The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  Kingston would provide Scott with the best possible introduction to his international career. ‘It was a big thing for me because I was still in college. I was able to take my girlfriend with me, so that was interesting. It was a great trip because that was really the first time for me to travel out of the country, my first real international exposure. I had never heard of Ovett before. I mean, I was pretty raw as far as who the top international people were. It was just a thrill for me.

  ‘So, to win the race was like icing on the cake and it was such an exciting race. They had a rabbit for the first couple of laps and then Filbert Bayi took over the lead, but the pace wasn’t, you know, by relative standards, that fast; I think we ran 3.39. It all happened in the last lap, it was one of those big last-lap kicker races. And it was me and Ovett going past Bayi down the home stretch, so there was basically the three of us all the way down the last hundred metres, and I was just able to inch by Ovett at the line. It was a hundredth of a second between the three of us and no one really knew until they checked the photo who had run the race. I thought, Oh wow, that’s great to beat Filbert Bayi, not realising how good Steve Ovett was until later that year. I think I was lucky because it was very early in his season. I was in mid-season shape and I’m sure I surprised him because he didn’t know who the heck I was at that point, some upstart long-haired American [who] would nip him at the tape.’

  This race became a milestone in Ovett’s career, since it was to be his last defeat at a mile or its metric equivalent, the 1500 metres, for over three years, forty-five races, during which time he became the most feared middle-distance runner in the world. The cross-country training, combined with the hard interval sessions he was doing with Matt Paterson, and the searing acceleration he had nurtured since his early teens with those 100, 200 and 400 metres races, had made him the perfect middle-distance machine.

  As for Steve Scott, he soon realised that he had had a victory to savour. He had beaten the already legendary Filbert Bayi and someone who would become possibly even more revered. During our interview, he reflected that he never beat Ovett again. That shows the dominance the Ovett exerted over his rivals, because Scott did beat him again, in the inaugural World Championships in Helsinki in 1983, when he won the silver medal. But, as he reflects, ‘Ovett beat me so many times he owned me. You know when I get to the [start] line, I want to beat Ovett, [but] do I really believe I’m going to beat him? No, because he owns me. And that is the way that racing is until you beat them: they own you.

  ‘I don’t know if you would call it a rivalry because he kicked my arse every time we raced. I had a tremendous amount of respect for his ability and it’s like I couldn’t have a break. Because, indoors, I’d be racing Eamonn Coghlan, and I’d try all different types of tactics to beat him. You know, I’d take it from the start, I’d take it from the middle, I’d try to jump him with a lap to go, try to jump him with two laps to go. It just seemed like there was nothing I could do to beat Eamonn except get him when he was tired. And Ovett, he was always real intelligent in his racing and I never got him when he was tired, or he would kind of evade me when I was at my very best and make sure that I wasn’t in the same race. But I tried all different types of ways to try to beat Steve as well, without any success.’

  Ovett was narrowly defeated the following week, Filbert Bayi returning the compliment of Kingston. But that was over 3000 metres – Ovett’s first serious foray into the distance – so there was no dishonour to lose to a man like Bayi. Two months later Ovett had a crack at 5000 metres, and lost to another all-time great, Miruts Yifter ‘the Shifter’ of Ethiopia. For a man who was essentially an 800/1500 metres runner, these performances were wonderful. Between the longer races, Ovett had come within a tenth of a second of Frank Clement’s UK 1500 metres record, with 3 minutes 37.5 seconds. Various correspondents pointed out that, had he not started waving to the crowd at Cwmbran, south Wales, he would have broken it.

  Ovett’s next two trips would serve to encapsulate the very different faces of the man: the mediated and moody, and the private and the personable. The first race was just up the (London) road at Crystal Palace, on 26 June. Alberto Juantorena and Mike Boit had been lined up to race in the 800 metres, a much-anticipated match that had been missing in Montreal the previous summer, when Boit’s Kenya had joined the boycott by African countries protesting over the New Zealand rugby team touring apartheid South Africa. For the same reason Filbert Bayi of Tanzania had not been able to race John Walker in the 1500 metres. That was to be regretted even more, given that Bayi had run away from Walker in the Commonwealth Games two years earlier, setting a world record from the front – a rebuke to every middle-distance runner since who thought he or she couldn’t achieve such a feat without a pacemaker. Walker was to meet Ovett at Crystal Palace in the mile.

