by Pat Butcher
‘But Horst manoeuvred them into using the same amount of money for one big spectacle, and it became the Golden Series. The first one was a mile in September ’78. The whole idea started in early June, by mid-July it was all fixed, and to persuade the major stars of that year, who were Ovett and Henry Rono, to come along, they obviously had to dispense large sums of money. I was never a hundred per cent certain, but the word in West & Nally was that they were paying Ovett twenty-thousand, whether it was pounds or dollars, I’m not certain now. But it was the first time I ever heard of a race being that amount of money.’
Tokyo might have been the richest race at that point, but the most valuable lessons had been learned in Prague. Coe père et fils remained adamant that Prague was an experiment in front running. But, if anything, that experiment contributed to Coe’s tactically impoverished run in the Moscow 800 metres two years later. Whereas Ovett maintains (and the Moscow 800 metres result backs him up) that he vowed never again to concentrate on just one man in a race.
The defeat by Beyer looked no more than a blip on the graph of the irresistible rise of Ovett. His all-round performance in Prague – silver in the 800 and gold in the 1500 metres – had earned him the Athlete of the Championships award, chosen by Czech all-time great Emil Zátopek. Back at home he won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. True to her lights, Gay refused to attend, but after a bit of soul-searching, given his media boycott, Ovett went along. Prior to that, he had to do another bit of searching – at the shops. Although he was now twenty-three, he’d never owned a suit.
One blemish was the British Athletics Writers’ Association exacting some revenge on Ovett for his press boycott by voting Daley Thompson their Athlete of the Year. According to his pal Dave Cocksedge, this irked Ovett enormously, because Thompson was one contemporary that Ovett couldn’t stand. In many respects they were similar characters: brash, opinionated, devil-may-care winners. Thompson was rarely gainsaid, but Ovett is responsible for one of the greatest put-downs in athletics history, when he described Thompson’s event, the decathlon, as ‘nine Mickey Mouse events and a slow 1500 metres’. Ovett denies it was intended as an insult to Thompson, but that was how everyone took it, and Cocksedge relates, ‘I just thought he would laugh it off [the vote], but it obviously did affect him. He was quite stunned by that. And, to me, it was a vote of spite. Ironically, Thompson became more hated later by the press than Ovett. I think the press voted against Ovett rather than for Thompson. A few days after that, he said to me, “let’s work out the average of Thompson’s scores and see how that relates on the [event-comparison] scoring tables to 1500.” It was 3 minutes 44 seconds. Steve said, “Christ, I could run three of those with a two-minute recovery.”’
Despite his forthrightness, there was still a shy, private side to Ovett. Unlike Coe, who, according to close friend Steve Mitchell, had a succession of girlfriends at Loughborough, it seems that Ovett was never a ladies’ man. But, four years after first noticing Rachel Waller training at Crystal Palace, Ovett finally plucked up the courage to ask her out.
14
Hare and Hounds
The worst thing that ever happened to British athletics was Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile barrier. First of all, it fostered the impression that all was well with the sport in Britain when, just two years before, the team had won a meagre two bronze medals in the Helsinki Olympics, and would win just one gold in Melbourne 1956. But on a broader canvas it helped perpetuate the myth that Britain was still Great. Today, it’s seen as one of the last gasps of Empire, along with the Festival of Britain, the coronation of a monarch who is still clinging on, and the ascent of Everest – by a New Zealander, led by a Nepalese.
But the worst aspect of the first sub-4 was the pacemaking. Because it wasn’t just British athletics which suffered from the belief that this was the only way to do it, but the sport world-wide. And it persists to this day, to a degree that is ruining athletics. It didn’t help that the sub-4 was accomplished by the sort of blokes portrayed by Nigel Havers in Chariots of Fire – fellows (in both senses of the word) who went out for a ‘spin’ rather than a run, and would celebrate the 3 minutes 59.4 seconds by going up to town and toasting it with champagne and cigars, and even, heaven forbid, some gels. Nothing wrong with a piss-up, of course, that’s the bit of their Britishness that you can’t fault. But their manner of securing the record, well, dammit, it just wasn’t English!
