by Pat Butcher
If it was the case that Ovett harboured profound doubts about his ability, among the media adulation at Coe’s mile record, there were a couple of writers who reminded Ovett what he’d missed. The Guardian’s John Rodda, who would be Ovett’s biographer five years later, wrote, ‘Last night’s mile . . . was the greatest race of all time, with the tenth man to finish, Ken Hall of Australia, doing so in 3.55.3. Steve Ovett must really eat his words about the victory in the race he missed being hollow.’ Frank McGhee in the Daily Mirror gloated: ‘Sebastian Coe established himself as indisputably the world’s greatest middle-distance runner. How does that feel, Steve Ovett?’
Provincial journalists – as Reg Hook, the Brighton Argus correspondent, pointed out – had a different agenda. Coe had brought the mile record back to Britain – its spiritual home. But residents of his adopted county would go a step further – he had brought it back to Yorkshire, since the previous British record-holder had been Derek Ibbotson, from Longwood Harriers, Huddersfield. And Granville Beckett, Ibbo’s clubmate and Yorkshire Post athletics correspondent, could tell Scott, Walker, Coghlan and co., maybe even Coe, a thing or two, because after the 800 metres record two weeks earlier, Beckett had written, ‘the next time Coe runs a mile, he’ll break that world record as well’. The Post did a ‘rag-out’: they reprinted Beckett’s forecast on the front page.
Ovett was canvassed for a response, which managed to be appreciative while carrying a sting in the tail. ‘Congratulations to Seb, he is running brilliantly at the moment. To be honest, when you hear times like that they can be quite frightening, but for me it doesn’t change anything. I don’t get caught up in times. I never run against the clock. I run against men on the day.’ This unequivocal philosophy would, however, be thrown out without a backward glance within the month.
Coe was in the zone, and underlined it with his most authoritative 800 metres victory, from a competitive point of view. Languishing near the back of the field on the opening lap of the European Cup final in Torino, he turned on the after-burners in the last 200 metres and flayed the opposition, which included Willi Wülbeck – who had elbowed him off the track in the same event two years before – and Olaf Beyer, who had outwitted him and Ovett in the European Championships the previous year. Coe then ran the last lap of the 4 × 400 metres relay in 45.5 seconds. This was off a rolling start, taking the baton on the run, but nevertheless put Ovett’s time for the distance in the shade.
A middle-distance hat-trick beckoned, and Coe would respond with his third world record in forty-one days. He has always maintained that when an approach was made to include Ovett – whether Ovett knew about or not – in the field for Zurich on 15 August, he did not demur. ‘What I did say in Zurich,’ Coe recalls, ‘was “I don’t mind who runs, but you won’t get a world record because there is no way I’m bloody going out there to do a pacemaking job for some guy who leeches off me and then comes by in the last thirty paces.” I guess even then it was worth a hundred thousand dollars from [US network] NBC to get the record. So Brügger says, “No, I think I’ll stick to the record rather than a head-to-head.” And it suited me in a way, because I didn’t particularly want that to occur before an Olympic championship.’ Andreas Brügger was the patrician promoter of the Weltklasse in Zurich, and he would become a family friend of the Coes.
So Ovett was out, and the record attempt was on. Yet it almost went awry, and was a reminder of how inexperienced Coe was at this level. The pacemaker, Kip Koskei of Kenya, whisked through the first 400 metres in 54.25 seconds, with Coe right behind and the rest nowhere. This was the sort of pace that Coe was running on the first lap of an 800 metres just a couple of years earlier, and was almost suicidal in the longer race. Koskei throttled back, but the damage could have been done, had Coe not been in such superb form.
At 800 metres, he was still well ahead, both of the rest and of the world record. When Koskei dropped out, Coe had no option but to go for it alone. He managed it, but only just, taking one tenth of a second of Bayi’s world record, with 3 minutes 32.1 seconds. Coe became the first man in history to hold the three classic middle-distance world records, although another all-time great, Jim Ryun, had once held the half-mile (negligible difference to 800 metres), 1500 metres and mile records. Being bracketed alongside Ryun was no shame. On the contrary, it was confirmation of Coe’s elevation to the pantheon of middle-distance gods.
A decade and a half before the broadsheet newspaper sports supplement became commonplace, even the news-cluttered front page of the Daily Telegraph (The Times was on strike) found space for reports and photos of all of Coe’s records. That had much to do with the enduring resonance of those 800 metres (or half-mile) and mile records. Former double world record-holder Sydney Wooderson was quoted: ‘I could not keep up with the intense competition nowadays. It is incredible that Coe should break these records in such a short time.’
Ovett, in comparison, was looking increasingly mortal. And the bracketing of Coe with Ryun will have hit him especially hard, since Ryun had been Ovett’s hero in his mid-teens, to the extent that, as will be recalled, Ovett tried to ape the American’s training. But Ovett was about to pay Coe an even greater compliment, although it’s doubtful he saw it that way. He was going to jettison his oftstated philosophy of racing the man rather than the watch. Steve Ovett was going record chasing. It was apostasy! He shrugged it off, but even his pals were surprised, and maybe a little disappointed.
