The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  ‘It came to the 1500 metres and I thought, I’ve got another shot at it. And, I don’t know if it was in the heat or the semis, but I was in the same race as Dave Moorcroft, and I was running well, and with about a hundred and fifty to go Dave Hill [of Canada] tripped in front of me and fell. I literally hurdled him, and as I hurdled him the others just went round the outside and qualified for the final. And I thought, Ah, the Olympics and me are not destined to come together. I saw my dad and again it was great. He said, “Well there was nothing you could have done there, it was just bad luck.” The next year in Düsseldorf, I proved that I could run 1500 and I knew that I was virtually in the same shape going into that race in Montreal, but I just didn’t get the chance in the final. That’s not to say I would have done anything, but I would have loved to be in the final.’

  Ovett was just one of many British disappointments in Montreal. There were some good performances, but they were obscured by the inevitable bottom-line assessment: how many medals did the British win? The answer was one, a solitary bronze for Brendan Foster in the 10,000 metres. And even that was a disappointment, because Foster had emerged as a long-distance runner of world-record class. Furthermore, given that his competitive record against Lasse Viren, double-gold winner from Munich 1972, was 10–2, there was hope, even expectation, that Foster would beat the flying Finn. But Viren triumphed again, at both 5000 and 10,000 metres.

  Back at home, out of the limelight, but in a season of significant development across the board for Coe, the most important event happened in the downbeat location of Stretford in the suburbs of Manchester. Coe had run there several times, in Northern Championships and British Milers’ Club races. It was in one of the latter events that the seismic shift occurred. Coe front-ran his way to a startlingly improved 800 metres personal best of 1 min 47.7 seconds, three seconds faster than he’d ever run before.

  There had already been a change of emphasis that year: Coe’s desire to be a miler had resulted in Peter beginning to abandon plans for the 5000 metres. But this was of a different order altogether, as Coe recalls. ‘It was a big chunk. I remember driving home with Peter in the car in complete bloody silence across the Snake Pass and we got to the other side of Glossop, and he turned to me and said, “I think we might have found your distance.”’

  On that night, 8 August 1976, the Coe–Ovett rivalry was really forged. Henceforth, Coe would be concentrating on the classic combination of 800 and 1500 metres, the same as Ovett. Their paths were marked out, and it was only going to be a matter of time before they crossed. But Coe still had a lot of work to do before he’d be ready for that encounter. ‘I was physically less mature,’ he confirms. ‘I was not as strong as he was, I didn’t start off with his advantages. I could run quickly, but I really had to work on the weights and the circuits and I had to work on upper-body strength and hamstring strength to have a very good kick. If I hadn’t done that, I would not have been a kicker. If I hadn’t lifted tons of bloody weights every year, you know, I would not have done what I did in LA, I would not have done what I did in Moscow, I wouldn’t have done what I did in Brussels. And I don’t think Steve, because Steve was so physically gifted, I don’t think he actually had to go through a lot of those things. Steve got away with running mileage, doing track work – but not always on the track, doing it on grass.’

  Coe was already well into Gandy’s gymnasium conditioning, and he also set about reducing the gap on the track with a will. While Ovett was restoring some self-esteem by beating newly crowned Olympic 1500 metres champion John Walker in an 800 metres in the AAA Championships, Coe was improving his 1500 metres best behind another New Zealander, Rod Dixon, who won the title in 3 min 41.4 seconds. Coe was fourth in 3 min 42.7 seconds. The time was roughly equivalent to a 4-minute mile, and in his last race of the season Coe would go sub-4 for the first time, in the Emsley Carr Mile at Crystal Palace on 30 August. His colleague at Loughborough, Dave Moorcroft, who had finished seventh in the Olympic 1500 metres, won the race in a personal best 3 min 57.1 seconds from Filbert Bayi (who had raced the day before in Italy). Eight men broke 4 minutes. Coe was seventh in 3 min 58.4 seconds.

