by Pat Butcher
Without a major championship that year, neither man was looking to catch an early summer wave. Coe was preparing to take his final exams at Loughborough, and Ovett had announced that it was going to be ‘a quiet year’ in preparation for the Olympic Games in 1980. The athletics world was thus unaware that a tsunami was about to hit.
In his first outdoor race, Coe was reminded – if it were necessary – that he shouldn’t run with a rough crowd. On the first lap of the 800 metres at the Northern Counties Centenary Championships in Stretford, he was bounced so far across the six-lane track that he was looking to the fence for support. He gathered himself, sped past the offending mob, and ran a championship best of 1 minute 46.3 seconds. He then negotiated the European Cup semi-finals in Malmö, Sweden, without any problems, another win, and prepared for his first trip to Oslo.
Ovett was making waves of a different sort. He ran in a British match in Bremen, Germany, on 23 June, winning the 1500 metres in 3 minutes 41.7 seconds, and headed off to race in Nijmegen in the Netherlands the next day. He won another 1500 in 3 minutes 37.7 seconds, the world’s fastest of the year at that point. But an argument then ensued as to whether he’d had permission from the federation to go. There was a threat from new federation secretary, David Shaw, to suspend him. This was ultimately another dispute about amateurism, and who held the reins of power. Coincidentally, Coe would be involved in a similar dispute a week later, but little or nothing would be made of it. There seems little doubt that Ovett’s stand-off with the majority of the media (he gave a big interview each year to Athletics Weekly, but that was it) fuelled the controversy, since no one knew he was going to run in Holland. Shaw admits that he wanted to suspend Ovett, but was overruled by his committee. In any case, as the federation’s first professional secretary, Shaw had battles of his own to fight, against the ‘amateur’ clan. The result, however, was more bad press for Ovett.
Coe’s late start in international athletics, compared to Ovett, meant that he had hardly travelled on the ad hoc European circuit. He had got into the Brussels meeting two years before only at the behest of Andy Norman, and had run there the following year. So Oslo was to be the start of his globetrotting, and it required Coe to show some of the bloody-mindedness that had not thus far been evident on the track. He mentioned to a team manager in Malmö that he was going on to Oslo, only to be told that he didn’t have permission: ‘I said, “I’ve got a passport, I’ve got a ticket, I’m going.” In the end, they gave me permission.’
The team manager in question must still smile ruefully when he reflects on how he almost prevented the first chapter in Coe’s rewriting of the record books. Compared to the 1500 metres and the mile, the 800 metres is a fairly simple race, in that it is an extended sprint. But maybe that’s just how we’ve looked at it since 5 July 1979. Because Coe followed a pacemaker, Lennie Smith of Jamaica, through a first lap of 50.6 seconds – over a second slower than he’d run in Prague – with the pack twenty metres behind, before running the second lap alone, and steaming through the line – no winning tapes any more – in 1 minute 42.33 seconds.
When Alberto Juantorena had run his world record of 1 minute 43.5 seconds in winning Olympic gold in Montreal three years earlier, then reduced it by a tenth the following year, the consensus had been that the 800 metres was now in the ‘Land of the Giants’. El Caballo stood 1.90 metres (6 foot 3) and weighed 84 kilos (185 pounds), and, in the estimation of those who had seen his temper, would have given his compatriot, Olympic triple-gold medallist Teofilio Stevenson, a few problems in the ring. The tale of the tape told another story. Sebastian Coe, standing 1.77 metres (5 foot 9), weighing in at 54 kilos (119 pounds), had taken over a second off the Cuban’s record. Welcome to the real future of middle-distance running. John Walker was sitting in the stands: ‘I remember putting the clock on him, and he went through at 1.42. I just didn’t believe it, I didn’t think anybody could run that fast.’ In the seven decades of official IAAF records, only Sydney Wooderson, Rudolf Harbig and Peter Snell had taken more time off the world record, but the lower it falls, the more difficult it is to take off chunks. Coe had emulated those giants of the past, and taken his place in the pantheon of legends. But it was only the start.
