The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  Paterson was privy to an interior force that would help Ovett just as much as his physical prowess: his ability to switch-off, which his wife Rachel says exists to this day. Dave Cocksedge noticed it, too, saying, ‘He would sit for an hour and say nothing.’ Matt Paterson recalls Ovett coming to his house and sitting watching TV with his kids. ‘I’d say to him, “Steve do you want a cup of tea?” and you’d get no answer. Then you’d ask him again, and still no answer. I’m thinking, What’s wrong with him? He’d just be switched off, you know, completely and utterly in a trance. He could do that before races as well. It didn’t matter what: you could have bombs going off around about him, he would be just utterly in his own little world. I know myself, my best races were the races where I was completely focused. I think Steve was able to do that every time he raced, whereas the rest of us, you might do it once in your lifetime.’

  All the pieces had come together for Ovett. After two decades in the doldrums for British middle-distance running, Mel Watman, the editor of Athletics Weekly, was already enthusing about his medal potential on the biggest athletics stage in the world three years later. After Ovett’s world age best for the 800 metres in the AAA Championships, Watman wrote, ‘One wonders what he will be achieving in this event and the 1500m by the time of the Montreal Olympics.’

  The Commonwealth Games in New Zealand in early 1974 might have provided Ovett with the invaluable experience of a major, yet low-key championship, to ready him for the Olympic maelstrom that was going to be Montreal. But in the trials for Christchurch, held at the end of the 1973 season, Ovett finished third, and was not selected. A ‘lively’ debate ensued, with both Mick Ovett and Harry Wilson writing to Athletics Weekly, which provided a forum in the absence of any public accountability from the federations and selectors.

  There were to be many such selection debates during the Ovett and Coe years, generating acrimony, antagonism and reprisals. For the most part, Ovett and Coe were so good that there was no question of them not being selected. But what was ignored in 1974, even though it was clear to Mick Ovett and Harry Wilson, and to Mel Watman, was that Ovett was a young winner who would benefit greatly from the experience. The lesson that Ovett drew from his disappointment was that he would become so good that he could not be ignored in the future.

  8

  Burn-Up

  Even in adversity, the careers of Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett seemed to steer parallel courses. After missing out on Commonwealth selection, Ovett contracted glandular fever, and couldn’t train for three months during the winter, which would have jeopardised Christchurch anyway. But the setback was only temporary, and he would charge through 1974, maintaining his assault on the world rankings.

  Coe would not be so fortunate. After an 800 metres time trial in April, he sustained stress fractures (hairline breaks) in his growing legs, ammunition for some of those club members and coaches who felt Peter was pushing him too hard. Coe would miss the whole of the summer season, but there would be a beacon amid that gloom to sustain him. Running alone in the time trial, he had recorded a new personal best for the 800 metres – 1 min 55.1 seconds.

  Ovett went back to junior competition at the start of the summer season, but even there he did something startling. Having run the Southern Junior 1500 metres the previous season, he dropped back down to his original record distance of 400 metres, and beat two of his 4×400 metres relay colleagues from Duisburg, setting a personal best of 47.5 seconds. If anything, the enforced rest had done him good. The results for the rest of the season suggest so, and give the lie to athletes’ obsession with training. After an enforced rest, an athlete often runs much better, yet the lesson is rarely learned.

  One of the men he beat in the Junior 400 metres was Bob Benn, who would later become a training partner and a pacemaker in the Ovett record-chasing years. Benn must be the only man who has ever joined an athletics club on crutches, as he relates: ‘I spent my formative years doing all sports and passionately wanted to be a soccer star. Actually, I was a far better sprinter and my parents always encouraged me to do running. Eventually I was taken by my mum to Croydon Harriers. I got some forms to sign up, it was Sunday morning and in the time I was down at the track, the football club I played for rang up to say they had arranged a friendly that afternoon and would I mind playing? I agreed to play, and promptly broke my leg! I never heard anything from the football club again. They never contacted me or found out how I was at all.