Coe recalls being taken aback, too. ‘I was surprised that he went for it in such a big way, because he’s a remarkably independent thinker, [but] it’s human nature with competition. He suddenly looked at a guy who was beginning to trespass into his areas.’ Dave Cocksedge, though, is still bemused by Ovett’s decision: ‘That was a strange thing, wasn’t it? I couldn’t really understand that. He may have been influenced by Andy [Norman] or someone [else] to start record chasing.’
Reg Hook, the Brighton club president, has a theory that Ovett’s decision had something to do with the increasing problems at home over Rachel. ‘It did surprise me that he was going for these world records with a pacemaker. If he was getting world records in a good race, that wouldn’t have surprised me at all, because he had such talent. But I think he had this problem at home, so he wasn’t getting any advice from home, and I think to a certain extent Andy Norman stepped in. He was going into these races where he had his pacemaker and that is not the type of event that he really enjoyed. It’s nice to have a world record, but I’m certain he found competition much more attractive.’
Matt Paterson had been trying to get Ovett to go faster for years, and welcomed the move. ‘Up to then, I don’t think Steve was interested: he just wanted to win and win well. I would say to him, “Look, you can run faster than that, you are bloody just jogging. Why don’t you start going for times?” If you are in a sport like athletics where it is very objective, you are measured according to how fast you run. I mean, you have to do it. But I think he got drawn into it because, as the sport became more professional, I think he had to start chasing times. I think Andy was behind a lot of that as well, you know. He wanted to see Steve going for records because Coe had started breaking the world records.’
Once he had decided, Ovett went at it full bore. And it says much for his talent and determination that he got so close to Coe’s mile record at a venue not known for track world records – Crystal Palace. Paterson voices the view of the cognoscenti when he says, ‘You know what Crystal Palace is like [in] September [in fact, 31 August] – usually windy, no one breaks world records there. And no one knew about it. I don’t think even Harry Wilson [Ovett’s coach] knew about it. Thomas Wessinghage was involved in the pace setting, I remember. I was sitting with all the other coaches, and I think they went through [the first two laps] in something like 54/55 seconds and 1.52/1.53 seconds. And they were all going, “What is going on here? This is world-record pace.” And I said, “Oh yes, I think it is.” And he ran 3.49 point something. It was a great race
and I think he came away thinking to himself, God, I think I can go after some of these records. He got a big kick out of that, and it probably still is one of the fastest times ever run at Crystal Palace.’
Ovett ran 3 minutes 49.6 seconds. It was the fastest time ever recorded in Britain, but three fifths of a second slower than Coe’s world record, and a fifth slower than John Walker’s previous best. Ovett was the third fastest in history, and still had not lost a middle-distance race for over two years. Coe, nursing a minor injury that had ended his season, watched appreciatively from the stands. ‘It was as perfect a race as I’ve ever seen, a real classy run,’ he remembered.
When he had graduated from Loughborough earlier in the year, Coe had been planning a career in the City. He even had an interview lined up for the Foreign Desk at Barclays. The world records had changed all of that, and Coe was starting to get the spin-offs from his classy runs, one of which was a top-of-the-range Saab. His close friend and training partner at Loughborough Steve Mitchell recalls, ‘He couldn’t even drive at the time. I don’t think those things changed him, he was very level-headed.’ If Coe was ever embarrassed at the image he was projecting, one occasion was as a result of an impromptu remark following an interview with Frank Bough on BBC TV. Bough ended the exchange with Coe by saying, ‘What an attractive young man.’ As Coe told his biographer David Miller, ‘I got the most impossible stick for months afterwards. I couldn’t go anywhere without ribald remarks being made.’
Coe was also present at Ovett’s next world-record attempt, at 1500 metres in Brussels. This had been Coe’s first foreign independent meeting three years earlier, and he was fêted by the organisers – driven around the track to the strains of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule Britannia’. Ovett took up the British baton, and ran with it. This time, he was just eight hundredths of a second from Coe’s world record.
Coe had had an annus mirabilis, but Ovett had had a finis proximus. There was little doubt that, had they been on the track together in any of those races, the result could have gone either way. But the world records were all Coe’s, and, for the first time, Ovett was in the lee. As he was in the final event of the year, the Coke Meeting at Crystal Palace, where he had another go in the mile. He clocked a ‘disappointing’ 3 minutes 55.3 seconds.
But the British public was justifiably agog, as was a reasonable part of the rest of the world. In the wake of Coe and Ovett (strictly in that order, for the first time), thirteen other Brits broke 4 minutes for a mile that year. It is a statistic which provokes awe and wonder at the start of the twenty-first century. The British hold on the golden distance – the mile (and its metric counterpart, the 1500 metres) – was total. In the wake of Ovett’s win the previous year, Sir Roger Bannister presented Coe with the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. All that remained for the pair at that point was to hold it all together for the Olympic Games.