Coe then had an impressive interlude, running his fastest 400 metres, 46.87 seconds – at last faster than Ovett! – to finish second in the AAA Championships. The better Coe ran, the worse, it seemed, Ovett behaved. The latter ran in the 1500 metres at the AAAs, did just enough to win, but incurred the displeasure of one of his admirers. The pathologically fair Mel Watman had conducted an interview with Ovett for Athletics Weekly during spring. Watman had urged readers to ‘Forget the surly, vaguely hostile image fostered by certain sections of the press; don’t be misled into dismissing Steve as cocky or arrogant because of all that waving to the crowd.’ Three months later, Watman’s exasperation showed through when he commented on Ovett’s behaviour in the qualifying heats: ‘Did he need to demean the efforts of those mere mortals scrapping for places in the final by running the last 30 metres across the track so that he finished, still comfortably ahead, out in the seventh or eighth lane?’
Unabashed, Ovett went on the offensive as Coe went back to Oslo twelve days later, to run in the Dubai Golden Mile. This was the big-money race that Ovett had won at the end of the previous year in Tokyo, but he was missing in Norway. He might not talk to the national press, but he had a way of making his feelings public, through the pages of Athletics Weekly and his pal Dave Cocksedge. The daily journos would transfer these thoughts directly to their back pages. Ovett would not run the Golden Mile, he said, because
The race has got to be held here in Britain. We are supplying four of the field of 12 for the race, and if we have that many in it, we should hold it here in front of the British public and not have to trek over to Oslo for it. I’ve beaten the world’s best in Düsseldorf and everyone who turned up in Tokyo, and now if the best milers in the world want to take me on, they must come here to do it. If they want to beat me, they must come here and race me – that’s the right of the world champion, surely?
This was all great knockabout stuff, and, allied to the superlative results that Ovett and Coe were producing, was going to keep the back pages (and frequently the front pages) of Fleet Street in business for the best part of a decade. Neil Wilson’s experience was common. He was back in journalism by this time, working for United Newspapers, which owned a series of provincial dailies. ‘We didn’t in those days send [a reporter] to athletics meetings; it was fairly rare. [But] I came home and suddenly found that Coe had broken the world [800 metres] record. He was from Sheffield, we had two papers there, so they said, “You’d better go anywhere this man goes in future.” From then onwards, the press followed him everywhere. I mean literally everywhere.’
Surprisingly, given the way he had demolished the 800 metres record, no one among his rivals lent Coe much credence in the Golden Mile. One of the reasons was that he hadn’t raced over a mile for two years, since beating Bayi in the Emsley Carr in an ordinary time of 3 minutes 57.7 seconds. Furthermore, in the two years prior to that, he had run in only a handful of 1500 or mile races. Walker was the world record-holder with 3 minutes 49.4 seconds, the only man under 3.50. He recalls, ‘It was a funny night, because we didn’t know who the pacemaker was going to be, and I thought Coe was an 800 metres runner, and wasn’t going to run that fast, because his 1500 metres time wasn’t that flash.’
Craig Masback, who was going to run the race of his life to finish third, had had an intriguing prelude to the race. Coe was thinking of doing a postgraduate course at Harvard. Since Masback was a Princeton graduate, Coe and his father sought him out for advice, and the trio had lunch together. ‘Seb was viewed as a real curiosity. We obviously knew of his potential as an 800 metres runner, but frankly no one had thought of him as a 1500 metres runner. No one doubted that he deserved, from a promotional sense, from a potential sense, the right to be in the Golden Mile, [but] I don’t
think there was any particular expectation for him in that race, beyond the curiosity value. My recollection was that Eamonn Coghlan was the favourite in the race, given that Ovett wasn’t present.’
