The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  Peter Coe remains unrepentant. Now in his mid-eighties, with a dodgy hip and deteriorating eyesight, he has mellowed a little, but not to the extent that he is going to disavow his former rigidity. When I visited him in late 2003, my opening sally solicited the response, ‘It’s a rotten question, because it leads to my natural arrogance.’ But there is an element of teasing in his manner. He had greeted me with, ‘Where do you live exactly?’ On being told, he turned to his wife and said with a frown, ‘Do we talk to people from up there?’

  Peter has always maintained that he was a soft touch within the family. When I telephoned early in 2004 to do some fact checking, Angela related with glee that when he had gone into hospital in the early 1990s for a hip replacement, and was logged under his original name of Percy, ‘Everybody called him Perky, it just killed me.’ His old friend Bob Hague says, ‘I didn’t like Peter at all at first. I thought he was arrogant and big-headed. I didn’t realise I would end up almost loving the guy. He is completely loveable. He does overreact sometimes. When we’ve discussed politics I’ve had an eruption on my hands. But he is genuinely upset, he’s not arguing for arguing’s sake; it’s because it’s something he feels passionately about. And that’s the thing about Peter. You think he’s a bad-tempered — but he just feels things, he’s very sensitive. But I don’t think he would like to be known as a sensitive person.’

  Steve Mitchell, whose house in Loughborough Coe shared in the early eighties, when they were training and listening to jazz together, has a similarly polarised view of Peter Coe. ‘He’s a bit dry, Peter, I like him, but I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of him. I’ve had lots of discussions with him, [he’s a] very articulate and a very knowledgeable man. You can have a discussion on almost any subject you like and he’s got an opinion and it’s probably backed up by facts. But if you only meet him occasionally, I guess people perhaps thought he was a bit stern, but he’s quite a soft old bugger really.’

  You can’t escape history in England. Angela and Peter Coe now live in Fulham, south-west London, barely a mile from where Walter George and Willie Cummings had their epic race in 1886, when George ran the mile in 4 minutes 12 seconds, the world record that would last for three decades. Nothing remains of the Lillie Bridge Stadium today. It was burned down the year after George’s feat there, when the two leading sprinters of the day, Harry Gent and Harry Hutchens failed to turn out for a match (their backers couldn’t decide which one should lose). The angry mob of punters, who had paid a shilling to get in and staked much more in wagers, tore the place down and set fire to it. Peter Coe, of course, made a telling contribution to the history of the mile himself.

  As an engineer, he brought his profession’s rigour to his son’s training, even to the extent of taking an evening class in statistics, so that he could better map out the future. Malcolm Grace, as Peter’s work colleague and a member of Seb’s athletics club, clearly had a unique perspective on the father and son. ‘They really did have a wonderful relationship. He ran Seb’s life like a project. It was almost like switching a light on and off. At any other time he was Seb’s father and did what a father should do, and then when we went down the track, down went the switch and there was a change of character, he became coach. The extraordinary thing about it was that he was able to divorce himself from being a father to being a coach. I’ve seen Peter do things that a parent couldn’t do to their child.

  ‘There was a situation where his schedule was six 600s in 84 seconds with three minutes between. Seb had done five and was puking up on the fence, and Peter did his tight “Russian face” thing. He had got three minutes’ rest and Peter shouted out two minutes, one minute, thirty seconds and Seb was off. I would suggest that most parents wouldn’t do that. He said he wanted six and six he did.

  ‘Another time, we were having a Christmas party and he came across. “Hey Malcolm,” he says, “don’t get liquored up. I’ve got a job for you.” He and I lifted this enormous metal weight into the back of his car, it was two inches thick, two foot six long and two foot wide, and Peter took it to his home. We got it upstairs into Seb’s bedroom and he made a leg press out of it. It must have been at least two hundredweight. That was Seb’s Christmas box.’

