The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  Horwill also met the young Ovett early in his career, during a weekend which demonstrated the youngster’s talent and personality. ‘I first met Steve at a Southern Counties Easter training event. Tom McNab was the coach in charge. Our first meeting wasn’t too friendly. Tom had a habit of introducing a thing called a Funtathlon, which was having to do things like sitting down and throwing a medicine ball over your head, or doing a standing Fosbury flop. Tom was in the habit of addressing the middle-distance people as the “spastics of athletics”, ’cause all they could do was run. Ovett had to do this standing Fosbury flop, and he did a higher jump than the high jumpers.

  ‘Anyway I was in the middle of explaining some exercise, and I remember saying, “Listen carefully, because we’ve got to get this down,” and I turned my back and I heard a raspberry. So I said, “Who did that? No need for the culprit to own up, I can see who it is. It’s you! You’ll never make a champion, you haven’t got the right attitude.”’ Ovett disputes it was him, but, as Horwill says, ‘He was the one who went bright red,’ and Ovett’s pal Dave Cocksedge agrees that it fits perfectly the young Ovett’s joky demeanour, as typified by Ovett referring to a young rival by the name of Tony Dyke as ‘Tony Lesbian’. Years after the raspberry, Horwill, as founder of the BMC, presented Ovett with a world-record plaque. ‘I handed it to him, and he said, “You know, this is strange, because I was told by Frank ten years ago that I’ll never make a champion, and those words stung me into action.”’

  Despite not having a coach, Ovett continued his impressive improvement that summer. His range of ability – from 5-mile cross-country to sprints – was still much in evidence. He won the Sussex Senior Men’s 800 metres title in 1 minute 53.6 seconds, then won the County Schoolboy title in a personal best of 1 minute 52.5 seconds. He won the English Schools Intermediate 800 metres, while Coe was finishing thirteenth in the 3000 metres. Ovett then won the AAA Youths 400 metres title, secured a 400/800 metres double against international opposition at a meeting in Southend, then set a national Youths record of 48.4 seconds for 400 metres. He ended his season with another 400 metres victory at Crystal Palace, then added a 200 metres race for good measure, recording another best of 23 seconds dead at a Southern Counties meeting.

  But joy and satisfaction at his progress were tempered by the first tragedy of Ovett’s young life. At the Sussex Schools event at the Withdean Stadium, Pop collapsed. ‘No one told me until after the race. I don’t know why, but they didn’t,’ Ovett recalls. ‘He had a heart-attack at the stadium and they took him down to his flat that was just a quarter of a mile away, and he died there while I was running. He was a lovely man, my grandfather, a very gentle man. I think perhaps as a child he subconsciously moulded me a lot more than I realised at the time. I was very close to him, and it was numbing. I always thought that he would be there when I was running, and there he was dying at quite a young age. I never said goodbye to him, but he always loved watching me run, so maybe that was the way he wanted to go.’

  7

  Genius

  What is most intriguing about Coe’s career at this point was that he and Peter were firmly convinced that he was eventually going to be a 5000 metres runner. The 1500s were simply stepping-stones, and despite that personal best of 1 minute 59.9 seconds in north London, the 800 metres barely came into the equation. Coe and Ovett would surely have met at 1500 metres and the mile, but the 800 metres races and all the double debate of Moscow would not have ensued. That English Schools cross-country in Hillingdon in March 1972 could have been the only time that they would ever meet, and their great rivalry might never have happened. It would still be a few years before Coe discovered his ‘true’ distance.

