by Pat Butcher
If Coe was manifesting signs of frailty, Ovett was demonstrating that he was some sort of superman. A week later, he had one of those runs which defied belief. Unable to get to Edinburgh for a 1000 metres against John Walker, he offered to drive his training partner Matt Paterson the fifty miles or so to Dartford, where the Scot was going to run a half-marathon. As they were driving, Ovett realised that after a hard 13.1 miles, Paterson would be unable to accompany him on their traditional Sunday-morning long run the day after. So Ovett decided to race, too, and asked to borrow shoes and kit from Paterson. ‘I was saying, “Don’t be stupid,”’ recalls Paterson, ‘and the bloke said, “You can’t win the first prize.” He said, “I’m not interested, I just want to run.” Barry Watson and a few other international marathon runners [were] in there and Steve was just jogging with me and he says, “I feel all right.” I said, “Well, just go, bloody go,” and he shot off after five miles and won it in about sixty-five minutes. He was laughing his head off at the end, it just felt so easy.’
This was three weeks after beating the Olympic champion at 1500 metres for the first time, two weeks after chasing home double Olympic champion-to-be Miruts Yifter over 5000 metres, and two weeks before a race that would place him firmly at the top of the athletics tree. Ovett’s extraordinary talent was now undeniable. The Dartford course was not easy, he entered on a whim, and he ran 65 minutes 38 seconds, beating Olympic marathon men. No wonder his rivals despaired.
Coe, though, would get an opportunity to show his talents just a week later. He ran in a club 400 metres race and clocked a personal best 48.9 seconds, still a long way from Ovett’s best, but the strength training he was doing at Loughborough was starting to enable him to put together two laps like that back to back. The following day at Crystal Palace, in a match against West Germany, he won the 800 metres with another solo front run. As a result of which, he was asked to run the Emsley Carr Mile the following day, Bank Holiday Monday.
The race is named after the then proprietor of the News of the World, who put up the pot in the early fifties as an enticement to British milers to run sub-4 minutes. Ironically, Roger Bannister achieved the feat the next year, 1954, in a completely different race, but Derek Ibbotson’s world mile record of 1957 came in the Emsley Carr, and the event has had a long and distinguished history of victors. None more so than Sebastian Coe.
The previous year, Coe had essayed his usual front-running tactics and been swamped in the last lap, finishing seventh. But this was a stronger, more mature and, after the rumble in Helsinki, smarter Coe. He was more cautious in this, his third race in three days, the more so since Bayi was running – although the Tanzanian had arrived directly from Italy, where he had won a 1500 metres the previous day. Bayi took up the running at halfway, and Coe attacked off the bottom bend, with a hundred metres to go, and won by a metre in a personal best of 3 minute 57.7 seconds. He was now firmly situated in the hierarchy of the world’s top milers, and the Daily Mirror underlined that with his first back-page headline the following day, ‘BOLD KING COE’.
The sub-editors were going to be stretched to find superlatives to describe Ovett’s next run, in the World Cup 1500 metres in Düsseldorf – just two weeks after his impromptu half-marathon. The ever-astute Mel Watman called it the ‘Perfect Race’. Coe terms it ‘one of the four great 1500 metres performances I’ve ever witnessed’. Another young miler, soon to join Ovett and Coe on the British team, Tim Hutchings, was holidaying with friends in Germany. ‘We went down to the World Cup,’ he says, ‘and I can remember being high up in the stands in the back straight. It was great: Juantorena beat Boit in a staggering 800 – 1.43. And I remember the 4×100 relay. We were in Row 57, and I can remember hearing the slap of the baton in the guy’s hand at the first changeover. And Ovett blowing away Walker in the 1500.
‘I did expect Ovett to win. Walker hadn’t got any significant European challengers then, because [Ivo] van Damme had been killed. Steve was like the new European knight in shining armour, and it was probably a bit of a shock to Walker to have somebody just tear away from him like that with two hundred to go. And it was impressive, the fact that they were actually in line with each other when they came into the back straight, then Steve had got fifteen to twenty metres, and at that point Walker stepped off the track.
