by Pat Butcher
And that’s what he did. Coe ran the first lap in an unprecedented 49.3 seconds, with television commentators screaming that it was an insane pace, while even experts looked on in astonishment. Yet there was still somebody with him, and it wasn’t Ovett. ‘I knew I was going quick, but when I got to two hundred metres, I’m fighting this guy off for pole position,’ says Coe. ‘And I was thinking, This is not supposed to be happening. Now, if I’d been a bit more experienced, I would have said, “Thank you, you take it,” and I’ve got a very nice pacemaker, which would have made the first six hundred metres marginally easier. I wouldn’t have won it, but it would have got me to seven hundred metres in better shape, because by that time I was caving in.’
Coe’s first lap was just one and a half seconds slower than his best in a 400 metres race. That is a recipe for what is called ‘oxygen debt’, where the body’s ability to run at speed is eroded by the build-up of lactic acid in the blood and muscles. It is a form of blood poisoning, the result of which is that the muscles and the mind begin to seize up, the result characterised by the graphic phrase ‘treading water’.
Ovett had been waiting his moment, and it had arrived. ‘I’d realised I was in terrific shape, and Seb went off very fast. I remember thinking, I don’t feel tired. It was disconcerting. I was clicking my heels behind him, and I kept thinking down the back straight, When is he going to “go”? It took me two hundred metres before I realised he wasn’t going to go; he was flat out.’
Coe got to 620 metres still in the lead. ‘He came alongside, he was taller, and there was a white vest, and I thought, I’ve gone, there is nothing I can do, I’ve shot my bolt. He was off, not pulling away dramatically quickly, but he was away. The next thing I know, this blue vest came from absolutely nowhere.’
Dave Moorcroft, waiting to do battle with Ovett at 1500 metres, was an entranced spectator. ‘With two hundred to go, I was convinced Seb was going to win. With one hundred to go, I was convinced Steve was going to win. With probably fifty to go, I was even more convinced that Steve was going to win it.’ Ovett thought the same thing during the race, briefly: ‘I swung around him [Coe] and kicked for home. Then Beyer, who had been accelerating from two hundred metres out, came past both of us, and pipped us at the post.’
Beyer had run 1 minute 43.8 seconds, exactly two seconds or a dozen metres faster than he had ever run before. Ovett had broken Coe’s British record with 1 minute 44.1 seconds, the fastest he would ever run over the distance. And Coe, who would be almost universally criticised for his suicidal pace, had paid the penalty by finishing third in 1 minute 44.8 seconds, which was also a personal best for him. Nevertheless, the shock was Beyer.
The tall East German jogged to a halt, seemingly as surprised as everyone else. He turned, jogged back down the straight, and out of the tunnel, all inside a minute. He’d gone as quickly as he’d won, and, given the shock, there must have been those who thought it was all a mirage. The crowd looked to the Brits for their reaction. Coe was exhausted, and unable to register anything much, other than fatigue. As for Ovett, it is a measure of how some journalists never came to grips with him and his eccentricities that Coe’s biographer David Miller wrote, ‘he covered his face with his hands in dismay’. On the contrary, Ovett exhibited the panache which endeared him to so many people whose daily newspapers were trying to insist that he was the bad guy. He jogged to a halt, looked over at his parents in the crowd, grinned, maybe in embarrassment, and shrugged his shoulders. He says, ‘I think a lot of people take their athletics far more seriously than I ever did. I have always enjoyed the sport, and I have never seen winning or losing as being a major concern. I mean, yes, it is lovely to win, but it is not life or death. You know, it is a sport at the end of the day.’
At the end of the Prague 800 metres, Ovett turned to find Coe, and they walked off together in commiseration towards the tunnel, with Ovett’s arm draped over his younger colleague’s shoulder. According to Coe, Ovett said, ‘Who the hell was that?’ Fast-forward a quarter of a century, to the Mommsen Stadium in a suburb of what was West Berlin, not far from the Wall which divided the city for three decades. The pate is starting to show through the sparse blond hair, but otherwise, Olaf Beyer is little changed physically from that day in 1978, when his tall, powerful figure, clad in the blue vest of East Germany, burst past first Coe then Ovett just before the line and strangled British celebrations in the throat.