Club athletics had begun a century beforehand, with the mob-run, where a guide would go out and lay a paper trail, and everyone else would follow. The practice – the origin of ‘paper-chase’ – gave rise to the first English running clubs, prominent among which, if only for its name, was Thames Hare and Hounds. So the practice has a long history of sorts, and Sydney Wooderson’s mile world record in 1937 was set in a handicap race, itself a type of pacemaking, since Wooderson was the scratch-man, or the back-marker, who would run the whole mile, while the lesser athletes would be off a variety of starts, a number of yards ahead of him, targets to draw him on. Reginald Thomas, ten yards ahead of Wooderson, acted as the main pacemaker.
There’s nothing wrong with peers agreeing to pace one another, but that’s on the understanding that they are taking a lap or a certain distance each in the lead, in an effort to improve their times. We frequently did it in inter-club races, two or three of us taking a lap each, but it was each man for himself on the last lap, with all of us out there to win, and that was the same philosophy espoused by the British Milers’ Club when it was set up in the early 1960s with a view to raising the standards of national middle-distance running.
It’s the paid pacemakers who are ruining athletics. Because they are effectively being paid to lose. How can this be ethical competition? Their forerunners were Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, red-carpeting for Roger Bannister. They might not have been paid, but they provided the template. The rules of the international federation, laid down in part to prevent cheating in its many guises, used to be very clear on this one: everyone in the race/competition should be there to try to win – ‘honest competition’. Self-evidently, pacemakers do not fulfil that criterion. There was also the understanding that everybody had to finish the race. That ‘honest competition’ rule has now been quietly dropped, and pacemakers drop out and are handsomely paid for their services. But the ethical question remains.
In 1953, the year before the first sub-4, Bannister had a rehearsal. Aussie international Don Macmillan paced for two and a half laps while Brasher trotted round a lap in arrears, waiting to pick up and pace Bannister over the fourth and final lap. Bannister recorded 4 minutes 2 seconds, but the AAA, to their credit, refused to recognise the time as valid for British record purposes, claiming ‘manipulation’.
The trio finessed it a bit the following year in the context of the Oxford University AC versus AAA match at Iffley Road, and history was made, but at a price. By the same token, I was never partisan to the acclaim that Chris Chataway received for his world-record 5000 metres victory over Vladimir Kuts in London’s White City Stadium in October 1954. Even as a kid, weaned on the those colonial moments – the Festival of Britain, the ascent of Everest, the coronation and the sub-4 – I could see that Kuts had led for 4,975 metres before Chataway drew level and edged ahead at the line.
Another Englishman, ‘Galloping’ Gordon Pirie, used similar tactics to beat Kuts, and break the 3000 metres world record the following year. But Kuts got his due in the torrid conditions at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. Pirie tracked Kuts in the Olympic 10,000 metres, and ran himself into a stupor following the Ukrainian, who at one stage veered off towards the outside lanes of the track, just to see if Pirie would follow. He did, Kuts turned to look him in the face, and they both knew then who would win. Kuts ran away, and Pirie disappeared back into the pack. In the 5000 metres later that week, Pirie let Kuts go, and ran for silver, which he duly won.
I occasionally run into Chris Chataway when we are trotting across Hampstead Heat
h doing what passes for training nowadays. Fifty years after his heyday, he is still an instantly recognisable figure, even from 400 metres away. The shock of hair is now grey, and he may have put on a pound or two, but he was always squarely built, and with those elbows round-housing for balance, he is unmistakable. About a decade ago, around the time of the fortieth-anniversary dinner for the sub-4, which he emceed very wittily – particularly with reference to Brasher, who responded the only way he knew, by chomping on his unlit pipe – Chataway said that there’d been no criticism immediately after that night of 6 May 1954 at Iffley Road, ‘but a couple of months later, there started to be a bit of questioning of the tactics’.
It was the worst possible example of how to break a record. Unfortunately, it became an indispensable tool for Steve Ovett and Seb Coe, who, since they wouldn’t, for whatever reason, race each other outside championships, made a virtue of pacemaking. In doing so, they must take considerable blame for the situation which prevails nowadays, where even they are forced to admit much of middle-distance racing is so predictable it’s unwatchable. We have even had the spectacle of Hicham El Guerrouj, the leading middle-distance runner of his generation, agreeing to be paced in two World Championships, in 1999 and 2001, and in the 2000 Olympic Games.