  But a row erupted when the Cuban delegation refused to let Juantorena race against Boit. Andy Norman proposed moving the Kenyan into the mile. According to Ovett’s autobiography, ‘It was obvious they used Juantorena as a political tool, which would be blunted if he were defeated by the man he did not face in Montreal . . . Less than an hour before the race was due to start, I told Andy that I did not want Boit in my race, and that he should go back to the 800 metres. If the Cubans pulled out . . . then let them.’

  Ovett was starting to use the muscle of his own celebrity, but that forced a compromise with Juantorena and Boit, who were put in separate 800 metres races, which they won, the Cuban in 1 minute 45.5 seconds, the Kenyan two tenths slower. Everyone who regrets that Ovett and Coe did not race each other more frequently – and never in Britain apart from their schoolboy race and the 1989 AAA Championships – need look no further than the bad example set by this compromise.

  Mel Watman, the perceptive and indefatigable editor of Athletics Weekly, put Ovett’s mile victory over Walker into perspective:

  It was a passionate race, one of the finest at this distance since Derek Ibbotson’s world record 3.57.2 20 years ago . . . 250 metres from home, Walker burst ahead. With 200 to run it was the Olympic champion by 3m from [Ari] Paunonen, with Ovett and the year’s fastest miler [3.53.8] Wilson Waigwa in close touch. Ovett moved into second place around the turn and mounted his attack on Walker coming off the bend. With the crowd delirious, Steve edged past Walker 70m from the finish and sped to a well-taken victory. The time was a bonus – three tenths inside Frank Clement’s UK record of 3.55.0.

  As Watman recorded, the 20,000 full house at Crystal Palace loved it, but the rest of the press took a more austere view. The headlines the following day included, ‘OVETT COWARD’, ‘BOIT BOYCOTT’, ‘OVETT SHIES AWAY FROM BOIT’, and the considered opinion, ‘I BLAME SELFISH OVETT’. Some of Ovett’s peers took a similar view. Dick Quax said, ‘I have not been impressed with his attitude to racing at all. You run against everybody, I think.’ Since Quax was an Olympic silver medallist, world 5000 metres record-holder, and one of the trio of Kiwis – with Walker and Rod Dixon – who had virtually created the European circuit, with a bit of help from Andy Norman, his opinion held weight. But it is a measure of tabloid news values contrasting hugely with appreciation of competitive excellence. Ovett had beaten Walker at 800 metres before, but never over the New Zealander’s Olympic title distance. On the other hand, Walker was not on top form, and he had only just arrived in the UK. He put Quax’s criticism into perspective, but had his own reasons to be displeased with Ovett. ‘Ovett was getting rubbished by Quax, saying he was never going to make it, but he’d said that about me. You’ve got your mantle, and you don’t like anybody coming along and knocking you off your pedestal. I had four years of number one in the world, it was probably longer than most. I was still the world record-holder for the mile, and you don’t like these young, fresh kids coming up and beating you, [but] I couldn’t believe what I saw. Ovett won the race, he ran out in lane five and he waved to the crowd coming down the straight. He just treated us with contempt. I mean, we were flat out going nowhere, he made it look s
o easy, and I thought, Well, this is a one-off, we are not going to do this again, but he treated us with total arrogance, and I thought, You asshole.’

  Ovett then took off on one of those whimsical trips that said so much of the character that few people really knew. Throughout his career, the ‘down-home’ Ovett preferred to run in small-town venues, but he outdid himself now, even to the extent of falling off the map, when he went to the centre of Ireland on the Cork/Limerick border. His support for the eccentric organiser of a meeting there, and his refusal to accept payment for competing, is one of the reasons why the Irish athletics community adores him.

  There is a small coterie of Irish athletics fans who travel the world to watch the major events. They are voluble, good-natured, great company, and manage to get into places where even journalists fear to tread. One of them got himself a seat in the lead car at the Boston Marathon one year. This is the car that precedes the runners, and it virtually requires a papal dispensation to clean it, let alone ride in it. On another occasion when the World Cross-Country Championships were held at the Auckland Racetrack in New Zealand, the media was not permitted on the course. We watched on closed-circuit TV in the stands. As the cameras panned down the back straight on the first lap, waiting for the race leaders, a lone figure came into view, preparing his Brownie camera for a close-up. It was, inevitably, one of the lads.

