The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  ‘I had had enough management experience to know how people work and things get done in the factory, preferably by persuasion, but there are times when you just simply say this is what we are going to do, this is the way we are going to do it. This is no way really to get the best out of an athlete, so we devised a trick that I was Dad at home, that was one hat, and I was the coach at the track.’

  Steve Mitchell, a contemporary during Seb’s time at Loughborough, was just one of the many people who were surprised by the relationship between father and son. ‘Seb never called him Dad; he always called him Peter which I found strange. I couldn’t work this out. How can you call your dad by his first name?’

  But, says Peter, ‘That was the rule. It was necessary, because I know it’s a natural thing with all kids to test their parameters, they want to see how far they can push parents, they want to push the controls, how much they can get away with, and it can’t intrude into athletics, because I’m there to call the shots. I say what is being done, when it’s being done and the way it’s being done, so on and so forth. The only thing I said was, “If you can do it, I can be there,” because there were some rotten nights [when] it was really bitterly cold and miserable. He said to me sometimes, “I can get on with it, I can do it, you can trust me, you don’t have to be there.” And I’d say, “If you can do it, I can watch.” So that was the division and that saved any conflict at all on the coaching front. At home, different: if he wanted to do something else I would advise against it or not.’

  There seems to have been more stick than carrot in the early days, but Peter was getting results, and not just on the track. ‘He was a very nervous young boy, he suffered from nervous eczema and pollen asthma. He was incredibly sensitive. He was deeply shocked when he failed his 11-plus, but as always I gave it to him straight, saying, “You can either be a secondary modern drop-out or get down to it and get your O levels.” He grafted and grafted, and got eight O levels.’

  Coe was also taking his first steps up the athletics ladder, although with the occasional snake down. Most of his schoolboy contemporaries would have been just going out for a run and trusting to luck, or maundering along with club coaches relying on the sort of natural talent that an Ovett manifested to get them through and bring early results. But, though frail, Coe at least had the benefit of a ‘system’, thanks to his dad. In the winter of 1971, he was finishing in the top three of all his schools cross-country races, and eventually won both the Yorkshire Clubs’ Colts title and the Yorkshire Schools’ Boys title. But he wasn’t quite ready for the national championships yet, and could finish only twenty-fourth in the English Schools race in Luton. There was further embarrassment, because his school had laid on two coach-loads of his classmates to watch him run.

  But the first substantial success, and recognition beyond the immediate confines of Sheffield schools, was not long coming. Granville Beckett was the Yorkshire Post’s athletics writer, and his reports from Huddersfield would be used by the Sheffield newspapers, who were in the same group. Beckett had been a club miler at Longwood Harriers, a colleague of Derek Ibbotson who had broken the world record for the mile in 1957. Beckett recalls his first encounter with the Coes, in May 1971. ‘They used to do this meeting on the Saturday evening after the Cup Final. Derek, when he set the world record, gave a trophy to the club, the Ibbotson Trophy. We used to have this schoolboys’ mile and the phone rang and it was Peter Coe. He said, “What is the exact time of this boys’ mile?” I said it will be somewhere about seven or quarter-past. He was so thorough, he wanted to know the exact time when this race would be run. I said what name is it, and he said Sebastian Coe, and of course Sebastian is an unusual name, and I said, “That fellow is keen, it’s only the schoolboys’ mile.” I said, “I’ll have a look for this lad when he comes.” Of course, he came and won, and he looked a thoroughbred. Right from those days, he looked a winner.’

  Peter Coe’s thoroughness would become a byword. Malcolm Grace was a Hallamshire club coach who would give Peter advice, but Grace was to get a closer view of the Coe development than most, since he also worked for Peter at one of the local cutlery factories. ‘At work sometimes he would talk to me for hours. He said to me one day, “I’m thinking of getting a bike, Malcolm. When I ride a bike behind Seb it will get me fit and I’ll be able to follow him.” About a month later I asked what happened to the bike. “Well,” he said, “I abandoned that idea because I realised if he pulled a muscle five or six miles from home, he would have to walk back, so I followed in the car.” So he had really got his head screwed on, had Peter. He thought of every aspect.’