It could be argued that countries ‘new’ to athletics – unsophisticated in the Corinthian nature of competition – are most likely to employ pacemaking in championships. The first example that I was aware of was Ben Jipcho of Kenya pacing compatriot Kipchoge Keino in the 1968 Olympic 1500 metres in Mexico City. Keino could have won it by himself, but he was afraid of world record-holder Jim Ryun of the USA. There is nothing wrong with being afraid of your opponent, but the crux of athletics competition is that the polarity of fight or flight becomes redundant – they blend into one. Keino had already run in the 10,000 metres, and finished second in the 5000 metres, and could argue that he was tired, and needed help to cope with Ryun, but it was already sufficiently established by then that Mexico City’s altitude would militate in Keino’s favour. He was born, nurtured and trained at an altitude even higher than that of Mexico City, close to 3000 metres up in Kenya’s Western Highlands, whereas Ryun trained close to sea level, with its abundance of oxygen. Ryun would go into oxygen-debt when he tried to rival Keino, whose lungs were accustomed to the thin air of altitude. The Kenyan ran away to the biggest margin of victory in Olympic 1500 metres history. He and Jipcho doubtless argued that they were doing it for their country, newly a nation since gaining independence from Britain only six years earlier.
The Moroccans try to argue ‘King and Country’. But Saïd Aouita, Morocco’s first great athlete, does not agree. There’s no love lost between the Aouita and El Guerrouj camps, but the former says, ‘I think pacemaking is really good in the [independent] meetings: people come to watch the fast races. But in the World Championships and Olympic Games, I was always against. I don’t like that. I don’t like to name the people, [but] they are just not really champions. Show me that you are strong, show me that you are running faster. Show me that. If not, you are not a champion. I don’t like to see some young athletes sacrifice their career for other people.’
Now, Hicham El Guerrouj is one of the nicest guys you could meet, personable, intelligent, accessible, yet there was widespread satisfaction when his paced tactics went awry in Sydney, where he folded in the final straight of the Olympic 1500 metres and conceded victory to Noah Ngeny of Kenya. I make no excuses for asking him, when he was in tears at the post-race press conference, why he thought it necessary to be paced in an Olympic final. He mumbled something about it being a decision of the Moroccan federation. That may be the case, but I doubt it. In any case, he was complicit to a tactic which demeans the Olympics, demeans athletic competition, demeans his competitors, and demeans the Moroccan youngster who was sacrificed like a lamb for a meschoui. But, most of all, it demeans Hicham El Guerrouj himself.
The worst thing in all of this is that El Guerrouj – an otherwise charming man – and his coach don’t seem to think they’re doing anything wrong. And why would they? Because the nation that gave the world the mile race, the nation that broke the 4-minute mile, the nation that produced Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett, the men who changed the very nature of international athletics, well, if the Brits can do it, why can’t everybody else? And that is the ultimate tragedy of Ovett and Coe’s refusal to race each other outside championships.
The antidote, the cure for this malaise, should be apparent to anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the sport’s history. It should be as clear in the memory of those who witnessed it as the day it happened thirty years ago. The defining moment of twentieth-century middle-distance running didn’t occur at Iffley Road, Oxford, on 6 May 1954, but at the Queen Elizabeth II Stadium, Christchurch, New Zealand, on 2 February 1974. And the genius to whom we should all be paying homage is not Roger Bannister but Filbert Bayi of Tanzania.