  It is hard for people of my generation and younger, who didn’t even have to do national service, to understand what two world wars did to the psyches of successive generations of our predecessors. During my chat with Peter Coe, he evoked an experience as a prisoner of war in the early 1940s, the better to illustrate a point. ‘During the war, I had to sit down and make a decision. I’d seen how the Nazis had behaved, and I said, “This is no place for me, I’m off.” It took me six months to get out of Europe. I was locked up by the French and the bloody Spanish. But I think if you’ve got the bloody-minded resolution to do something, if it matters enough, you’ll do it.’

  For all that self-belief, Peter Coe was never closed to the expertise of others. He couldn’t afford to be, since he had started from a position of zero understanding of the sport. And he gave credit where it was due. Frank Horwill, another opinionated man who is not slow to voice criticism, explains: ‘Peter wrote to me, “I’ve heard about your five-pace system, could you explain it to me?” To his credit, he had listened to a lot of other coaches. He had a very open mind to that sort of information. A lot of people accuse Peter of being a charlatan. He’d never been a runner, yet if there was such a subject as the physiology of exercise, he could take a doctorate in it, because he was clued up to the eyebrows.’ Horwill said that some of the rumours among other coaches of Peter’s domineering manner with Seb went to ridiculous levels, such as, ‘Peter starts on Seb first thing in the morning and harangues him.’

  Although Janet Prictoe didn’t like Peter, she saw a different picture on her visits to the family home at Sheffield. ‘People say Peter didn’t suffer fools gladly, but that is a polite way of saying he was bloody rude, which he was, [but] I think they had a good relationship. It wasn’t completely dominant. Seb was his own man, he wasn’t totally a puppet of Peter. There was a mutual respect. I don’t see him as being particularly controlling. I know people say that, [but] in fact it was his dad’s professional attitude to it that made Coe. He was the first in this country to tackle athletics professionally, to do the high-quality training, to research it.’

  Peter Coe should have written a book entitled, Seb and the Art of Monomania Maintenance, because, like Robert Pirsig’s famous book, Peter’s training philosophy is based entirely on quality and the understanding and application of it, as he explains: ‘Some of the club members never understood, never came to terms with the intensity with which he was training – quality, not volume. They would accuse me, and say, “Seb is only fourteen, you’re killing him, he must be doing forty, sixty miles a week at least.” I said, “He does twenty, maybe twenty-three, something like that.” He got third in the European [Junior] Championships on just under thirty. On quality. Every year, he was going to have to do more: there was going to come a time when he would touch sixty, seventy miles a week, which would be high for a low-mileage runner. But when you are hitting that stuff early on, there is nowhere else to go.’

  There is a striking similarity with the Barry Tilbury philosophy of coaching the young Steve Ovett. And these men were instructing young runners in the wake of a generation of British middle-distance runners locked into a 140-plus miles a week training regime. For all the difference in the physiques of their charges, this careful nurturing of young talent, the insistence on quality and the progressive nature of their training regimes would lay the foundations for some of the most memorable performances in athletics history.

  Former Olympian and television executive Adrian Metcalfe has an interesting perspective of the Coe father–son relationship. Metcalfe is alone in feeling that it had a strong element of theatre about it. ‘A wacko dad, but a very interesting man. “My athlete”, he called him, never Seb. It was a kind of game really that they played with each other. It was an
extraordinary relationship. They adored each other, and they adored each other’s mind, and they adored plotting and scheming.’

  Maybe Metcalfe has read Kenny Moore’s Sports Illustrated feature on the Coes, from a lengthy interview conducted in late 1979. Former Olympic marathoner, Moore stayed at the Coe home in Sheffield over the Christmas following Coe’s first three world records, and in the article he describes several instances of Peter’s gallows humour in exchanges with his elderly mother, before adding an explanation from Peter himself: ‘My father was not a happy man, but dour. One might even say bitter. In reaction, my mother and I developed a certain humour, involving a good deal of fantasy, which I’m afraid my father never understood.’ Nor did many other people. But, crucially, Seb would. And the results of their partnership would be unrivalled in the history of track and field athletics.