‘John had a very robust mental approach, he was renowned for his consistency, but look at the actual circumstances of that race. He must have just gone, “Jesus, what the hell is that?” when Steve kicked, because he was operating at a different level. That must have been a huge shock for Walker. I don’t know if it was any kind of a watershed in his career, but you know from then on, he wasn’t going to beat those two again.’
Athletes hate to admit defeat, and Walker still has difficulty in coming to terms with what happened in Düsseldorf. ‘It was a funny race. I got accused of quitting, but I lost many races in my life, and I never walked off a track or quit. I can take a defeat like anyone. But on the last lap, I remember it vividly, this German guy pushed me, and I took three or four steps off the track, and normally you would just walk back on the track, and start again, but because we were coming round the bend, I lost my momentum, and that was it. So I just quit. If I hadn’t been pushed, I would have been third. Before the race, 55,000 people applauded me; and 55,000 people booed me after the race.’
After his first English Schools victory, with his family in attendance, Ovett admits that Düsseldorf is his next favourite memory, but he’s very low-key, to the point of dismissiveness, about his racing history. Perhaps those who make history can afford to ignore it, but no one else who saw that race can ever forget it. In fourth place, and an occasional supporting actor at 1500 metres over the next couple of years, was Abderahmane Morceli, the elder brother of Nourredhine. The latter would ultimately follow Walker, Bayi, Coe, Ovett, Steve Cram and Saïd Aouita as the world’s leading middle-distance runner, only to be surpassed himself by Hicham El Guerrouj. And so it goes on.
Probably the most impressed by Ovett’s run in Düsseldorf was a clean-cut young man sitting with friends and training companions in his living room in Sheffield, watching the race on television. It put his own fine year in perspective. ‘For me, that was probably the single most definitive run he ever produced,’ says Coe. ‘Walker was the Olympic champion, Wessinghage was effectively the European record-holder, Eamonn Coghlan as well. Walker? I mean the guy [Ovett] completely destroyed him. Even if I had allowed myself the luxury of thinking I had won the [European] Indoor title, which was a good progress at twenty, you were soon brought back down to earth by this monstrous performance.’
And the ‘monster’ wasn’t finished yet. But nor was the mini-monster, his admirer. At the traditional season finale at Crystal Palace, Coe chased Mike Boit to the line of the 800 metres, losing by just a couple of strides, but breaking Andy Carter’s British record by two tenths, in 1 minute 45 seconds. It was his first senior national record, underlining the promise of those years of hard thinking and training by himself and his father, and his brave front running against all-comers.
But Ovett was on hand to remind him how hard the future would be, winning the mile in 3 minutes 56.6 seconds from Wessinghage on the same evening. Ovett went on to impress further, both by his astonishing range (again), and by demolishing Henry Rono, as he had John Walker. The following year, ‘Sir’ Henry, as L’Equipe dubbed him, was to break four world records. One of them would be at 3000 metres. But at that very distance in Wattenscheid, Germany, on 23 September 1977, the Kenyan had a six-metre lead on Ovett with two hundred metres to run. Ovett beat him by four metres in 7 minutes 41.3 seconds, a time that had been beaten in Britain only by Brendan Foster, when he ran the world record of 7 minutes 35.2 seconds.
If Coe was the King, it was over some lowly earthly domain. Ovett was in a stratosphere where minor royalty like his putative rival was cowed and bowed. Olympus, perhaps? He had the wit and countenance, and the obtuseness, of a Greek god. And his nemesis was sti
ll a long way off.
13
Eastern Block
The Ovett–Coe rivalry began in earnest in 1978, as did the media obsession which would last the best part of a decade. They could have met at that year’s Commonwealth Games (something that ultimately never happened at all), but both decided to give Edmonton a miss. Apart from a misjudged experiment in the late sixties and early seventies, when the European Championships were shifted to odd years, the Commonwealths and Europeans are always held in the even years between the Olympics. Usually it is possible for middle- and long-distance runners to do both. But in 1978, Edmonton in western Canada was only a month before Prague, in central Europe. The distances and time differences probably militated against doing both well, and the comparison between the two championships was beginning to reflect the political situation – Europe and the European Championships were far more important to Britons with ambition.
