The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  The next month would prove to be the worst of his career, as he was beaten in successive races in East Germany and Stockholm, the latter being another hammering in the mile, this time by John Walker of New Zealand, whose potential match against Bayi for the Olympic title the following year was eagerly awaited. Even though Ovett then started to win again, in both the European Cup semi-final and the AAA Championships 800 metres at Crystal Palace, he was perplexed by what he perceived to be his poor form.

  His dissatisfaction may have contributed to two incidents which were later seen to be supremely indicative of the Ovett persona. In winning the AAA title, he admitted that he had badly jostled old perennial Pete Brown, who had been a sort of guardian to him in his first senior international race two years earlier. Ovett said, ‘I hit him a couple of times, which is a bit unfair. I could have been disqualified, and I would not have argued.’ But it was a spat off the track following his European Cup semi-final race a fortnight earlier that became a cause célèbre. The British team had won through to the European Cup final a month later in Nice, and Ovett was asked as a matter of course about his chances. He surprised everyone by saying that he wasn’t going, that he had already arranged to travel to Athens to watch Lesley Kiernan race in the European Junior Championships. Terry O’Connor, who was the athletics correspondent for the Daily Mail, was incensed and accused Ovett of being unpatriotic.

  O’Connor is a bluff character, whose erect bearing, clipped diction and military manner betray his wartime service in the Royal Air Force. But he knows his athletics. He has followed the sport since the forties. He saw Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson run; he saw Sydney Wooderson win the European title in Oslo in 1946; and when his paper, the Evening News, sponsored athletics in the fifties, he was the meeting promoter. He covered every Olympics from 1948 to 1988, and also wrote Derek Ibbotson’s biography. But he is old school. Thirty years later, O’Connor is still slightly abashed by the incident. ‘I recall him saying that, although he had been invited to run for Britain, “It depends if it suits my circumstances.” Now, I’m not a loyalist, I wouldn’t say I’m overly patriotic, but I had served in the air crew in the war and it just seemed astonishing to me that anyone could turn down their country. I said to him, “You can’t do that! It’s an honour,” and he dismissed it.’

  Neil Wilson, who would eventually take over from O’Connor at the Mail, recalls, ‘It was embarrassing. Those of us who were young and not working on national papers at the time were sheltering in the back, keeping our heads down. It was in that little back room that exists at Crystal Palace, very small and the athletes sat on a chair and everybody grouped around, standing up above. It must have been quite intimidating for young athletes. I’m not saying that Ovett was intimidated. He certainly decided from that moment that he would never come back.’

  Ovett says he had already begun to be annoyed by some of the inane questions he was being asked at previous meetings, which contributed to his reaction. ‘I genuinely felt that I wasn’t really doing much by going up to the press box. It was a bit like a royal command, you had to ascend the steps, sit down and be grilled, and I thought, Hang on a minute, what am I getting out of this? I’m running, I’m not getting paid for it, these guys are sitting there, they don’t know much about the sport, they haven’t really done their homework, they haven’t found out, sometimes, even what my name was. Because they’d say, “Could you spell your name, and where were you in the race?” And I thought, Well, why bother with this? There were a couple of occasions where people said pretty ridiculous things, got a bit on their high horse and I thought, That’s enough, and I just stopped. Of course, that created even more problems because they couldn’t comprehend that. They had never had anybody who didn’t want to speak to the press. It went on and the bad-boy Ovett image obviously ensued from that, which was fine by me.’

  As chairman of the British Athletics Writers’ Association later, it fell to O’Connor to try to mend fences, in order to get Ovett to the annual dinner. ‘I wrote him a letter and said I might have gone over the top or something like that, and he eventually turned up. I actually got on with him quite well. But he was right. Some of that stuff that comes out is such drivel. There is terrifying ignorance. The majority of people who covered athletics, eighty per cent of them, knew nothing about it. I was taught that you can’t write about track and field, or rugby, football or any particular game, well unless you know the history of the sport.’

