in his whole career, and from whose name his own would become inseparable – Sebastian Coe.

  4

  The Toff

  In anyone’s estimation, Sebastian Newbold Coe was one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth or indeed any other century. He combined the classic competitive tendencies of being able to win from the front when things were going well with, more importantly, the grit to overcome almost unbearable setbacks, and return to greater glory. Yet he had been a timid youngster, a late developer, and was as cautious in public as he was later to be in politics. He was perceived, in the words of L’Equipe, as a fils à Papa – Daddy’s boy. It was intended as a slight, but they were right on the money. Coe’s father Percy, known universally as Peter, was to be the seminal influence in his career.

  There was an element of gentry in Coe’s background: the Newbold from whom both he and Peter took their middle name was the son of Yorkshire landowners. But Harry Newbold was something of an eccentric, later getting involved in the theatre, where he worked with Charlie Chaplin. Coe’s half-Indian mother Angela was an actress; her mother had danced with Pavlova; and an uncle was a Royal Academician. Coe’s sister Miranda would dance with the Royal Ballet and Ballet Rambert. His father Peter had been a cyclist, but he was going to give far more than his sporting genes to his son. He was going to give him hell.

  An executive at one of the Sheffield steel companies, Peter Coe was a martinet. One of Seb Coe’s contemporaries in the Sheffield schools system was Kim McDonald. Prior to his untimely death aged forty-five, on several occasions he told me of seeing his tiny early teenage competitor in tears after races, having been given a dressing-down by his father after a poor run.

  But it was all to an end. Coe must have had a talent equal to Ovett’s otherwise he could not have achieved what he did, but his gifts were not so immediately obvious. They had to be drawn out, nurtured, unlike the immediate dazzling explosion of Ovett’s natural talent. And there was another crucial difference. There had always been two distinct strains in British sport, probably best exemplified by the ‘Gentlemen versus Players’ cricket matches, which persisted through to the 1960s. There was a similar distinction in athletics. If Ovett typically brought to mind the ‘chancers’, the pro athletes from the nineteenth century, the hard men who lived on their wits and rough talent, then Coe was the late twentieth-century equivalent of the patrician Oxbridge athlete, who lived in sheltered academe and wafted rather than battled his way round a track.

  Seb Coe was born in Chiswick, west London on 29 September 1956, almost a year after Steve Ovett. The Coes moved first, through Peter’s work to Stratford, where Coe competed in school sports, just like Ovett in the sprints and long jump, but with nothing like the early results of his later rival. But Peter Coe had already recognised that his son more than made up for his slightness of frame with a burgeoning competitive nature: ‘He was the most bloody competitive thing you ever met. He never went to the shops and back unless you would time him, and was he quicker than last time? Losing was not in his game. In games of seaside cricket, he was never out. There was one day when he was thirteen or so, he lost a game of tennis to his mother and it was a disaster.’

  By then the family had moved to Sheffield, and Seb had joined the local athletics club, Hallamshire Harriers. For almost a year, the youngster relied on the club coaches for guidance, but again in a remarkably similar experience to that of the Ovett family, Peter realised th
at relying on the club was not the best way to further his son’s vocation. ‘I listened to a lot of people at the club, and I thought it was all tales, nothing seemed coherent, there was no pattern to it. I thought, Well this is no good, none of this seems to make any sense. I wanted to support Seb, because he enjoyed running, he liked the club. I just sort of gently eased him out, and took it over, and then started really thinking about it.’

  This wasn’t just a shot in the dark, because, allied to that competitive streak, Peter Coe says, ‘I noticed in the way he moved and ran and did things.’ But even family friends like Bob Hague were impressed by Peter’s prescience. ‘It’s extraordinary how Peter recognised his talent in the first place,’ says Hague. ‘I don’t know how he did that and how he learned without any background knowledge of athletics to nurture it and develop it and to be able to tailor the training to Seb’s physical peculiarities and requirements. How he recognised exactly what Seb had to do to reach a certain performance was almost uncanny.’

  The one thing that Peter Coe had going for him was his engineer’s training, which, when combined with his managerial experience, would prove invaluable. ‘I always had a science-based education,’ he says now. ‘It’s the difference between certainty, which doesn’t exist, and dealing with what is a high degree of probability or none at all. All the probabilities indicated that I was dealing with somebody with talent and if you are doing that, don’t play about. Put your mind to it. And it was total concentration. Nobody knows better than a parent who is willing to think about it and be objective, and that’s what I can be. I can be very objective, get inside their head. So as far as it’s possible to know any human being, even your own kid, I figured out what made Seb tick, what was his nature, what he would respond to.