  6

  Brief Encounter

  It was clear from the way he answered an unsolicited phone call that Kirk Dumpleton has not lost much sleep over the intervening thirty years, wondering whether he should have been an Olympic hero, like the pair he beat in their first ever encounter. My sister had remarked on his ‘Dickensian’ name, and if Dickens had created a character based on Dumpleton, he would have referred to him as ‘the cheery party’. Dumpleton is an uncomplicated man, a middle-aged teacher, head of Humanities at a secondary school north of London. He was marking A-level exam papers when I arrived at the homely, hastily tidied suburban semi-detached in Luton, from which he had despatched his wife and two young children for the morning. ‘Otherwise, we wouldn’t have got a minute’s peace,’ he explained.

  When I had mentioned this book to a young colleague, he asked if I’d tracked down the ‘mysterious’ Kirk Dumpleton. That amused Dumpleton, as it did Ovett and Coe, both of whom had got to know him well after his demolition of them in the English Schools Intermediate cross-country in 1972. Dumpleton had gone on to feature highly in domestic races right up to the mid-1990s, when a debilitating illness had ended his competitive career. So there was nothing too mysterious about him. But he was tickled to be considered a cult figure – the only Englishman to beat Ovett and Coe in the same race during their entire careers. That he didn’t go on to emulate them once again says something about talented youngsters in athletics, and the thin line that divides those who make it to the top from those who don’t.

  Dumpleton was bright, smart, amusing, thoughtful, communicative, everything you’d expect a head of Humanities to be. And he was a middle-distance runner, ready to chew the fat. After weeks of interviewing international runners, I was back on home territory. But this wasn’t so much an interview, as two old hacks discussing the thing we loved most – running. As a bonus, not only had Dumpleton won that schools race in 1972 – Ovett was second and Coe tenth – but he would later share a coach, Harry Wilson, with Ovett and would spend two years at Loughborough with Coe.

  ‘I suppose I was one of the favourites, but only one, because I hadn’t run against the northern boys that much, and it was mainly schools races in the south of England. I couldn’t think of many who’d be beating me – I’d have been in the top four, five, six you’d be looking for. I only knew of Coe as a name from the north of England that you’d spot in the results. I’d come across Steve on a couple of British Milers’ Club courses. I was only just getting to know Harry Wilson; it was after that I got to know Steve a bit better. They were just names really. At sixteen, I was probably training more, I was totally free of injuries that year, I wasn’t doing a big mileage, about thirty-five miles a week, but some of it was absolutely lung-busting. Training-wise, it was a very good year.

  ‘What I remember most is running at the front of the field, in second or third, and thinking, I’m jogging. I do remember Ovett loping alongside me, and thinking at one stage, He looks fairly easy. He had that sort of style where – he was always a big, strong lad – he looked easy. I think I knew from the breathing, although he looked easy, his running style, I could tell the others were breathing harder than myself. But on that particular day I felt great, I just thought, I can step this up, and I was just waiting really until the stage when I thought, I’m not going to wait any longer. You know, when you really are at your fittest, you run races, and you can’t believe how easy you feel. I remember about two-thirds of the way through, I thought, I’m going to kick in, and I did, and just went. Obviously I was hurting at the end, but relatively it felt easy. It was just lovely.’

  Coe recalls, ‘It was boiling hot, I was absolutely sweltering. It was March and it must have risen to something like seventy degrees. I think I finished fourth or fifth in the Yorkshire Schools that year and we all lined up in the positions we finished in the county championships. I remember getting caught up really badly in traffic and for the first half-mile I was way down and I was starting to pull-back slowly. I came through really strongly at the end.’

  Ovett says he can’t recall anything of the race, and I don’t think in this case it is the amnesia that often accompanies defeat. He claims that dyslexics have poor memories, and his close friend Matt Paterson concurs that not only did Ovett not remember many incidents in his career, but that he wasn’t given to talking about the past much anyway. That fitted with other people’s observations about him: he realised he was good at running, and that was it. He didn’t bang on about it then, and he doesn’t now. Paterson says they never talked about running when they were training. And when they meet up now, they rarely discuss the past.