‘I honestly thought I wasn’t capable of running both,’ says Ovett. ‘I have always been cautious. Rather than spread myself too thin, it is probably better to concentrate on winning the ones that you want to win, and as a European, the European Championships, I suppose, hold more kudos, (but) I remember I was quite upset when the Commonwealths were going on, thinking I wasn’t there, and that I would like to give it a go. And Dave [Moorcroft] won. I think I had flu in between the two, so I was lucky I didn’t go in the end.’ For Coe, ‘Europe was where it was at,’ and a further justification for him was that, of all the people who did both, ‘only Daley Thompson and Dave Moorcroft got a medal’.
Ovett began the year as he had left off the previous September. As if to rub in the lesson of his final race of 1977, his first big outing in 1978 was over-distance again, in the Inter-Counties Cross-Country Championships. This was second in importance only to the National Cross-Country. Yet Ovett won in thick snow – hardly the track runner’s medium – by eighty metres from Steve Jones, the Welsh hard man who would become one of the world’s leading marathoners half a dozen years later. It was further evidence of Ovett’s catholic talents. Here was a man who could run 400 metres in 47.5 seconds winning one of the world’s biggest cross-country races by a street. If Coe was impressed by Düsseldorf, he had every right to be completely overawed by this performance. Ovett then went even further, finishing fourth in the National beaten only by Bernie Ford, Ian Stewart and Tony Simmons, all Olympic 5000/10,000 metres finalists, and men who over their careers either won the World Cross-Country title (Stewart) or finished in the top three. Ovett did make one concession to sporting mortality by passing up on the World Cross-Country Championships, saying it would encroach on his track season. Long-distance runners across the world slept easier.
But then Coe made another leap forward himself, and rivalling Ovett no longer seemed such an Olympian task. After a tentative training period, due to a badly sprained ankle, when the track season began in late April Coe reduced his 400 metres best to 47.7 seconds. It was still not quite as fast as Ovett had run four years earlier, but Coe’s next race at 800 metres was altogether in a different register. Ovett’s cross-country feats had come at Allestree Park in Derby and Roundhay Park in Leeds, neither very far from Coe’s stamping grounds. It was an equally mundane setting, Cleckheaton, in the Yorkshire County Championships, that Coe ran 800 metres in 1 minute 45.6 seconds, easily a personal best, and the world’s fastest for 1978 at that point. Everything was coming together over two laps. Peter Coe could sit in his factory office in Sheffield looking at all sorts of flow-charts, but the one where the graph was heading relentlessly upwards was that which sketched out his son’s destiny in the Lenin Stadium two years hence.
In contrast, Ovett seemed to be in full 1500 metres mode. He barely raced 800 metres, and was just as likely to run 3000 metres, as he’d done at the end of the previous track season, or 2000 metres, which he did on 3 June at Crystal Palace, becoming the third-fastest man in history, with 4 minutes 57.8 seconds. His range of competitive distances continued to startle. Nevertheless, Ovett had a qualifying time for the Prague 800 metres, and had been given the option of running in the event. Characteristically, he left it until the eleventh hour to declare. Coe admits he was irked by Ovett’s gamesmanship, but says he would probably have done the same, had he had the opportunity.
While Ovett concentrated on the mile and 1500 metres, Coe increasingly put himself in pole position for the only race he would run in Prague, the 800 metres. In just about the only big foreign meeting he ran regularly, he set a UK record of 1 minute 44.3 seconds at the second Ivo van Damme Memorial in Brussels. The emphatic nature of his win – by fifteen metres – and the time, just 0.9 seconds off Juantorena’s world record, made him the Prague favourite in virtually everyone’s estimation, including Ovett’s. But not in his own: ‘I was beginning to inch closer to him, but we [father and son] were both realistic enough to know at that stage I was not the finished product. I was not closing the gap at 1500, but I knew the gap was really beginning to close at 800.’