  ‘I got a two-page letter from Mike Fleet [former international and Croydon secretary] saying how disappointed he was, and that I should come down and meet everyone and get involved. That was an illustration of the difference between the two sports at that time. I was pretty green at athletics at that stage and I didn’t know much about this chap Ovett. He seemed to be the life and soul of the party [in Duisburg], always laughing and joking, and it turned out that he was a pretty good athlete, too. He was very aware of what everyone was doing even at that age. He definitely lightened the atmosphere because not only was he very accomplished in his own field; he was a good man to have on the team.’

  Still a junior internationally, Ovett was firmly ensconced not just among the seniors but ahead of them, most of the time. Inside a month in midsummer, he won 800 metres races in the Southern Championships at Crystal Palace and in an international match in Warsaw, took the national title back at Crystal Palace, then rectified that little mishap of his 4-minute mile by clocking 3 min 59.4 seconds, the same as Bannister had done nineteen years before, in winning at Haringey (later to be the London home track of his great rival, the currently indisposed Seb Coe).

  While Coe was languishing at home in Sheffield, Ovett was packing his bags again and setting out for the Eternal City. One year after winning the European Junior 800 metres, he was going to have a crack at the senior title in the European Championships. Rome’s Olympic Stadium had been the venue for one of the greatest 1500 metres races in history, Herb Elliott’s victory in the Games of 1960, when he set a world record of 3 min 35.6 seconds to win Olympic gold. It doesn’t get any better than that. To my generation of club runners, the one immediately prior to that of Ovett and Coe, Elliott was untouchable, a god, the only man never to lose a 1500 metres or a mile as a senior. When I finally met and interviewed him in 1985, I was not disappointed. The strength of character was as obvious as the impression that Elliott would have been successful whatever pursuit he had chosen. Ovett and Coe would eventually be mentioned in the same breath as Elliott, but not quite yet.

  The 800 metres world record-holder at the time, with 1 min 43.7 seconds was Marcello Fiasconaro, a South African rugby player who had started running 400 then 800 metres, and had been persuaded by the Italian federation to swap nationalities to race for the country of his father, who had been an Axis airman, shot down by the British over Sudan during the Second World War. He had been sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa, and liked the country so much that he returned there after the war. South Africa was excluded from the Olympics and international athletics during the apartheid period, and although ‘Fiasco’ did not suffer anything like the treatment that Zola Budd received in Britain a decade later, he says, ‘One Afrikaans newspaper had a headline, “Fiasconaro the Traitor”. But most of them were really happy, because in those days I was known as a South African. It was such a pity. With Dickie Broberg, Danie Malan and myself in 1973, we would have had three in the top five in the world.’

  Fiasconaro eventually returned to South Africa after his athletics career finished, but with one of his sons now a rugby player in Italy, he is a regular visitor to Rome. Fiasco is a big, jolly extrovert, and at Rome’s Golden League meeting in 2003 he recalled with some amusement how the young Ovett had brashly predicted his (Fiasconaro’s) demise at those European Championships in 1974. ‘I became quite friendly with a lot of the British guys. There used to be a hotel, it had a swimming pool on top, and we used to meet there regularly. They couldn’t believe that I was actually training for a
major championship because what I used to do was train in the morning and go and lie in the sun, which was probably not the ideal build-up for a major championship. But I read an article and Ovett had said, “While Fiasconaro fiddles in Rome, I’ll be burning up the track.” But you know he was right. He was good, I met him once or twice, a hell of a character and also very happy-go-lucky in those days.’

  In fact, Fiasconaro had been injured and unable to prepare sufficiently for the championships, but, having had some success front running, he gave it a go in the final. He delighted the crowd for 700 metres, but then, as Ovett had suggested, he went down in flames. Ovett might have been good, but he was not nearly good enough to defeat Luciano Susanj, a Slovene running for Yugoslavia. Ovett has always said that he ran a poor race tactically, which was true, but there was little more he could have done that evening. He was boxed in when Susanj kicked for home, but the Slovene won by almost fifteen metres, an incredible margin in a two-lap championship race. His time was impressive – 1 min 44.1 seconds – well beyond anything Ovett could have achieved at the time. But the young Briton fought his way to the silver medal in 1 min 45.8 seconds, a personal best and a European junior record.