No one, least of all the favourites, had given him a prayer. Even his colleagues were dumbfounded. Jürgen Straub – who would split Coe and Ovett in the Moscow Olympic 1500 metres two years later – says, ‘We knew Olaf was capable of a great deal and was in good form, but we never expected him to beat both of them.’ A race which had seemed destined to be won by one or the other of the British champions was stolen from under their noses. Inevitably, something smelled wrong.
Conventional wisdom has it that Beyer and his colleague Straub were products of the East German state-doping programme. Beyer’s name (though not Straub’s) does feature on a Stasi list of doped sportsmen and women which I have acquired from the acknowledged experts in the field, Brigitta Berendonk and her husband Dr Werner Franke. For the record, I asked both Beyer and Straub, whom I also met in Berlin, if they had ever taken performance-enhancing drugs, knowingly or otherwise. They both denied any involvement in doping. But, in the prevailing suspicion of the age, much was made of Beyer running off the track immediately after his victory in Prague, and submitting to his dope test in a record thirteen minutes, during which time his eyes were blank, and so on and so forth. This was standard Cold War fare, and about as reliable as tabloid astrology. The allegations are repeated in David Miller’s first biography of Coe, and backed up in Ovett’s autobiography.
But neither Beyer nor his coach Berndt Diessner were having any of it. Beyer said, ‘I’ve read [Miller’s] book, it came out in German. I don’t know why it says there that I was wrapped in blankets; and as for the urine test, that’s definitely not true, since I could never go to the toilet after a race! It took me hours to produce a sample; it’s simply not true . . . I’m the quiet type and, for me, the race is over when you cross the line. These days, people are allowed to celebrate, it’s part of the show. I don’t know if I could bring myself to do that. I always remember when John AkiiBua, after his Olympic win, ran another lap over the hurdles. I couldn’t understand why he did it. He’d done his race and it was over, why did he go on a lap of celebration with people applauding? Times change but, for me, I just wanted to get away. I never did a lap of honour because I was too much of a quiet type to do something like that.’
In a separate interview with Berlin journalist Jörg Wenig (who acted as my interpreter with Beyer and Straub), Beyer’s coach Diessner backs up his charge’s account, although he admits he was mystified by the runner’s reaction. ‘Right after the race, Olaf simply went out through the tunnel, which I didn’t understand, but it was typical of him. Olaf is a very shy person and he would never have liked the idea of being celebrated. So he simply went through that tunnel and I later asked him, “Why did you do this, why didn’t you run a lap of honour? You should have done so?”’
Beyer had been brought up in Tanzania, where his father was an engineer. It may well be that the youngster had drawn some then unrecognised advantage from living at altitude. By the time of Prague, however, he was back in East Germany, and had moved from the family home in Saxony to Potsdam, the training centre for the few top East German middle-distance runners, Straub included.
According to Beyer, ‘Until 1976, I was coached by my father. Until I did Abitur [university entrance exams], I was training once a day. At times these were very tough sessions, which I couldn’t often reproduce in later years. I ran 1 minute 46.8 seconds, just training once a day . . . In 1976 I went to Potsdam and was able to do nothing but train for a whole year before I began studying in 1977. Training three times daily in camp had knocked me out, and in ’77 I only improved by a few fractions o
f a second. I ran 1 minute 46.1 seconds against the best in the world in the World Cup in Düsseldorf, including Juantorena. I think the hard training only started to pay off a year later and the turning point was that from 1977 to ’78 I could really train hard, injury-free. I was never able to repeat that.’
Diessner said, ‘He was in absolutely superb form that year [1978]. He was a great talent. Before Prague we were training in high altitude in the Belmekken in Bulgaria. Ten days before Prague he clearly beat his personal best in the 1500 metres, running 3 minutes 36 seconds, then we had another test within a competition. He ran two 400 metres races, the first one in 47.3 seconds, the next one in 47.5 seconds, with a thirty-minute break. It was clear that Olaf could take on any pace in the final. I knew he could stand it. That was what I told him, and that was what he did . . . I knew if he ran tactically clever he would have a chance to win, and he would be OK. I expected that Coe and Ovett would kill each other off, so I told him to stay behind them. And Olaf was tactically a very clever runner. It all happened as expected. Maybe Coe was a bit too sure about himself. Running this speed for the first four hundred metres with a pacemaker would have been OK, but without a pacemaker? I think it was a bit too much, even for someone like Sebastian Coe.’