When Bayi dared to run away from the field in the Commonwealth Games 1500 metres final in Christchurch, he created a template for Sebastian Coe, for Steve Ovett and for any middle-distance runner who wants to be proud of having stamped his or her personality and authority on the events which have done so much to define international athletics throughout the century and a half of organised competition. Bayi opened with a lap of 54.9 seconds and just kept going. John Walker, who had his breakthrough in that race, was catching Bayi throughout the last lap, and was barely a metre behind on the final bend. In those circumstances, 99 times out of 100, the pursuer bursts past to victory. With barely a backward glance at the big black-vested interloper, though, Bayi simply stretched away again, and won in 3 minutes 32.2 seconds, breaking Jim Ryun’s world record by nine tenths of a second. Almost a second off the world record, and he had run every step of the way in front. What a man, what a hero! Bayi’s performance is an indictment of every middle-distance man and woman who thinks that they have to be paced to turn in a decent time. The film of his Christchurch run should be compulsory viewing for every aspiring middle-distance runner.
It is the nature of athletics racing which causes the problem. Its essence, like that of any sport, is competition. Beating the other team, man or woman, and winning the contest is the end. But athletics has another yardstick of excellence – the world record. In running, that produces a parallel competition – runner against the clock. It has its place, but it should not take absolute precedence. The refusal of Ovett and Coe to race against each other, choosing instead to pursue paced world-record attempts, was the starting point for the barren situation we have today. Now, top middle-distance runners are led through a succession of paced races, with no effective opposition but the clock. Almost invariably, they get nowhere near the world record, and the result is dissatisfaction for all but the winner.
I was as frustrated as anyone by the refusal of Coe and Ovett to meet outside of championships, and criticised their solo world records as ‘about as exciting as postal chess’. I admit to a measure of hyperbole because, since they were in the vanguard of reintroducing pacemaking as a means to an end, and they were succeeding so frequently, they built a high level of expectation, such that the excitement when they did meet in championships was as palpable to the public as their self-doubt was to themselves. Nevertheless, their example has led to a competitive wasteland much of the time in middle-distance running, and explains why athletics is going through a period of crisis which has nothing to do with drugs.
Steve Cram went some way to rectifying the situation, and two of his races, against Ovett in London in 1983 and against Coe in Oslo in 1985, are rightly remembered as great competitive victories. Both were as close as modern-day running gets to the nineteenth-century matches that Walter George and Willie Cummings enjoyed. Before Ovett and Coe, another great national rivalry – Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson – provoked the Swedes into racing each other 23 times (compared to Ovett and Coe’s 7), resulting in 20 world records. In Oslo in 1985, Cram justified the belief of
Hägg and Andersson that more records would have inevitably ensued from more Coe–Ovett confrontations, because he passed the bell for the last lap thinking that a world record was out of the question. Hounded all the way to the line, he broke Coe’s world mile record by over a second.
With impeccable continuity, I bumped into Chris Chataway on Hampstead Heath again recently, a few months before the fiftieth anniversary of the first sub-4. We trotted together for a while, and I mentioned this book. He stopped immediately, the better to impress on me, ‘Of course, Roger’s achievement was marvellous, but it wasn’t in the same league. There’s no doubt about it. Coe, Ovett and Cram were our three best middle-distance runners ever – by a mile!’
15
In the Zone
One of the reasons Ovett gives for he and Coe not racing each other more often is that their seasons were so different. Coe would invariably begin indoors, whereas Ovett would have a cross-country season, with heavy mileage, and would not be track-sharp until much later in the summer. ‘Seb was obviously in better shape than I would have been to run against him earlier in the season at 800 and 1500. I’m still coming off a hundred miles-plus [per week]. He would have probably creamed me. Seb used to have a big Yorkshire Championships, running 1.44 or something like that, while I was still running 1.52 at the Sussex Championships.’ For the rest of it, Ovett said, they’d be preparing for championships, and wouldn’t want to get in each other’s way. After the championships, they would have had enough of each other.
Notwithstanding the pained riposte of ‘Yes, but seven races in seventeen years?’, Coe’s first ‘big’ year certainly began in the way that Ovett describes. Coe stepped up a distance and won the AAA Indoor title over 3000 metres at the end of January 1979. The first sight of Ovett was, as he remembers, on the cross-country circuit, finishing well up again in the National, sixth behind Olympic 10,000 metres silver medallist Mike McLeod. Ovett finished in a bunch of other great distance runners. It suited the pair somehow: the slight, fragile Coe running indoors, while the burly Ovett was braving the elements in nine miles of mud and ploughed fields.