  For Dumpleton, who beat Ovett by 200 metres, the race would remain a career highlight. ‘It was the best race I had in a way, because when I won at Brighton two years later [the Senior Schoolboys race], I won that in a sprint; it wasn’t as easy. Steve was very good, he came up to my dad afterwards and said, “Oh, you’ve got a good ’un there,” very charitable, very good in defeat. It was around that time that I joined up with Harry Wilson. I ended up getting to know Steve, and stayed at his house for three or four days when we were eighteen, and got to know him better.

  ‘I always liked Steve, as an affable sort of runners’ runner. He was so talented, [but] the way he talked to you, he was never patronising. He liked to joke, he was a bit of a joker, and we’d have a drink. He was never the guy who was going to knock back a lot, but he wasn’t someone saying, “No, I’m only going to have a Coke tonight.” He really struck you at that time as being a good bloke.

  ‘Coe [was] quite a different personality to Steve. Seb was a lot more serious, very systematic about what he was attempting to do, [but] he would have a joke at times. But there was an occasion when some of us were running really well at Loughborough, and he did a six-mile cross-country with us. He was very fit, we knew from his track sessions. And we were just starting to be aware that he was going to be very special. Anyway, six of us beat him, but it was a muddy, wet six miles and he trailed in a bit disconsolate. Later, we were at a club do and we had a big university relay in London coming up, and one of us jokingly said, “You know, Seb, you might scrape in the team.” He didn’t see the funny side of it at all. He said, “Well, you know, I can see the point of a three-mile road relay, as opposed to slopping around a six-mile cross-country,” and we had to say to him, “There’s no doubt you’re running, Seb.” So he was very serious in some ways. He wasn’t without humour, but it wasn’t as natural as most people’s.’

  Coe improved steadily throughout the summer of 1972, but there was still a huge gap between the slight fifteen-year-old and the burly sixteen-year-old Ovett. That was best demonstrated when Coe was comprehensively beaten in a 1500 metres at Crystal Palace by Paul Williams, whom Ovett had slaughtered in his first 1500 metres at the venue two years earlier. Coe had the consolation of a personal best of 4 minutes 5.9 seconds, and was now regularly running in British Milers’ Club races in the south. It was all part of Peter’s master plan.

  ‘There was always this feeling in Yorkshire that you had to be so much better than anybody else in the south of England to get selected,’
says Seb. ‘There was part truth in that because the BAAB [federation] used to say it would cost them thirty quid assembling costs to get somebody down from Yorkshire, but cost only six quid to get them to Heathrow from Hertfordshire. That was often the selection criterion. I remember my old man saying, “I don’t know if this is true or not, but what we’ll do is we’ll just make sure there is no doubt about that.”

  ‘When I was about fourteen we went down to a huge cross-country race in Luton. We went specifically down there to turn over anybody and everybody who was in the south of England. His view was, “I’m not experienced enough in the politics of this sport, but if there is any doubt about this, we’ll make a mark early.” So we used to go down regularly and compete in the British Milers’ Club things on Saturday nights at Barnet Copthall. We did a big cross-country race in Luton, which I won by about a minute. My old man was always slightly more aware than people in the north about what was going on elsewhere.’

  Frank Horwill recalls in his inimitable fashion the first time that Coe came to Barnet. ‘I first met Coe when I put on a boys 800 at Copthall. I always remember he wore a little pink cap. I remember getting ’em all together before the race. I said, “Look here, boys, the BMC hasn’t paid your fares to come down here and fuck about, so get stuck in.” Seb must have been a bit nervous. I forgot about this, but Seb reminded me: I looked at my watch, and I thought, Dreadful first lap, so apparently I stepped onto the outside lane, and yelled out, “If you can’t do better than this, get off the track,” and he said, “We ran the next lap as if we’d had a shot up our arses.” He broke two minutes, he came second, and I don’t think his father was very pleased at his performance, because I saw him looking at him. He wasn’t shouting, but more or less saying, “What were you doing?”’