  Nevertheless, there is a photo of Ovett coming off the track looking disgusted with himself, and thirty years later the experience still rankles. ‘That was bloody annoying. I was tactically outwitted. I don’t think I would have got any better; Susanj on the day was better than I was. But I got so boxed in, I didn’t really break for the silver until fifty metres from home. And I think I could have probably run a little bit faster. I was annoyed, because I did run badly that night.’

  Ovett in turn was going to do some annoying – of a man who would turn out to be a close ally during his final push into the top stratum of world athletics. Andy Norman was the administrator of the Southern Counties AAA, which organised the training weekends, such as the one when Ovett had met Harry Wilson. Norman was also in charge of recruiting for the end-of season Coke Meeting, Britain’s biggest TV athletics spectacular. At the end of the European Championships, he asked Ovett to run at Crystal Palace the following week, but Ovett had already arranged to tour around Europe with a new girlfriend. When Ovett refused the offer, he got the gimlet-eyed treatment from Norman, who threatened to block his entry to the following year’s meeting. That would soon be forgotten, when Norman started arranging trips for Ovett, but for the time being Ovett went off on his own trip, which was in part a way to celebrate leaving school. Even to the end, Varndean schoolmasters had been oblivious to his talent. In a season when he broke 4 minutes for the mile and won a European senior silver medal, his school report for sport read, ‘Continues to improve’.

  Following his European junior victory the previous year, Ovett had been approached by over two dozen US universities, and offered athletic scholarships. For Irish juniors this had long been a way of getting an education while furthering their athletics careers. Track luminaries like Ron Delany – who won the Olympic 1500 metres in Melbourne 1956 – Noel Carroll and Tom O’Riordan in the sixties, and Eamonn Coghlan and Ray Flynn later all benefited from transatlantic scholarships.

  British athletes had started to follow suit in the sixties. Nick Rose was one of the most successful transplants, coping with college demands while continuing his career as a British international. But many promising athletes suffered in the US collegiate system, which often stipulated several races each weekend, in order to satisfy team and coaching commitments. Ovett had discussed various further-education options with his parents. He had been to see George Gandy and the art school in Loughborough. But he would ultimately stay at home and opt for Brighton Art College. He got swiftly into character by growing a goatee beard.

  His wife Rachel says that if he hadn’t pursued a career in running, Ovett would have made a good architect, such is his spacial awareness and design capabilities. But he also put his practical ability to good use in his hobby of collecting cars. The next year cannot have been so arduous, because, even with training for the Olympics and pursuing the art foundation course, he found time to rebuild a sports car from scratch. In the end Mick had to beg him to sell one of the other three jalopies cluttering the pavement in front of the family home. The goatee lasted longer than the college career, because he dropped out when he failed his exams and was asked to repeat his first year.

  His parents were far from wealthy, although good and plentiful food was never going to be a problem with the Ovett market stall, and they offered to underwrite his athletics career. ‘I think I took the easy option,’ Ovett recalls. ‘I mean, if you can get your washing done for you and your cooking done for you and someone giving you pocket money each week, as opposed to doing all your bloody washing at university and all your cooking or whatever . . . I took the easy way out. If it hadn’t have been offered, I don’t think I would have taken advantage. I was a successful athlete, I was always winning, so they had a great deal in return for what they were doing in a sense. They had a great deal of pride in their son, and it went on. It started at the English Schools and it went right the way through to the Olympics. So they had the perfect, non-stop climb up the ladder. I think it was difficult for them, but I think it would have been harder if that success hadn’t come along. If they had put all that work in and didn’t have any success, then it would have been terrible.’