  The ‘O’Connor incident’ has grown over the years to include Ovett taking a chair, plonking it in front of the assembly, and telling them to interview that. But, as O’Connor admits, and Dave Cocksedge concurs, it was O’Connor who stalked out, unable to contain his patriotic rage. Ovett followed, never to return. He would always be asked by a press attaché on the infield for a comment following his numerous successes at Crystal Palace over the next decade, and he would occasionally proffer a reply. The one everybody remembers is ‘Happy Christmas’. It was the middle of August.

  One repercussion for O’Connor was a brief conversation that Dave Cocksedge recalls from being in the Ovett household when the Mail journalist phoned to ask about Ovett’s racing programme. Gay replied, ‘I don’t know, but you’ll be the last to find out.’

  But after all the controversy, Ovett did in fact run in the European Cup final in Nice, and duly won impressively. However, this season ended as indifferently as it had begun, with two comprehensive defeats in the mile, both to John Walker. On the latter occasion at Crystal Palace, the meeting was held up due to an IRA bomb threat.

  Coe was having a calmer and more upbeat finale in his first international championship. He didn’t win the European Junior 1500 metres in Athens, but he did get a bronze medal behind the statuesque Finn Ari Paunonen, whose feats had resulted in him being touted as a talent to equal Ovett. Like so many others, Paunonen did not ultimately live up to his promise, but he was too good for Coe in Athens. Coe again showed his aggression by leading in the early stages, and although he couldn’t contend with Paunonen’s final lap of 55 seconds, he was rewarded with yet another personal best, 3 min 45.2 seconds.

  There was still a substantial gap between Coe and the senior ranks in which Ovett – despite the minor setbacks – was now operating with such distinction and character. But that gap was inexorably closing.

  10

  Blown Away

  Coe began to blossom at an accelerated rate both socially and athletically after he left home to go to Loughborough University in autumn 1975. Resident coach George Gandy would not initially have a great deal to do with Coe, but his input, as was mentioned earlier, was eventually crucial. I have known Gandy for over thirty years, since a fortuitous combination of a little talent, a lot of training, competitive fortune and the wholesale incompetence of rivals resulted in your scribe winning the first British Milers’ Club race organised by Gandy, when he was a teacher in the West Midlands, prior to going to Loughborough in the early seventies. The race was at Warley Stadium, where Coe had his first international race and victory. This minor footnote to British athletics history is intended to convey in terms other than Olympic gold medals just how good Coe and Ovett would become. When I won that race in Warley, I knew that I was fitter than 99.9 per cent of the population could ever conceive of being in terms of running. But Ovett and Coe at their best would have beaten me in a mile by the length of the finishing straight.

  With his usual thoroughness, Peter Coe had consulted Gandy about the biomechanics aspect of his training programme at Loughborough, which in those early days of his tenure was more geared to sprinters. ‘Peter had some concerns about Seb’s running action in those days,’ recalls Gandy. ‘We had another guy who had a similar sort of arm action and his nickname was “Coat Hanger”. Seb’s was a little bit like that. It was shoulders up a bit, elbows up a bit, which was mainly the upper-body response to the fact that he had relatively long and quite strong legs.

  ‘He started joining in the gym conditioning work. I
wasn’t a hundred per cent sure at that time of the extent of the relevance for 1500 metres runners, but Seb wanted some connection with 400 metres-type runners. I remember a little bit of a problem with one of the exercises we did back then: hanging from wall bars and raising the legs straight to horizontal position. The first time Seb came he overdid it, and actually missed a session. I had a slight concern because I thought maybe I’d lost this guy after one session, but sure enough he came back.’

  Gandy has always been an easygoing and amiable character who would readily join in with his students on social occasions. He was well placed to see just what sort of character had joined his training group. ‘At that stage I don’t think he was particularly used to the rough and tumble of intermingling with the kind of people he initially came into contact with. And the thing was, he was small, slight and appeared to be not overly socially confident.