  But it was a mile in Gateshead the week before that had made everybody sit up and take notice of the slight nineteen-year-old. Brendan Foster was now working for the local council and promoting the meeting. ‘I was doing the two miles and John Walker, the Olympic champion, came and ran the mile,’ remembers Foster. ‘And there was this young kid from Sheffield who set off like he was trying to win it, to beat the Olympic champion. And Seb was clear of John Walker with a lap to go. It was like “Whoops, hang on a minute, who is this and what is he doing?”’

  Nearly half the finishing straight behind, with just one lap left to run, Walker was asking himself the same question. ‘It was a windy, horrible day and Coe took off, about thirty, forty metres in front the whole way, and he stayed there right until the last fifty metres and I ran him down in the straight and won the race. Thank Christ it was really windy that day, and the wind blew him backwards and I managed to catch him, because I wasn’t going anywhere. I wrote to my coach and said, “I’ve just run against a little guy and if it hadn’t been windy, then he would have beaten me. I don’t know who he is, but it’s unbelievable.” I couldn’t understand how somebody could even do what he did. And that was Coe.’

  11

  The Fatman

  I always knew when Andy Norman wasn’t being truthful. He would append a plaintive ‘Honestly!’ to even the most minor fabrication, almost as if he was trying to convince himself at the same time. We haven’t spoken in around fifteen years, due initially to various newspaper exposés I’d done on his antics, such as manipulating dope tests. But the bullying tactics, both private and public, that he was to use on a profoundly disturbed Cliff Temple, which contributed to the suicide of that fine Sunday Times athletics correspondent in 1994, have put Norman beyond the pale of most civilised company in Britain.

  But he was a seminal figure, probably the most important person – Coe and Ovett themselves apart – in the development of British athletics over the last thirty years, transmuting it from a backwater, occasional Olympic pastime to a frontline, highly mediatised professional sport. At the same time, he was an invaluable ally to the emerging Steve Ovett, and he would ultimately have a significant role to play in the career of Sebastian Coe, too.

  Norman comes from Ipswich and joined the police force straight from school in the late fifties. An early measure of his capabilities was his promotion at twenty-three to become the youngest sergeant in the Metropolitan Police Force in London. He was a good runner, sub-50 seconds for 400 metres and 1 min 54 seconds for 800 metres, but an injury truncated his competitive career, and it was as an administrator for the Metropolitan Police Athletics Club that his true qualities – for organisation – came to the fore. His successful running of the police team made him some powerful contacts, notably Gilbert Kelland, who became Assistant Chief Commissioner of the Met (which made Kelland’s nomination on the tribunal to judge Norman’s subsequent involvement in manipulating drug tests highly questionable, but that’s another story).

  By the mid-seventies, when Ovett was emerging as a potential world-class talent, Norman was ideally placed to team up with the talented youngster bandwagon. The good work that he was doing for the Met Police AC had resulted in him taking over as administrator for the Southern Counties AAA, which organised the training weekends that had introduced Ovett to a wider athletics community. The Southern Counties’ administrative area covered Brighton and Hove, home to Ovett and his club. Athlete and administrator would have been aware of each other very early, since Norman was also the guiding force in the graded meetings promoted by the SCAAA. These events were extremely popular and very successful. The rationale was the same as that of the British Milers’ Club, with a wider remit: to unite athletes of similar capability in peer events; for example, milers who could run between 4 minutes 20 seconds and 4 minutes 30 seconds would run
together, and those who were ten seconds slower would run in a different race. The idea was to improve standards, bring the 4-minute-40 guys and gals down to 4 minutes 30, and so on. The meetings were so successful that athletes would even come from outside the SCAAA area to compete. Dave Moorcroft recalls coming down from the Midlands to race, and Coe came from Sheffield. Ovett set a couple of early personal bests in the meetings.

  Norman quickly acquired a reputation for organisation and hard work, allied to a capability to think on his feet and take decisions. His agile and compendious mind was also apparent. Part of later Norman lore was his capacity to organise an international meeting ‘on the back of an envelope’. But he was also a bit of a bully, the caricature of the suburban copper: bluff, narrow-eyed, foulmouthed. None of these ‘qualities’ was necessarily a disadvantage. For the best part of a century the sport had been run with patrician indifference by public schoolboys, intoxicated with Corinthianism and the specious Olympic imprimatur of amateurism. They were as remote from working-class kids like Ovett as London’s West End theatre was from the Punch & Judy show on Brighton beach.