Ovett was still winning the occasional 800 metres race impressively enough, even if his times were nowhere near as fast as Coe’s national record. Accordingly, everyone across Europe expected the 800 metres to be a two-horse race in Prague. Coe says, ‘I never thought of anybody else. I thought basically it would be between the two of us.’ Ovett concedes that this was the year he began to see Coe as a rival. ‘Yes, he ran very fast that year, faster than I’d ever done. Everybody thought that it was going to be a very fast race.’ No one was prepared for quite how fast, nor for the identity of the eventual winner. But Ovett, though he hadn’t realised it at the time, had had a preview of another potential rival.
The ‘spectaculars’ like the Coke Meeting, with athletes drawn from across the globe to ensure good competition in every event, were making the traditional two- and three-nation matches, with empty lanes and disparate results, increasingly redundant. But in mid-June, six weeks prior to Prague, there had been a UK–East Germany match at Crystal Palace. Ovett ran in the 1500 metres, and demolished another man who would be a party-pooper in the future – Jürgen Straub. The former steeplechaser had become a very good 1500 metres runner, and had already beaten Thomas Wessinghage earlier in the season. But, virtually ignored, winning the 800 metres very easily (Coe was not competing) was Olaf Beyer.
He recalls the London prelude to his day of days. ‘I had certainly expected them [Coe and Ovett] to run [at Crystal Palace]. So, I was pleased they didn’t, since that gave me a chance to win. I would never have expected to beat such great runners. Looking ahead, I would have thought, Where can I finish? First and second are already booked, so I might take third or fourth. When they weren’t there, we could raise our estimates a bit.’ It was a valuable lesson, but only for Beyer.
In Prague, life went on as normal, despite the change of scenery. Coe was available to the press, Ovett wasn’t . . . with the very occasional exception. He’d always said the press boycott was not 100 per cent, and one man who could testify to that was Alain Billouin from L’Equipe. But Billouin had to work hard for his interview. ‘I found out where Ovett was staying in Prague, and I went to his hotel, and got David Jenkins to go in and talk to Ovett for me. Jenkins came out and said, “Sorry, but he won’t talk.” But I decided to stay anyway, and three hours later Ovett came out. He saw me and said, “Look, I’ve got to go somewhere, but I’m happy to talk to you as we walk.” So that’s what I did, and he was perfectly good, and answered everything I asked.’
Ovett vaguely remembers the incident. ‘I was never totally averse to talking to the press and I think the foreign press were a little bit different. I suppose you treat them with a certain amount of respect, whereas I had very little respect for what was going on domestically. L’Equipe was always the magazine that I used to respect as an adolescent. It was proper, a bit like the Financial Times for financial information. And Alain was a persistent guy. I remember talking and he was happy, it was an exclusive interview. I didn’t give him the in-depth Steve
Ovett, but I think he was more than happy with it.’
Which is more than most could say for Prague. But many Western Europeans visiting the East for the first time and labelling it dour were being signally unfair. Had Prague been part of Western Europe after the Second World War, it might even have rivalled Paris. The German annexation of Czechoslovakia meant that the city had not been destroyed, like Warsaw, or scarred, like Budapest. And the medieval buildings, narrow cobbled streets and avant-garde theatre, opera and puppet-shows, for those who sought them out, made an intriguing adjunct to the championships. Added to which, the lively bars and restaurants, serving the best beer in the world, and the Czech joie de vivre, personified by the ebullient Emil Zátopek, one of the greatest distance runners in history, meant that it was a cut above most cities in Eastern Europe, and many in the West.
But it was two West Europeans who were setting the pace in the stadium. The British pair dominated their heats, with the other two qualifying races being won by Beyer and Andreas Busse. The East Germans underlined their heat wins by finishing second to the Brits in the semi-finals. Even so, no one saw them as threats to Coe and Ovett.
Coe and his father had their plan, as usual, and they decided to go through with it even though Coe was feeling the after-effects of a stomach bug, which had caused him to lose a couple of valuable pounds in weight. ‘We sat down before the race, and we analysed it honestly, and said never go into a race without believing in yourself. But this is an opportunity to learn a lot about these guys. I remember my old man saying to me, “I want to know at the end of this race what these bastards are made of. And it’s probably not enough to win, but it will get you onto the rostrum.” So I said, “You just want me to go out and run as quickly as I can in the first lap?” He said, “Yes, and hang on for as long as you can. I want to find out how much it’s going to hurt.”’