  In another of those remarkable parallels in their careers, the same thing would happen to Ovett, but from the opposite end of the racing spectrum, and a little sooner. He was the leading young 400 metres runner in the country. But a fortuitous meeting with Harry Wilson at a Southern Counties training weekend in early 1973 would turn him into a serious 800 metres runner sooner than he might have envisaged. It was a move which would eventually lead to the Moscow gold medal. Ovett arrived late at Crystal Palace to find the sprint group oversubscribed. He was sent to the middle-distance group. Ovett recalls, ‘Harry said, “You shouldn’t be here,” and I said, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” He said, “OK, join in, and then next time you can go back to the sprint group.” And that was my introduction to middle-distance running. I went from doing sprint drills back at Brighton to running 1000s with Julian Goater and Barry Smith. I came back absolutely exhausted. I remember my dad had to carry me up the stairs.’

  Goater and Smith were on their way to becoming world-class 10,000 metres runners, and in his book Running Dialogue, Harry Wilson describes his amazement at the young sprinter’s ability to emulate the distance men in his first attempt at a more strenuous training regime: ‘To my astonishment he not only did the repetitions, but led on practically all of them . . . matching Julian without any apparent discomfort.’ Wilson continued, ‘I never dreamt I’d coach a genius, or the greatest runner in the world, yet I came to regard Steve Ovett as both of those.’

  The meeting with Wilson was to prove the most crucial of Ovett’s career. During the next two years, the ‘dogmatic, brash extrovert’, as Ovett once described the coach, would give the teenager the benefit of his broad experience. As a runner, Wilson had been a Welsh cross-country international; as organiser, he was involved with the British Milers’ Club; as a coach, he had guided a generation of club runners. What Peter Coe was picking up from others and piecing together himself as quickly as possible, Harry Wilson had assimilated from years on the front line of what had seemed a losing battle against an indifferent administration and limited talent.

  Lesley Kiernan, Ovett’s girlfriend, was also coached by Wilson, and saw how the pair hit it off. ‘Harry was such a good motivator. If Harry had told me I could climb a mountain, I would have done it. I believed whatever he told me, and I think that Steve was the same in the early days. Steve felt if Harry said you can do it, you could do it. With Harry, there was something extra, that’s why he was such a good coach. For Steve, in those early days, he was the best thing that could ever have happened. They had their disagreements, but Harry idolised him, and I don’t think it was because he was successful; it was because they just got on really well.’

  Ovett says, ‘There was a certain confidence in Harry’s coaching. He’d learned by working with people with not much talent, and I think a lot of coaches did prior to the so-called golden era of the seventies and eighties. A lot of hard work went on with coaching, the [Geoff] Dyson era and people like that, very technically minded guys, public schoolboys who had gone to university and they loved their sport, become Blues at Oxford and Cambridge and God knows what else. They came out, joined the clubs, became very good track middle-distance runners or coaches and worked with a lot of club athletes who hadn’t got much talent and weren’t very good. They formed the British Milers’ Club, people like Harry and Frank [Horwill] and Ron Holman and a few others all keen for something to happen. It was like the tinder was there, the firewood was there, they just needed a few sparks. And the bright sparks came along at the right time and whoosh, the combination just suddenly took off. And that heady mixture of experience, understanding and talent was what I believe produced that great era that we had.’

  And the brightest spark, of course, was Steve Ovett. Almost immediately, Wilson’s guidance was going to accelerate Ovett’s development as a middle-distance runner. Within four months of increasing his workload with Wilson, Ovett won the Sussex Senior 1500 metres title, taking 8 seconds off his personal best, in 3 minutes 53.4 seconds. The next three months were going to see another great leap forward, as the seventeen-year-old Ovett consolidated his status as a leading junior international while making considerable inroads in the senior ranks.

  In contrast to Ovett’s charge into the world rankings, Coe continued his steady but unspectacu
lar progress. The most significant improvement in his results was that he was winning more races; what’s more, they were important ones. After another second place, but with another personal best of 1 minute 56 seconds, in a BMC 800 metres at Crystal Palace in mid-May, Coe won the Northern Counties Youths 1500 metres in 3 minutes 59.5 seconds, his first time under 4 minutes for the metric mile. Of those behind him, Malcolm Prince and Sean Butler would become close friends and training partners at Loughborough two years later, and Kim McDonald would go on to be the first serious athletics agent when the sport went professional a decade later.