  ‘Seb was never a big socialiser or drinker, but he did grow to like the student scene. It was somewhere he felt comfortable; he wasn’t treated like a star. And people respected him because he did just mix in and behave as normal. On one very early occasion, there was a typical student thing where the demand was that certain people downed a pint in one go. I had to do mine, then Seb got the same demand, and being a very protective kind of person, I said, “I’ll down it for you, Seb.” But he said no and took it, and it is not a major thing, but he did it.’

  Something else that would emerge at Loughborough was the aforementioned caddish element. Although they had a two-year relationship, Janet Prictoe still wonders whether she and Coe were actually the ‘item’ that she thought at the time. Several people who knew the couple confirm that they were, but Prictoe still has her doubts. She remembers how the relationship began, at one of the first warm-weather training camps that federation sponsors organised for promising juniors in early 1976.

  ‘The first trip that they took us on was to Gibraltar. Seb was there and neither of us was that impressed with the set-up. We just hit it off, we got on because we had a similar sort of humour, and it went from there. I had actually applied to go to Birmingham University to do English and I ended up applying for Loughborough. Seb contacted George Gandy, and I think he helped me on my way because my A levels weren’t brilliant. So Seb actually smoothed the path a little bit and I started that September.

  ‘He had a very good sense of humour. He was very witty, very funny, he’s very slick really and I was a young, naïve seventeen-year-old. When I look back I realise he won me over. He’s very charming, he’s the perfect boy next door, take home to mum and all that sort of thing. I see things differently now. I think if he was interested in somebody he could just charm the pants off anybody.

  ‘I considered us very much an item. Over time Seb got more and more famous, and although I was running internationally I wasn’t making a mark like he was. There was a children’s programme on TV, Seb went to present an award and whilst he was there he met this producer. I didn’t know anything about this; I don’t think he mentioned it to me. One weekend shortly after, he said he was going back to Sheffield to do some training. I never thought anything of it and I was swotting for my exams. That same weekend Loughborough were playing at Twickenham in a big rugby match, and a couple of coach-loads of supporters went down. On the Monday morning I was at gymnastics, and one of my fellow gymnasts said, “Oh, we saw your boyfriend this weekend jogging round Richmond Park.” So he had been rumbled in a big way. Somehow I put two and two together with this producer. I remember him coming into my room, and I said, “Did you have a good time in London this weekend?” And he went, “Oh, I was in Sheffield,” and I said, “I never want to see you again,” and that was it. That was the end of our relationship, as dramatic as that. In the end, I actually took a year off university because I couldn’t cope with seeing him.’

  Despite her disappointment, Prictoe had always recognised the talent and application of her former boyfriend. And she had an offbeat example of his strength, despite the slight frame. ‘I always thought he was like poetry in motion, exceptionally talented. I can remember the first week I went to Loughborough, I was living in a converted garage, which was part of somebody’s posh house, and I had to cycle into Loughborough. For some reason, I accompanied Seb, who was going on a run, and he went up a really steep hill, but I couldn’t get up it with the bike, and I was fit in those days. I remember him running up the hill, pushing me and the bike and I was thinking, Gosh, I thought I was fit, but he must be phenomenally fit to be able to push me and this bike up this whacking great hill and then just carry on. He was exceptional and he was focused.’

  All those attributes were combining to push Coe closer to his goal. Between races for Loughborough and his commitments back in Yorkshire, where he continued to support the county championships, he opened the summer season with personal bests at 800 (1 min 52 seconds) and 1500 metres (3 min 43.3 seconds). This was the first year that Coe and Ovett began to appear regularly at the same meetings. When Ovett won the Inter-Counties 800 metres at Crystal Palace in 1 min 47.3 seconds, Coe was being taught an interesting lesson in miling tactics by Glen Grant, who put in a hard third lap to get away from him, then continued with another fast last lap, to leave Coe twenty-five metres back, albeit with another personal best, of 4 minutes 2.4 seconds. Ovett won the Olympic 800 metres selection race at Crystal Palace the following week in part one of the trials for Montreal. In part two a week later, only the vagaries of qualifying-heat draws prevented another historic Coe–Ovett confrontation in the 1500 metres trials. Coe was in the first heat and Ovett in the second. There is little doubt who would have come out on top, since Ovett won the final the following day in a personal best of 3 min 39.9 seconds, while, despite taking a sliver off his own best with 3 min 43.2 seconds, Coe finished seventh in his heat and didn’t even qualify for the final. But he did run faster than Ovett in those heats, as the latter recorded only 3 min 44.4 seconds to reach the final.