Beyer continues, ‘I had already realised from their earlier results in the heats and semis that neither of them was going to be hanging about and would run from the front. That was obvious. My plan was to stay with them and do what I could. I had a strong kick, but so did they. I thought, You must stay with them, but at all costs not take the lead. Whenever I did that in my career, I lost. So I hung in and stayed with him. He [Coe] probably thought that if I was still with him, he had to run faster, and he did. I glanced at the clock and saw 49.5. I was feeling really good and thought, That must be a mistake, you’ve never run that fast in your life. Fifty-one seconds was very quick when I went on to run 1 minute 46 seconds, so I couldn’t believe it. After five hundred metres he started to move aside, thinking Steve Ovett was behind him and wanted to let him pass. As he turned, he saw it was me and increased his pace again. I had no desire to go past. I didn’t want to lose if they were coming from behind me. The tempo was relatively slow till six hundred metres, then Ovett went past me, I gathered myself again with two hundred metres left and I felt I still had a kick left. There was still a gap coming off the final bend and heading into the home straight, but somehow I managed it. A good day!’
That is something of an understatement. The fact is that neither Coe nor Ovett, nor anyone else for that matter, even his team colleagues, even the man himself, expected Beyer to do any better than third. He was truly a deus ex machina, in the same fashion as his colleague Straub would be in Moscow in 1980.
It is perhaps testimony to an unfulfilled career that Beyer is still competing today. After our interview in the Mommsen Stadium in May 2003, he competed in a veterans’ (over-forty) relay, running 1000 metres in 2 minutes 48 seconds, a superlative time for a forty-eight-year-old. Beforehand, he had enthusiastically related how he had recently been training in Portugal for ten days, ‘with a nineteen-year-old. We ran about a hundred and twenty kilometres in a week. If only I could do that every week!’ Here was a man who clearly loved his sport.
Back in Prague, in 1978, there was some unfinished business: the 1500 metres. And Ovett was imperious. He recalls, ‘I was pretty determined. It was the only chance of the UK winning a gold in those championships, so there was that pressure on me, and also pressure from myself to make sure I got a European gold medal, because I had two silvers, and that was enough. I made sure that I didn’t do anything stupid, because I knew that I had one or two seconds to spare on the rest of them, so I made sure I wasn’t in the position of being knocked over or bumped or whatever, and when I made the move, I was pretty straightforward, pretty cutthroat.’
The best judge of that was Eamonn Coghlan. Like many of his compatriots, going back to John Joe Barry in the late forties, and most famously to 1956 Olympic 1500 metres champion Ron Delany, Coghlan had won an athletics scholarship to a US college. He had liked New York so much he’d stayed on for years afterwards, living north of the city in the seaside community of Rye. In his house there, he had a collage of photographs on one of the walls. Pride of place was accorded to one of him in his Irish vest, arms aloft, crossing a finish line. If every picture tells a story, this is an ironic one. For Coghlan is finishing second. Out of shot, well ahead, is Ovett, who has slowed to a walk after winning in Prague. The picture is similar to those taken at the end of the Olympic 1500 metres in Moscow, when Jürgen Straub reaches for the sky, to celebrate beating Ovett. Except that Straub has finished second to Sebastian Coe. That’s how it was for their opponents – finishing second to Ovett and Coe was a triumph in itself.
Coghlan is an extrovert character, and the New Yorkers, particularly and inevitably the ‘Irish’, loved him. He was the King of New York when either the Millrose Games or the Fifth Avenue Mile was on. At Millrose, in the carnival atmosphere of Madison Square Garden – where most of the staff are Irish–American – it was cut and dried. It was better than running in his home town of Dublin. Coghlan owned the Wanamaker Mile, the highlight of Millrose, winning it seven times in the late seventies and early eighties. That feat, since the track surface was then wood, earned him the sobriquet ‘Chairman of the Boards’. Such was the affection in which he was held that, when he returned a decade later, to attempt the first sub-4-minute mile by a forty-year-old, the traditional US national anthem prior to the race was forgone in favour of ‘A Soldier’s Song’. He just failed to break the 4-minute barrier then, but did so a week later, in an even more Irish town – Boston.