  One man impressed with Norman’s organisational abilities was Mike Farrell, an Olympic 800 metres finalist in 1956, who was Norman’s equivalent at the Midlands AAA. ‘Norman was doing enormous good for the sport at the time,’ recalls Farrell. Another grass-roots administrator, Doug Goodman, remembers him in a more equivocal light. ‘The way he shouted and talked to people sometimes was disgraceful, but, on the other hand, he was really helpful to a lot of athletes.’ Farrell’s ultimate summation was ‘an honest rogue’.

  The graded meetings involved mostly locals and junior, upcoming athletes like Ovett, Moorcroft and Coe. But Norman’s application would soon be noticed elsewhere, and allowed him to establish a foothold on the international stage.

  The social changes of post-war Britain, the collapse of class barriers, were slow to percolate into amateur sport, but even university athletes were fed up with being treated disdainfully. And a British athletes’ association called the International Athletes’ Club had grown in the years following the Tokyo Olympics.

  Two- or three-nation matches were still the norm for international competition through to the 1970s, and still exist today at junior level. The Golden League and Grand Prix circuit were yet to come, although Zurich had put on its Weltklasse meeting, often described as the one-day Olympics, since the late 1950s. Scandinavia, energised by the Hägg–Andersson matches in the 1940s, also had an ‘independent’ circuit.

  Adrian Metcalfe, a voluble 400 metres runner from Yorkshire with an Oxford classics degree, was instrumental in setting up the first athletics ‘extravaganza’ in Britain. He had retired at twenty-two, as was the norm in the sixties, and gone to work first as a print journalist before moving into Independent Television. Until then, athletics on television had been strictly the preserve of the BBC, but the combination of an executive from Coca-Cola looking for a new advertising vehicle, Metcalfe’s boss John Bromley and Metcalfe himself as the general secretary of the International Athletes’ Club resulted in the birth of the Coke Meeting in the late 1960s.

  Metcalfe still works as a freelance TV adviser to several international sports bodies, including the IAAF. He recalls the genesis of the Coke Meeting: ‘The IAC applied for a permit for a meeting at Crystal Palace, and somebody signed it, a bit cautiously, because they didn’t like the idea of athletes running anything. Athletes were dirt. Then, suddenly, we’ve got Ron Clarke, Kip Keino and a whole raft of top names.

  ‘The BBC went mad, they tried to stop it, but they couldn’t because it was a five-year agreement. It was good for British sport, it was good for British athletics, an enormous number of British athletes wouldn’t have been able to run in their own country against competition of a standard they hoped to attain. So it lifted the general standard. And ITV was giving it tremendous exposure. Andy [Norman] was basically so useful that after three or four years, we put him in as the meet director.’

  Brendan Foster, Britain’s leading runner by then, epitomised the ‘new’ British athlete: bright, working class, dedicated, enormously successful, a media hero who could draw thousands of paying customers into Crystal Palace or any stadium near his home in the north-east of England. But, despite his professional approach to the sport, with the long hours of training and planning that entailed, the ‘Pied Piper of Gateshead’, as one newspaper styled him, was still condemned to being an amateur.

  ‘The sport was in a mess,’ he says now. ‘You had a billionaire [Avery Brundage], who was the boss of the International Olympic Committee, saying this sport should remain as an amateur sport, which was bloody nonsense, and it collapsed, but the turn to professionalism was a slow, messy business. In 1973, I was a schoolteacher, and I had to run in the Europa Cup in Edinburgh. I came back from Edinburgh on the last train on a Sunday night, to be in the classroom by nine on Monday morning. The following Friday night, there was the Coca-Cola Meeting.