It was the best mile field ever assembled, even without Ovett. The embryonic ‘circuit’ – and the money from the Dubai sponsors – meant that it was possible to draw athletes from all over the world, instead of the occasional chance collision of top milers in one of the past Oxbridge–Ivy League matches, the two- or three-nation fixtures or even an Olympic 1500 metres final without a boycott or a banned ‘star’ – for there had already been plenty of those. Walker was Olympic champion and world mile record-holder and after a spate of injuries had come back to form with a world indoor 1500 metres record; Thomas Wessinghage was mile European record-holder with 3 minutes 52.5 seconds; Coghlan had recently set the world indoor mile record of 3 minutes 52.6 seconds; the slowest of the three Americans, Steve Scott, Steve Lacy and Craig Masback could still boast 3 minutes 54.7 seconds. Coe, by contrast, was the slowest of the four Brits. Commonwealth 1500 metres champion Dave Moorcroft and the Scots John Robson and Graham Williamson were ahead of him on paper, and made up the biggest national complement. Only the home entrant, Bjorge Ruud of Norway, and Takashi Ishii – in the field for Asian TV interest – were slower than the new 800 metres world record-holder.
Mindful perhaps of his slight frame and past misfortunes, Coe made a dash for the front. It was his best possible move as it strung out the field, and when Lacy took over after a hundred metres, the die was cast. None of the others seemed to know that Lacy was going to pace, but Scott, who always made sure he was near the front in any race, was in his lee, with Coe right behind. When Lacy dropped out at halfway at 1 minute 55 seconds – perfect pace for sub 3.50 – Scott readily took over. By now, the rest were ten or more metres behind.
Although Coe had run plenty of 1500s in the past, and had won his last mile, those races had not been at this pace, and he was now entering the unknown territory which had been a hazard for milers throughout the century of record chasing – the dreaded ‘third lap’. ‘Peter and I always knew the third lap would be critical for someone who was a jumped-up 800 metres runner and not, on experience, a true miler,’ Coe told biographer David Miller. But Steve Scott was going to give him an unwitting lift.
‘I took over the pace on that third lap,’ explains the American, ‘and, I mean, none of us thought that Coe was going to be a factor. He was a very good 800 metres runner but hadn’t proved himself over a mile. It was like, OK, now you are running with the big boys and you’ve got to prove yourself. So when I took over the lead and felt someone on my shoulder, the last person I thought it was going to be was Coe. I don’t remember exactly when he took over, but I know the one thing was we were all in kind of shock that not only would he kick all of our rear ends, but he also breaks the world record in his first mile attempt.’
Coe took over just before the bell for the final lap. He had six metres on Scott, and over twenty-five metres on the rest. The gap was still a dozen metres at the end, and Coe had shaved two fifths of a second from Walker’s record. After almost a decade of planning and preparation, it had taken just thirteen days for him to annexe the middle-distance double that only Peter Snell and Sidney Wooderson had accomplished in the previous half-century. He was holder of the 800 metres and mile records at the same time.
Coe’s most telling comment was: ‘I was mentally prepared to be hurt on that [third] lap, and to go through a pain barrier, but it didn’t happen. It was not all that hard.’ Between them, Peter Coe and George Gandy had forged a stayer as strong as Sheffield steel. There was something more than simply the record: it was the manner of its acquisition that impressed his competitors. Eamonn Coghlan says, ‘Seb Coe introduced something to me I’d never experienced before: running very fast from the start – he was gone.’ Dave Moorcroft concurs: ‘That’s dead right. We’d kind of amble round the first lap. For example, I finished well down the field, and ran a personal best of 3.54. I never got on the pace, and it was the fastest first lap I’d ever run, must have been about 57 seconds. Years later, you’d occasionally go through in 55.’
Coe himself rightly points to Bayi as the precursor: ‘I changed the face of 800 metres running. I don’t think I changed the face of 1500 metres running. Bayi did that.’ Nevertheless, Coe was the inheritor and the perfector. There have been few runners in history who would take this tactic to its limit, and Coe is the archetype. Another inveterate front-runner, the Ukrainian hard man Vladimir Kuts had once said of the tactic, which early in his career had resulted in many defeats, ‘I knew one day they would never come back.’ In Kuts’ case, the double gold at 5000/10,000 metres at the Melbourne Olympics would be his justification. The Golden Mile in Oslo in 1979 was only the second of many for Coe.
Craig Masback remembers the aftermath of the historic race: ‘There was a dinner in a sort of dark room somewhere in central Oslo that only the milers were invited to. For some reason, three of us ended up being separated from the rest. I think it was because John Walker was getting a lot of phone calls, [wanting] his reaction from New Zealand and around the world. People wanted to know how he felt losing his record. Coe, I think, never had a chance to change [out of his kit].