There was an edge to Coghlan’s self-publicising, however. Many even of his countrymen would have described him as a ‘chancer’. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially as a sportsman, even more so as a miler. One item in the chancer’s repertoire is never to admit you’re beaten. Ovett had a strong strain of that, too, as George Gandy, Coe’s coach at Loughborough, once observed: ‘You never beat Steve. Even when he lost.’
It always seemed to me that Coghlan would have loved to get Coe and Ovett onto the US indoor circuit, where he was practically unbeatable. How wrong can you be? A quarter of a century later, sitting just a few hundred metres from the Garden, scene of his greatest triumphs, when it might have been easy to equivocate, or drop in a throwaway justification, Coghlan was ruthlessly honest: ‘No fucking way. I didn’t want them on my patch. They were too good.’
They were certainly too good in their 1978 end-of-season encounters, in the Coke Meeting at Crystal Palace. But an opportunity for them to race against each other in front of an adoring British public was lost. According to Coe, ‘I wanted to run in the two miles. Steve was running against Henry Rono, and I wanted to run, too. I don’t think it was a decision by Steve, but I don’t think Andy Norman was too keen to have me in there buggering up what was going to be a world-record attempt.’
What an intriguing possibility that might have been. Coe had begun his career at 3000 metres, the metric equivalent to two miles, but had percolated to 800s. This was the year that Rono had set world records for 3000 metres, the steeplechase, 5000 and 10,000 metres. Ovett had beaten the Kenyan in a 3000 metres at the end of the previous year. With Coe in there too, it would have been worth travelling across continents to see. But it was not to be, and after that, Coe never ran further than 2000 metres on the track outdoors.
At Crystal Palace he ran in the 800 metres instead, winning in 1 minute 44 seconds, breaking Ovett’s week-old British record. In an exchange on the steps up to the press box, Peter Coe encountered Ovett’s coach, Harry Wilson, and jibed him with, ‘We told you it was only borrowed, Harry.’ Wilson need not have been too bothered. In a year when Rono had carried all before him, Ovett blew away the Kenyan in the two miles, winning by eight metres in 8 minutes 13.51 seconds, clipping a fifth of a second off Brendan Foster’s world record. Coe got caught up in the criticism
of the ‘Ovett wave’, saying, ‘I really cannot condone so much of Steve’s behaviour on and off the track. He is without question a wonderful athlete, and my admiration of him as such is sincere and unbounded, but he does conduct himself in a way which regularly leaves so much to be desired. He should not belittle inferior opponents in lesser races the way he sometimes does. That is sheer bad manners.’
On the track, the couple’s mastery of all but Beyer was complete when Coe emulated Ovett and ended his season with consecutive victories over Coghlan – in a 4-mile road race in Dublin’s Phoenix Park – and Rono – in a slow mile at Gateshead. Ovett, meanwhile, ran what might be the fastest mile ever run at 4°C, in Oslo, winning in 3 minutes 52.8 seconds.
There was to be one more race for Ovett, which would be intriguing not simply for the result – another victory – but for the manner in which the event arose. It was something called the Dubai Golden Mile, but, in spite of the name, was held in Tokyo. Athletics was still amateur, in theory, but Ovett, and increasingly Coe, could command appearance fees of up to $3000. Neil Wilson had left journalism for a couple of years, and was working for one of the first sports management companies, West & Nally. ‘It was fifty-one per cent owned by Horst Dassler and Adidas,’ recalls Wilson. ‘We were an Adidas front-company, and although Horst used federations for his own ends, he was very much pro the international federation. And he saw a threat to the IAAF from some rich people in Dubai, who suddenly had an idea that they were going to turn athletics professional, and run a circuit rather like the fledgling tennis circuit.