  Coe then scored two of his most significant wins to date. Coming from behind on the final bend, he won the English Schools Intermediate 3000 metres title by over 10 metres in 8 minutes 40.2 seconds. A month later, in early August, he won the AAA Youths 1500 metres title in 3 minutes 55 seconds, the championships record for his age group. Coe’s achievements were enormously satisfying for both himself and his father, who realised that he was on the right track with his self-taught coaching methods.

  But those accomplishments were not so much put in the shade as almost buried out of sight by the superlative performances of Ovett. Because, despite Coe’s improvement, the gap between the pair was becoming a chasm, as was demonstrated in three races inside ten days in early July. While Coe was still competing in the National Youths Championships, Ovett, although still a ‘junior’, had graduated directly to the senior championships. The highlight of the two-day meeting at Crystal Palace was Dave Bedford’s runaway victory in the 10,000 metres, setting a world record of 27 minutes 30.8 seconds. But Ovett would make a mark of his own. He finished a close second in his heat of the 800 metres in 1 minute 47.5 seconds, surprising himself and his family, who had to change their plans and stay in London because he had got to the following day’s final. There, he ran even faster, 1 min 47.3 seconds, the best ever in the world by a seventeen-year-old.

  A week later, he ran a mile race at Motspur Park in Surrey, where Sydney Wooderson had set his world record of 4 min 06.4 sec in 1937. Ovett chased seasoned international Nick Rose all the way to the line, and, with Rose clocking 3 minutes 58.4 seconds, and Ovett just a few strides behind, Harry Wilson confidently told his charge that he had broken the magical 4-minute barrier, less than twenty years after Roger Bannister had done it for the first time. But, in a repetition of the scenario of three years earlier when officials had denied him his 2-minute 800 metres, the clock-watchers gave Ovett 4 minutes dead!

  It would be a year before Ovett finally realised the dream of every schoolboy miler and went sub-4, but, given the 109-metre difference between the 1500 metres and the mile, and their comparative times, Coe would have just been coming round the final bend as Ovett was crossing the line. That was the difference in mid-1973. And the rest of Ovett’s season more than made up for the minor disappointment. He earned his first international vest in a match against France in Sotteville, where he acquitted himself satisfactorily by placing third. He then went to his first major event as a favourite, the European Junior Championships in Duisburg, West Germany.

  Neil Wilson was one of just two British journalists who covered the championships. He says Ovett simply ‘played with the field’ before winning the 800 metres by an ace. Ovett looks back on it very differently. ‘Oh no, not at all, it was my first championship. I don’t think you’d ever be that confident, when you consider the field that was there – van Damme, Wülbeck, [Erwin] Gohlke – that was a fairly tough field. It was probably the toughest race of those championships. That race produced more people that went on to become champions, Olympic medallists and world champions or whatever. Lesley Kiernan was running in the women’s 800 metres just the race before mine. She ran the race of her life and finished second, and literally fell into my arms as she came through the line. I remember thinking, God, you know I’ve got to win this one now, otherwise I’m going to have to take second place to my girlfriend, which is a bit of a hard job for any bloke to swallow.

  ‘I came off the bend just behind Wülbeck, and van Damme was just behind me. We ran literally inch-by-inch to the line and we crossed the line all together. I mean, it was not an easy race. I just won it by a breadth of a vest, and everybody thought, Oh, you ran that one well, but really I couldn’t have done much more about it. I was actually flat out and the fact that Wülbeck, the [1983] world champion and van Damme, the [1976] Olympic silver medallist, were just behind me just shows you the calibre of field in that particular race.’

  Lesley Kiernan was not in the least surprised by her boyfriend’s achievement. She had seen enough of Ovett to recognise the qualities that he brought to his racing. ‘Many times, he wasn’t necessarily the favourite, but he always managed to pull through. And if he didn’t, he was so disappointed. That real want of succeeding was always there, always evident, and it was obvious that was going to happen. He trained really hard, he never shirked, and I never knew him not finish a session. That’s just how he was, and, to be a good athlete, that’s how you’ve got to be.’