  They do not travel alone, but with a man who might be described as their spiritual adviser. Well, he says the mass for them on Sundays at a preordained hotel when they’re on the road. And they put a stopwatch on him, because he doesn’t want to waste time when there is a world-class athletics to be watched. When he’s not wearing his priest’s dog collar, which is most of the time, he is carrying a camera and a notebook, because he has an athletics magazine to get out. His name is Fr Liam Kelleher, and he is a legend.

  Fr Liam, as he is universally known, has been the bane of his bishop’s life for over thirty years. Since his ordination as a priest, he has organised athletics meetings and trips to championships from every parish where he has worked. After moving him several times, in attempts to short-circuit his enthusiasm for his extracurricular activities, it seems the church authorities have given up, and Fr Liam now has his own parish, in County Cork. His greatest achievement, apart from getting the likes of Ovett, John Walker, Thomas Wessinghage, Eamonn Coghlan, Ray Flynn and John Treacy to run at his meetings, has been to build a track in the middle of nowhere, Tullylease, put on an athletics meeting, with Steve Ovett as the star, and get any vehicle coming within a mile of the track to pay an entry fee, even if they weren’t staying to watch the races. It’s a mixture of Don Camillo and the building of the international airport at Knock.

  In the words of Eamonn Coghlan, ‘Tullylease is an asshole backfield in a little tiny village in Cork. Fr Liam Kelleher had this ability to force his friendship on runners, through the power of the white collar, and through his persuasive and intrusive personality we got to love the guy. Steve was hooked in . . . more than anybody else.’

  While Ovett had been in Jamaica losing to Steve Scott, Fr Liam had been at a college reunion in England, where he discovered that one of his colleagues was a priest in a Brighton presbytery just two doors down from the Ovett household. Fr Liam invited himself to Brighton. Gay Ovett might have been a better guard than Cerberus to the gates of the Ovett perceptions, but not even she was a match for Fr Liam. ‘I knocked on the door and said I want to see Steve, and his mother took my phone number, and, fair play, as soon as he came back he rang me, and said he would like to come to Ireland. From that day on, we had a great relationship.’

  In 1977, Ovett combined a run at a regular fixture on the athletics calendar, the Cork City Sports, where he beat Eamonn Coghlan in the mile, with a 5000 metres debut race on grass for Fr Liam in Midleton – home to Powers and Paddy whiskey distilleries. He beat John Treacy, who would go on to win two World Cross-Country titles. While he was there, Ovett did a seminar for the local youngsters. But it was an event two years later which would become part of local folklore, and even make it into the pages of Sports Illustrated, through an interview with John Walker, who claimed he had never run in a stranger place in his life.

  Fr Liam had always had it in mind to build a running track at one of the communities where he worked, and Tullylease seemed the ideal place. ‘There were about four, five houses in the village, right up at the top on a kind of a hill, and no facilities whatever, no playing pitches, nothing,’ says the priest. ‘The Land Commission were dividing up the farm and we went up to Dublin and we bought five acres. I know exactly the amount, 3,502 Irish pounds. Then I was up at Cork City visiting a friend in hospital, and I looked at these huge machines that were taking away soil – they were building a shopping complex. Fine machines, built like kangaroos, and I said to the guy in charge, “Are they expensive?” “Oh yes,” he says, “very expensive.” So I said, “When you have finished here I have a job for you,” and he came and had a look at the field the following night. There was a thirty-three-foot drop in the field. And I said, “How much would it be to level that, and build a track around it?” “Well,” he said, “about eight and a half to nine thousand pounds.” I said, “Fine”.’

  All that remained was the little matter of raising the money. Fr Liam organised a concert featuring several groups, including the celebrated show band the Wolf-Tones. That raised around half the money, and after a session of head scratching with Brendan Mooney of the Cork Examiner, Fr Liam hit on the idea of a sponsored run. ‘I said, “Look, I’ll do a hundred and fifty laps of the track,” not knowing what the distance was. And there was this banner headline in the Examiner the next day that I was to do it on St Patrick’s Day, of all days. That St Patrick’s Day turned out to be a really savage day, but I still did the hundred and fifty laps, which was thirty-seven miles without stopping, and it nearly killed me, but we raised four thousand punts. Every child that sponsored me for the full distance got a free ticket to the World Cross-Country in Limerick.’ The kids’ pennies were well spent, because John Treacy successfully defended his title on the Limerick mudheap a week later.