  Bob Hague got to know the Coe family through his brother Ian, a club 400 metres runner (and a big Ovett fan). Ian Hague was one of the young Sebastian’s teachers. Bob recalls, ‘One day Ian said that he’d got this extraordinary little boy in his cross-country team at school who he thought would be a great runner one day. Ian was always very level headed about making judgements on how good people are going to be, so when he said this boy is going to be amazing, I pricked my ears up.’

  Through their membership of the Hallamshire club, both the Hagues became family friends. Bob saw that the young Sebastian was being nurtured not just in running but in a broad range of interests. ‘They were an intelligent family that discussed things openly and so he’d know where he was in so many areas from the fact that things had been discussed at home. They were very lively, their interests were not solely athletics, it was only part and parcel of the scene. It was a very full and interesting family life.’

  Janet Prictoe, an international 800 metres runner and Coe’s first girlfriend at Loughborough, came from a more traditional working-class family, and saw the differences immediately when she began to visit a few years later. ‘I think he had greater backing from his family. If you asked my father even now he wouldn’t know what event I ran. My mother tried her best. I think he had terrific backing. They prided themselves on being a bit intellectual and clever. They used to listen to the cricket on Radio 3, his mother had been to RADA, and they knew all the actresses’ names in old films. It was very stimulating.’

  Although their backgrounds were very different, there were some remarkable similarities in the developing characters of Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett. Despite what many perceived as Ovett’s shyness, his exposure to the various characters who inhabited the organised mayhem of Brighton’s market place lent him a maturity beyond his years, as Dave Cocksedge remarked when he first interviewed him. Bob Hague would discover a similar trait in young Seb Coe. After a training session one evening in the early seventies, Hague, then about thirty, fell into conversation with the fourteen-year-old Coe.

  ‘It must have been ten years before the first Olympic event, and he said to me, “You know, my dad says that if I keep on developing in this way, I can win the Olympics in 1980.” He said it in sort of a detached way. It wasn’t as if he was trying to impress; it was just an observation of what he firmly believed. I was impressed by that.’

  Again the similarity with the Ovett development is striking. Barry Tilbury had told the Ovett parents that their son could and would be an Olympian. Almost concurrently, Peter Coe was making one of his biggest contributions to his son’s progression. ‘It was at the corner of our road, going down to the track’ recalls Peter. ‘I said, “You are going to the 1980 Olympics. Get that firmly fixed in your mind, just accept it that you will be there, this is what we are going to do.”’

  Just saying it wasn’t going to get Coe to Moscow; there was going to be a lot of hard work along the way. Warm-weather training abroad for young hopefuls was also a long way in the future, and the English winters are hardly the best environment for a 10-mile run. Initially, Angela Coe had her doubts about her husband’s strictures. ‘Angela always said, there were times when I was very cruel to Seb,’ says Peter. ‘Because, at Christmastime, there was snow on the road. I said, “Seb, now is the time for your distance run.” It was hard work going up those roads, it was
slippery underneath, plodding away. “I know you’ve got geography homework, but you’ve got to fit it in, it’s got to be done. You can’t allow yourself to be put off things you’ve got to do.”’

  Seb himself saw the gradual acceptance of this regime by his mother. ‘My mum came from a household where the arts were quite important. There was a stage early on in my career when she suddenly had a child that was training twice a day, coming back mud-splattered and racing at weekends, and clearly obsessive. There were a couple of years when she got quite nervous about just how serious this was beginning to get. Then, of course, she got into it. She became more competitive on some occasions than both myself and my dad. He’d be the one saying, “OK, the season is going all right,” and she’d be the one ringing me up and saying, “You know Ovett ran 3.31 in Milan last night.”’