‘I’ll never forget it, because John went in first and the entire room, which was primarily the people from the race and maybe a coach or two, stood up and applauded him. It was the first time to sort of recognise him for being the first sub 3.50 miler and for coming and racing in this great race where he knew he wasn’t going to win and wasn’t going to set a record but putting himself out there. Then Seb walked in and he got a standing ovation from the group, and it was the first time where I think it really sunk in for him what he had achieved. It was like he was almost in shock, to have his peers give him a standing ovation. That is what indicated to him that he had joined this incredibly small elite group of people who were world record-holders in the mile.’
Walker recalls, ‘I was introduced as a world record-holder, as pride of the world. And five minutes later it was all over, and the whole focus of the thing shifted from me to him, in one night.’ Well, not entirely to ‘him’, as there was, of course, a notable absentee.
Steve Scott believes Ovett played a tactical card. ‘It was highly unusual that Ovett wasn’t in that mile race, because Ovett had been the dominant force in the mile/1500 since ’77, ’78 and going into ’79. He was undefeated. It was very suspicious. I mean, Oslo was always the big mile race of the year, and I think that was a pretty good indicator of Ovett’s frailness in confidence that he wouldn’t want to be there and show Coe a thing or two. I think that he purposely avoided racing him.’
This is a theme that Scott returned to a couple of times during our interview: that Ovett was not as confident as he seemed. And he was not alone in voicing that opinion. ‘Steve was such a tremendous competitor and it showed by how he raced, but I don’t know if he was putting on a façade or what, but when he was off the track it seemed to me that he was really not a very confident person in his ability. I don’t know whether it was because we were his competitors and so he wanted to come across that way, or whether it truly is the case. But if you look at his career, he was always very dependent on [someone]. In the beginning his mum travelled with him wherever he went, to every race. Then it was Andy [Norman] and then it was his wife, so very rarely did you ever see him travel anywhere by himself.
‘There always had to be someone there to keep building him up and keep stroking his confidence. And again, from my conversations with him, I don’t think he was a real confident person. You certainly wouldn’t see it when he stepped on the line – all of a sudden he became a lion – but in between times he wasn’t that way. It was remarkable the things he would say. After a race, he would just be, like, “Gosh, I don’t know where that came from, I just felt ghastly going into that.” And I’m like, “Oh right!” So again, I don’t know if he was just playing a game, but
that was always my perception, that considering what he had accomplished he didn’t really come across as someone that had a lot of confidence.’
I interviewed Scott quite early on in the research for this book, and at the time his comments came as quite a surprise. I’d always felt that Ovett was shy, something he readily admits, but this was something new. Yet others would back it up, prompted or otherwise. One of Ovett’s later training partners, Bob Benn, put a different perspective on it: ‘I think it was quite an astute observation from Steve Scott really, because you know he [Ovett] travelled a lot with Rachel and perhaps a lot of people would frown on that. You are going off to break a world record, you don’t to the outside world turn it into a little “jolly”, take your wife or the girlfriend along. But that was important to him, that human side to Steve, which a lot of people found difficult to understand – because of the way he was portrayed and conveyed to the public at large. They couldn’t believe he had that side to him, but he certainly was a very sensitive person.’
In retrospect, I had had personal experience of Ovett’s need for company, but I had not given it any credence at the time. Prior to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, I had been the only British journalist at the Lausanne meeting. This was before the event became a Grand Prix and moved to the local football stadium. It was on a tiny municipal track down beside Lake Léman, and, similar to Koblenz on the Rhine, the floodlights would attract hordes of moths, lending the event an atmosphere of what Americans call a ‘cow-pasture meet’. Right up Ovett’s street, in fact. After the meeting, he asked if I wanted to accompany him on a training run the following morning. I gladly agreed, after being assured that it would be no more than a trot, to get the stiffness out of his legs. We ran down to the lakeside track, and when he said he wanted to do a few strides on the track, I turned to run back to the hotel. I was bemused when he insisted that I stay while he did his short session, but gave it no further thought until Scott and Benn started to discuss this side to his character.