  That final was significant for the unveiling of the Ovett wave. Matt Paterson was watching in the stands with Gay Ovett. ‘He ran down the straight and there was no gap and he ran between David Moorcroft and someone else [Frank Clement], and he turned round and waved to myself and his mother in the stand. And I just thought, What is going on here? It was one of the most exciting races I’ve ever seen. And he wasn’t doing it to be arrogant at all. It was just his excitement; he loved it. It was the first time he waved to the crowd. He did it so many times [after that] and people would say, “What’s he waving to the crowd for? He’ll miss out on a world record?” Steve didn’t worry about that. He just loved to wave to his mum, to say he was OK. It was an entertainment.’

  Ovett maintains that it was exuberance, ‘a bit of fun’. But the Ovett wave would come in for much criticism over the years, including from his greatest rival, who recalls being told in no uncertain terms by one of his elder training partners in Sheffield, ‘Don’t ever let us fucking catch you doing that in the finishing straight, son.’

  While Ovett was gearing up for his Olympic debut, with much expectation from himself, his growing legion of fans and commentators, Coe was quietly reducing his 800 metres best to 1 min 50.7 seconds in a match that would become as much a staple of his athletics year as the county championships, the Loughborough versus AAA fixture. Ovett was only marginally faster in an 800 metres in Finland, but that race was significant for two reasons. It was the first international race that Andy Norman fixed up for him independently of the federation, thus earning him a couple of hundred dollars. And he put down a competitive marker for the following year, because he beat John Walker of New Zealand for the first time.

  The 1976 Olympic Games would result in personal bests for Ovett at both 800 and 1500 metres, and provide him with an experience that would prove invaluable in Moscow four years later. But Montreal was a huge disappointment for him. The Crystal Palace public and the national television audience were seeing a performer confident and competitive enough to nudge opponents out of the w
ay if necessary, then waving to them as he won. The national press was seeing an arrogant and bombastic yob who wouldn’t talk to them. But in Montreal, Ovett was a twenty-year-old whose demeanour was largely a front for his own uncertainty. He was out of his depth.

  He acquitted himself well enough at first in the 800 metres, winning his first round, and placing third in the semi. But in the final, he was drawn in lane eight in a year when the international federation was experimenting with running three-quarters of the first lap in lanes, in an attempt to prevent the collisions that are part of the 800 metres game (as the delicate Coe would discover). Ovett ran the first lap far too slowly, and his race was over. He finished fifth in 1 min 45.4 seconds, a time which would win him gold four years later.

  ‘I felt as if I’d been hard done by, because I was a fairly young athlete and I really did want to run well and thought I could have run a lot better than I did. I never saw anybody for half the race. It’s a bit like having a 5000-metre run and you are running for 2500 and then they suddenly bring everybody else in. I was an inexperienced young lad out in lane eight, there was the greatest 400 metres runner of all time [Juantorena] on the inside running a very fast 400 metres, which I suppose I would have expected, but you don’t know. You don’t go off and run 49 [seconds] from lane eight because you could find yourself ten yards in front of the rest of them and you blow up. So it was a very unfortunate situation for me and I felt disappointed. I felt a bit let down by my sport because after that they changed it back again, and it [the experiment of running in lanes] never got repeated.

  ‘I felt very down and my dad must have sensed that when I phoned him up. He flew across and took time off work to console me. My dad was always a bit like that. He never said much but whenever I needed him he was always there. It was good to see him. He was laughing because he was totally out of his depth: fine hotels and whatnot to eat. He’d never done it before. He had only probably travelled away once before in his life.