  9

  Boycott

  The highlight of the 1974 season had been a performance that still stands out in the 150-year history of organised athletics – Filbert Bayi winning the Commonwealth Games 1500 metres title in Christchurch from the front, and setting a world record of 3 min 32.2 seconds. It provided a lesson that would not be lost on Peter Coe. When his son, now eighteen, and having his first race in around eighteen months, returned to the track in early March 1975, he won the National Junior Indoor 1500 metres title with a tactic that earned him the highest praise from Athletics Weekly: ‘Coe leading every step of the way in a manner Filbert Bayi would have been proud of.’

  Three years later, Coe would be widely criticised, accused of being naïve for using a similar tactic in the European Championships 800 metres in Prague. He is still annoyed by those jibes. ‘A point that very few people make in track and field is that front running is actually a tactic in itself. It isn’t a negation, it is actually utilising a strength. Now you may choose to do it because, like [Dave] Bedford, there is not much else you can do when people start kicking in with 52-, 53-[second] laps at the end of a 10,000 metres. But it is a tactic. Nobody would say that Ron Clarke was clueless tactically. He ran from the front, and there is a perfectly good reason for that.

  ‘My old man sent me out regardless of the fact that John Walker, Dave Moorcroft and Eamonn Coghlan were in a mile race, but to run to schedule. His view was “I don’t care if you finish sixth, seventh or eighth, but one of these days you have to learn, you’ve got to understand what it’s like to really commit and hurt.”’

  This was the next stage in the Coe apprenticeship, and it was a tactic that he would use widely and frequently, and to good effect, over the next two years. In his first race after injury had blanked his 1974 season, he had won another title with another personal best, 3 min 54.4 seconds.

  Coe was back in from the cold, while Ovett was back out in it, creating another bit of history when winning the National Junior cross-country by over 200 metres. He was still running the occasional 400 metres on the track, but here he was, defying the odds again, and winning a 10,000-metre cross-country race, and by a street. A further measure of the progress he had made in the previous two years was that Kirk Dumpleton and Kevin Steere, youngsters who had beaten him into second place in the English Schools cross-country championship races in 1972 and 1973 were now finishing over a minute behind him.

  Coe continued his front-running tactics with equal success in his first outdoor race of the season, another personal best in the 1500 metres, 3 min 49.7 seconds in Spenborough near his Sheffield home. He carried on in a similar ve
in, occasionally varying the tactics by taking up the running from halfway in a series of races across the north of England. But the results were invariably the same. He won the Northern Junior 1500 and 3000 metres on successive weekends, then the AAA Junior 1500 metres a month later, in another personal best of 3 min 47.1 seconds. A future international rival, Ray Flynn of Ireland, finished third.

  ‘That was the first time I had seen him,’ says Flynn. ‘He was still very boyish. I had heard a lot about him, and I saw his dad outside the stadium holding his spikes. It was very, well, I wouldn’t say odd . . . I mean, sometimes when you see what is perceived to be a very overbearing father, who was always with his son and they were almost only seen together and he was the prodigy runner. I think there was intrigue.’

  It would only add to the Coe mystique. And that was going to be introduced onto a larger stage. That victory in the AAA Championships secured Coe his first international race, a 1500 metres in a junior match against Spain and France, at Warley in the West Midlands. There he would meet another man who would spend a long career chasing Coe’s and Ovett’s shadows, José-Manuel Abascal. Coe won, with Abascal five metres behind.

  Although Ovett was on a bigger stage, it was to be a season of mixed fortunes. He had a poor start to his outdoor campaign. Filbert Bayi made his British debut in late May, two weeks after breaking the world mile record (3 min 51 seconds in Jamaica). The Tanzanian now held both the 1500 metres and mile records, but what looked in the early laps of the Emsley Carr Mile at Crystal Palace like an opportunity for Ovett to measure himself against the very best disintegrated as he dropped from being a close second to Bayi at halfway to finishing sixth. Bayi ran impressively from the front to victory. Ovett looked sluggish and thought he might be suffering a recurrence of glandular fever.