  ‘It was being run by David Hemery [Britain’s Olympic 400 metres hurdles champion in 1968]. He had John Walker and Rod Dixon and Dick Quax, and maybe Jim Ryun as well, all running at Crystal Palace. I’d won the Europa Cup, and I was getting all the headlines, and I was supposed to run at Crystal Palace against these guys. Hemery told me, “We can’t pay you what we pay all the others,” so I said, “OK, I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I won’t take Friday off school and lose my day’s wages. I’ll run home from work on Friday, and I’ll watch the Coca-Cola Meeting on telly.” And I did.

  ‘Next year, I was getting ready to run in the Commonwealth Games. We had met in London and we went to Crystal Palace to do a training session. Andy [Norman] appeared, because he heard I was at the track. He said to me, “I’m organising the Coca-Cola Meeting.” I said, “Well, I’m not running.” He said, “Ill pay you to run. In fact, I’ll pay you more than anybody else.” I then won the European Championships on the Sunday, and the Coca-Cola Meeting was the following Friday night. There were so many people there, they’d pushed the fence over, round the back straight at Crystal Palace. I ran the two miles against Viren and Steve Prefontaine. It was the last event of the day, and I won. Andy said to me, “There’s your money,” and I said, “This is more than you offered me.” He said, “Yes, I had to pay Viren and Prefontaine a bit more, and I told you I’d pay you more than anybody else.” So that was the beginning.’

  The sums at the time were probably not much more than a couple of thousand dollars, but at last the athletes had found someone on home territory who was talking their language. Norman was not the only person doing this; he just became one of the most successful. Amateurism was clearly now untenable, but with a world-wide membership of over 150 countries in the international federation, with the USA and the Soviet Union still playing their Cold War games, engineering change across the board was not easy. ‘No one was breaking the law, just the rules of the sport,’ said Norman later. Nevertheless, it made many people uneasy, because they felt they were doing something wrong. Coe summed it up well in the first volume of his autobiography: ‘It made honest men dishonest.’

  In contrast to the other honorary officials who, in Norman’s accurately acid estimation, were ‘more interested in which table they’ll be sitting on at the banquet afterwards’, he was prepared to undertake an enormous workload, thus making himself indispensable not only to the national administration and the international athletes, but to television and sponsors. Even better, he could keep all the details in his head.

  This was the beginning for Steve Ovett, too, and he recalls the early days of his relationship with Norman in the mid-seventies. ‘It was getting Andy the first foothold in learning what athletics was all about. That was definitely a learning curve for both of us, because we were coming through a sport that was turning from amateur to professional, literally within the space of a few years. And with the likes of myself and Seb, and media and TV who wanted a bit more of the action, it needed organising. And it wasn’t coming from
the sport [i.e. the national administration].

  ‘Andy was a very, very good administrator. He would have been a great chartered accountant, merchant banker, that type of guy. Facts and figures meant a lot to Andy, you know. Profit meant a lot to Andy, which is not a bad thing in the right context. But it’s not my be-all and end-all, and I think that is probably why we got on so well. He took care of that sort of thing and I just took care of the other side of things.’

  ‘When it all started, it was just a bit of fun, two hundred dollars a race, and an air ticket or two,’ says Ovett. Over the next decade, he and Norman became virtually inseparable, working their way together up through the echelons of the athletics rankings (and clandestine earning power) and administrative hierarchy. It was, recalls Ovett, the perfect symbiosis. ‘Andy didn’t say to me, “Right, I want you to do this, do this, do that.” I would say to him, “Look, if I’m going to run this, I need this and I need that,” and I used to get it from him.

  ‘He wasn’t an exciting ideas man, Andy, no way. Sometimes he used to say to me, “What about this?” And I’d say, “No, I think that’s a bad idea, because that would happen. And if you did that, this would change this,” and he’d say, “Yes, I think you are right. So what shall we do at this meet?” And I’d say, “Perhaps you should put this on and that on, and maybe the people will come,” and he’d say, “All right well do that then.” I’m not boosting up my own side of things but I don’t think it was a one-way situation. Andy Norman did not have control over where I raced; vice versa, really. I think he used me as a tool sometimes to get other people races because, if you put up a good trump card, you can use that to your best effect, and I think he was learning the ropes administrative-wise as much as I was.’