  But the early hard lessons would be well learned. Malcolm Grace says the difference in application between the young Coe and his contemporaries was painfully evident. ‘He came down one day and there was a group of athletes sat on the grass by the side of the track, trying to decide what they were going to do. Seb warmed up and he did a speed session on a terribly maintained track. He ran three 200s in 22 seconds with ten minutes between, warmed down and went home. He knew exactly what he was doing, he knew exactly what effect he got. It was a speed session, out, see it off, long rest in between because it was speed, off home. He had been down and done his bit while all the others were making their mind up what to do.’

  In later years, some rival athletes and coaches and some sections of the media would be scornful of the Peter–Seb Coe axis. But those closest to them saw only the positive side of it, both in terms of athletics success, and in forging the sort of relationship that few fathers and sons enjoy. Bob Hague says, ‘I always thought that they had an excellent relationship, it was unique, and I did see more of it than anybody else. I saw them at home, in their family life. Seb has a tremendous affection for his father and respect, and it just worked. They talked things through. I think it was a relationship that brought them closer together.’

  More than that, the hothouse family atmosphere produced a well-rounded son who, as well as a broad appreciation of athletics, football and boxing, would develop an abiding interest in jazz and opera. He was also being nurtured in the good manners that the media in particular would highlight in contrast with what they saw as a recalcitrant and ‘awkward’ Ovett. Granville Beckett, the journalist who first started circulating Coe’s name around Fleet Street, says, ‘I always had a soft spot for him. People always said to me, “He seems so goody goody, is he like that?” I said you can only take people how you find them, and I find him well mannered, well spoken, always willing to talk to you and if you saw him at a press conference he would always acknowledge you.’ Malcolm Grace concurs: ‘He always treated me with respect, and I would say even as a man of forty he treated me with the same respect. I met him at the Hallamshire centenary dinner, and he treated me with the same deference as he did as a boy of fifteen.’

  Later, there would be the occasional divergence from that image. There seems to be an element in Coe’s character that wants to be laddish, even caddish. Maybe all those years of toeing the line have nurtured a desire to break out a bit. Given some of the more manic elements in their support, his affiliation with Chelsea Football Club has always mystified people. Dave Warren, the third Brit in the Moscow Olympic 800 metres, says, ‘If you wanted to find Seb on a Saturday afternoon in the winter, most of the time, you’d find him down at the Shed at Chelsea, and I think he was really happy being a Chelsea supporter on the terraces, which goes a little bit against the image other people had of him. I think he wasn’t quite as goody two-shoes as we were led to believe.’

  Janet Prictoe saw a definite early scratch in the veneer, too. She recalls being at the Coe family home when the children were being presented to a guest. Coe was in his early twenties by then. ‘I can remember saying to Seb, “Oh, isn’t it lovely that she obviously thinks so well of you?” There was slightly that within his family, presenting this lovely picture, which I’m sure wasn’t anywhere near as rosy, as nobody’s is. I can remember him saying, “It’s a bloody pain having to be polite to all these people.” So there was even then within the family this thing of creating an image and Seb is very much that: he created an image, or he lived up to the image that was created for him.’

  Both Coe and Ovett would have illnesses or injuries during their junior years, which would necessitate lengthy periods off training and out of competition. Coe would miss most of the 1974 season with stress fractures – hairline breaks, usually in the shinbones, which come from training on hard surfaces. Ovett missed the winter of 1973/4, with glandular fever. But, like Ovett, once Coe began his rise, there was never really a time when it seemed that he wasn’t going to be successful. There wasn’t that difficult transition period when a career can be in the balance. As Peter Coe says, ‘No, because we won so much. In terms of age records, he didn’t rank. But he won. This is the greatest gift that the coach can be given – consistency.’