  When Ovett arrived in Tullylease another two months after that, the bulldozers were still at work. ‘It was in the middle of nowhere, and he’d got all the local contractors levelling this damn thing, and it was just unbelievable,’ says Ovett. ‘He took me to his mother’s farm, he took me to Blarney Castle, and they were just closing, so he whipped out his dog collar, and says, “Mr Ovett’s here,” and the guy said, “Right, Father,” and opened up again. We did Blarney Castle, and kissed the stone, and when we got back, the rest of the boys had arrived. I’m staying at Fr Liam’s, and I went into his study, and he’s got a picture of the Pope, then he’s got a picture of me, and a picture of John Walker, and he’s got John Treacy’s vest next to that, and a crucifix underneath. It’s a mixture of the Bible and a Who’s Who of world athletics.’

  There were still a few problems to overcome before the meeting the next day. Overnight rain had reduced the greenstone track to porridge. After one of his sprint-masses, Fr Liam led everyone in a prayer for the rain to stop. According to Ovett, ‘As they walked out of the door of the church, the sun broke through. It did literally stop raining. I remember it was bright sunshine from about ten o’clock onwards.’

  But the track was still in a terrible state, so Fr Liam changed the race distances – 800 to 1000 metres, the mile to 2000 metres – so that the expected poor times wouldn’t reflect on the world-class line-up he’d tempted into the wilderness of the Cork/Limerick hinterlands. Ovett beat Coghlan in the 2000 metres, and all that remained was to pay the runners with money collected at the gate and from the unwitting car-drivers.

  Ray Flynn recalls the set-up: ‘He had almost a cult following from the people who helped him. I had to go into a little college to get the money that Fr Liam had agreed. One of the things I always remember was this old man saying, “You’re an awful man, taking the money off the priest
” – working on our guilt. One of the strangest places I ever ran in my life.’ ‘Here’s Steve,’ says Coghlan, ‘the greatest runner in the world, coming to run in Ireland, and doing it for nothing, while we guys, we were saying, “Bullshit, we’re taking the money.” And he was taking dirty, old, scruffy pound notes that were handed in by farmers, they were bagged and handed to Walker, Coghlan, Wessinghage and Scott, as everybody else. But Steve, I believe, did it for nothing.’

  He did indeed. As Ovett says, ‘He was quite an entrepreneur on the quiet, because he charged people to come and watch. It wasn’t done for generosity. But the money that Liam makes gets filtered back to the magazine, or to him travelling round the world to watch the sport or whatever. There are a few people I would definitely take money off, but I don’t think I’d take it off Liam.’

  Fr Liam was transferred again in 1981, and the Tullylease track is no longer there: it was taken up and covered over in 2002, and the field is now a Gaelic football and hurling pitch, used by a local Gaelic Athletic Association club. It is, as Fr Liam says, ‘Just a memory.’ But it is one that no one who visited there – athlete or spectator – will ever forget.

  Fr Liam still travels the circuit, he was in Paris in the summer of 2003, maintaining his record of never missing a World Athletics Championships. He and Ovett – who was commentating for Canadian television – spent a while reliving old times. A couple of days later, Fr Liam confided, ‘Of all the athletes I have ever been involved with in Ireland, I suppose Moses Kiptanui and Ovett would be the top two, both character-wise, and as friends, people you could talk to. Very, very human people, and yet so thoughtful; I suppose Christian. It’s a great thing to be able to say.’

  By June 1977, Coe was back in action, and surprising himself in his first race back with an outdoor 800 metres personal best of 1 minute 46.8 seconds, finishing second in the AAA Championships to Milovan Savic of Yugoslavia. That earned him selection for the European Cup in Helsinki. At that event, while Ovett underlined that he could run at any pace and still win – the 1500 metres was a stroll until he kicked in with a 52.6-second last lap – the inexperienced Coe would get a lesson in rough-house 800 metres running. This may have contributed to his competitive uncertainty over two-lap championship races in the coming years, for after being bundled out of the way and defeated by Willi Wülbeck – Coe ultimately finished fourth – he admitted to ‘the lingering doubt at the back of my mind that I was vulnerable to the hand-off’.