  Neil Wilson saw another side of Ovett as they travelled back from Duisburg together. ‘We came across on a boat from the Hook of Holland to Harwich and then train all the way home to Brighton together. So I got to know him reasonably well; not that anybody ever got to know Steve terribly well. At that stage he was very questioning, he wanted to know everything you knew, and he had questions he was going to ask. Even though he was pretty raw, inexperienced internationally, it was obvious he was a man of fairly strong opinions. You could give him your opinion on something, but he didn’t just take it without questioning.’

  So everything was progressing well for Ovett; except, that is, for school. He has said he enjoyed his time at Varndean, but his dyslexia prevented him from shining academically. Since the school prided itself on its academic achievement, it is perhaps not surprising that Ovett’s athletic successes were not highly regarded. Audrey and Ray Spinks, who organised the Brighton & Hove AC junior teams, had a son, Corin, who was also at Varndean. Audrey says, ‘I don’t think they were very geared to athletics. I don’t think they realised just what he’d achieved. Corin and three other little boys got full colours for winning their Sussex Schools cross-country and Steve got half colours when he won the European Junior Championship.’

  But there was one local headmaster who realised just how good Steve Ovett was, and he was going to become another crucial addition to ‘Team Ovett’. Matt Paterson was also a member of Brighton & Hove AC, and was not going to be put off by what many club members perceived as Ovett’s ‘arrogance’. As head of a local school, he invited Ovett to come and talk to the kids about winning his European title. ‘I didn’t find him in the least bit arrogant. I think he was quite wary of people, and there was a certain amount of jealousy as well, as there often is when you get someone like Steve with so much talent at such an early age. We just got chatting, and it was like speaking to someone of my age. He seemed to be ten years older than he actually was. We started training together, and I thought I was training pretty hard then. I had a good idea what I was doing, and then you get this young kid coming along who you thought had done no kind of background in any aerobic training. He comes along and just absolutely screws you.’

  Ovett returns the compliment with interest, saying, ‘Matt was probably the most significant factor, apart from Harry, in my success. He was the perfect training partner. He literally lived across the road from me. He used to get me up in the morning, not me going across getting him up. He would bust his gut to keep up with me most days, whereas I was just cruising. People said, “Why doesn’t he run very well?” And I used to say, “He’s always too bloody knackered after training with me to run anything like as well as he should.” And to this day I don’t know why he trained as hard as me and for as long as he did, because there was no apparent reason. But thank God that he did, because without that I definitely wouldn’t have carried on. He was consistent; he was always there; he never failed.’

  Poor
Paterson. He won ten Sussex County titles during his career, but at one point he was only the third-best 5000 metres runner in his street. Ovett lived across the road, while Brendan Foster – who was at university in Brighton – would come and stay with his girlfriend, now wife, who lived a few doors away. But Paterson does not agree that his career suffered. ‘No, I loved just running with Steve and looked forward to every session, and I mean I was just absolutely jumping out my skin sometimes. We were just like brothers and we’ve still got that very close relationship. All I wanted to do was to make sure that someone like him could get to the very, very top.

  ‘I was a reasonable athlete, a club athlete, but you know when you are eighteen, nineteen, you are never going to become a world-class athlete. So all I was wanting to do was to get the best out of myself, which I think I did, and also help Steve, because there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing someone you know achieve all the things that you would dream about when you were younger. I wasn’t living my life through him, I wasn’t looking for any adulation or any praise. I got that from Steve. He would go out of his way to thank us for what we did. Sometimes I would say, “I think I’m holding you back,” and I really thought that he had to find someone else to do some training with. And eventually Bob Benn came along and did some speed work, but the distance stuff he said was fine. When I had a good day and Steve had a bad day, that was when we were probably together.’