  In 1971, Coe was still a long way behind Ovett in his development, a reasonable situation, given that he was nearly a year younger. In contrast to Ovett’s times for 800 and 1500 metres – 1 minute 55.3 seconds and 4 minutes 10.7 seconds – Coe’s bests were 2 minutes 8.4 seconds and 4 minutes 18 seconds. But, unlike Ovett, who was still concentrating on the 400 and 800 metres, Coe was already regularly competing at the distance at which he would make Olympic history. His first national competition at that distance, however, would prove dismal. He finished last in his heat of the English Schools Junior 1500 metres. If he had been watching the Intermediate 400 metres final, he might have spotted the strapping Steve Ovett taking third place.

  The next English Schools Championships, the cross-country events in 1972, would be the first time they would meet in competition. Coe trailed in the older boy’s wake. But he had plenty of time. They both did. Right now, apart from a small coterie of family and friends who could see their potential, they were virtually anonymous. But when their time came, almost everybody in the world would know their names.

  5

  Mum and Dad

  ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,’ the poet Philip Larkin memorably wrote. Well, they do and they don’t. Most people who met Peter Coe thought him a disciplinarian with political views somewhere between those of Margaret Thatcher and Genghis Khan. Those who knew Gay Ovett lived in fear of her ‘market mouth’. But it is doubtful whether their first-born sons could ever have achieved what they did without their ‘driven’ parents’ considerable input.

  So obvious was their influence that well before Moscow 1980 insiders were saying that the rivalry was as much about Gay and Peter as it was about Steve and Seb. Everybody who knew Gay said that she was the driving force, the motor for her son’s achievements. And you didn’t even need to know Peter: simply seeing him there on the infield, dervishing around with a stopwatch, was enough to convince anybody that he was the puppet-master. Angela Coe and Mick Ovett might have played huge roles in the development of their sons, but their influence was largely offstage, in the wings, while their spouses wore the red coats, and wielded the metaphorical whips.

  I spoke to Gay Ovett only once, a few months prior to Moscow 1980. She rebuffed my telephone request for an interview with her son with that exaggerated politeness that can be construed only as contempt. She left me in no doubt that I should not bother to call again. I got off lightly by all accounts.

  Gay James was only fifteen when little Steven was conceived. She must have been a solitary child, because on the evidence of Ovett himself, and the testimony of friends and family, she was not awash with social graces. She was blunt and brittle, and her language reflected the street markets where she and her husband worked. While recognising her faults – and they had their own vociferous fallings out – her elder son paints the broader picture, though.

  ‘She was incredibly supportive, and imme
nsely proud,’ explains Ovett. ‘She was the front that most people got if they wanted Steve Ovett. And it was a very abrupt front. She was a very market person, sort of “take it or leave it”. There was no margin for greyness; it was black or white as far as my mother was concerned, and I think that was probably a portrayal that most media people found very hard to accept. I mean, most people would love to get their name in the press. And most mothers would love to see their son’s name in the press. My mother adopted the attitude that Steve has got a job to do and if he doesn’t want to talk to people, then that is the way things are going to be. And there is no compromise.

  ‘The surface of my mother was very hard, but I think she was a very shy woman, a bit like me really, and socially a bit inept, the same as me. I think we were very working class people, who withdrew into a hard shell when we found ourselves in situations which we couldn’t get on with. And I think she just, well, not retreated exactly, but I think she used that. She was a very emotional woman. She was never hard as nails, my mother, and I think she used that “just get on with it and to hell with anyone else” attitude as a methodology for whatever she wanted to do in life. She adopted a very “we do our thing, and if everybody else doesn’t like it, well then tough luck”!

  ‘And it was easy for me to follow in that vein – a united front, as it were. I mean, if my mother adopted that attitude and I suddenly broke out of that mould and started deviating from that way of things, then I think it would have caused problems, because then she would have had to cope with everything that I brought into the family. And it would have been very hard for her. My mother wasn’t an ogre. She would give as good as she got, simple as that, and if someone was being hard on her, then she must be equally hard back.’