16
Zen and the Art of Winning
Nothing becomes a champion more than a rival. A champion can exist in isolation, beating all-comers into submission and the rest of us into boredom. But, ultimately, it is rivalry which determines the champion, because the essence and raison d’être of sport is competition – between peers, with the result in doubt. It is a shame that so much credence has been given to that other arbiter of running excellence – the stopwatch. Both Coe and Ovett had proven they could run against the clock, but now they needed each other as foils to prove their greatness. And, finally, now they were both at their best, they were going to get the opportunity on the greatest stage – the Olympic Games.
By the time they reached the start line of the Olympic 800 metres final in Moscow on 26 July, the excitement was palpable, and a British TV audience of close to 20 million was testimony to that. The massive interest was partly because the build-up had begun the year before. Propagandists for heavyweight boxing bouts are probably the experts at ‘selling’ confrontation – often without the slightest notion of competitive excellence – but a couple of the most talented ‘amateur’ athletes in history managed to turn the game into an art-form in the months leading up to Moscow.
The bruiser Ovett must take a lot of the credit for that. Or maybe ‘blame’ is the appropriate word. He doesn’t remember now, he says – and Coe has either forgotten or forgiven; and in the grand Olympic scheme of things maybe it doesn’t matter so much – but in the early weeks of the 1980 summer season, Ovett tried to jump into a couple of Coe’s domestic races, even going so far as to issue a challenge via the national press. It’s difficult to see this as anything other than gamesmanship on Ovett’s part, trying to unsettle his rival before Moscow. Ovett, who was due to run in the 800 metres at the Philips Night of Athletics at Crystal Palace on 21 May, switched to Coe’s event, the Bannister Mile, a tribute race to Sir Roger. The upshot was that Coe moved to the 800 metres, which he won as comfortably as Ovett won the mile, neither man extending himself on the track.
Ovett did the same thing the following week at the Inter-Counties Championships, switching to the mile and again forcing Coe into the 800 metres. Ovett then compounded the insult by not turning up, and Coe turned to the media for revenge. ‘Both the AAA and Ovett are well aware that any world-class athlete programmes his season to be at a racing peak at certain planned times,’ he said. ‘Steve Ovett has never in the past been prepared to run in a race which did not suit his purpose and has been known to manipulate the field for his races . . . It is wrong of him and the AAA, besides being unfair to the public, to contrive a race between us as short notice . . . I look forward to racing Ovett when I’m ready.’
Coe went back to what he did best, and completed a run of four 800 metres races in ten days, with the last two, 1 minute 45 seconds and 1 minute 44.7 seconds, the fastest in the world for the year. That was his two-lap preparation for Moscow. Ovett, meanwhile, dragged potential Moscow 1500 metres colleague Steve Cram to the fastest time for a teenager at Crystal Palace, 3 minutes 35.6 seconds, three tenths behind Ovett himself. Cram fuelled the hype by saying, ‘I think someone will beat Steve this year. He doesn’t seem to have that little bit of zap he has had in the past.’
With six weeks to go until Moscow, anticipation levels were hiked up to breaking point when the pair broke world records within an hour of each other in Oslo in late July. The Bislet Stadium was the venue for several of their records, and anyone who ever attended a meeting there on a calm, warm, sunny summer’s night will testify to the magical quality of the place. Oslo is small and accessible for a capital city, and the Bislet Games and Oslo Games each summer became the focus for the knowledgeable citizens. The stadium is right in the middle of the town, across the road from a brewery, and flanked on either side by apartment blocks. The track had always been six lanes, which means that the spectators are much closer to the athletes than with the typical eight-lane track. It was common practice for the trackside spectators to lean over and bang on the metal advertising hoardings as the athletes passed, adding further noisy impetus to the races. Throughout this period, a 20,000 full house was guaranteed for the two big meetings each summer.
A year on from breaking the world records for 800 metres and the mile at Bislet, Coe set out to capture the rarely run 1000 metres record on the same track. The previous mark of 2 minutes 13.9 seconds had been set in Oslo six years before by the 1976 Olympic 800 metres bronze medallist, Rick Wolhuter of the USA. As with Coe’s 1500 metres record at the end of the previous season, the pace seemed almost suicidal on the first lap. This was the start of a new pacing era, and there weren’t sufficiently experienced athletes to undertake the job. Trinidad’s Mike Solomon whisked through a lap of 50.1 seconds, which would have been fast for an 800 metres record attempt. But, again, Coe held on, although Willi Wülbeck pulled back thirty metres on the last lap. Coe crossed the line in 2 minutes 13.4 seconds, and was now, like Henry Rono the previous year, the holder of four world records concurrently. That status would last precisely one hour – until Ovett crossed the fini
sh line in the mile.
That race had an extra significance for two of the younger Brits, Steve Cram and Graham Williamson, since they had been asked to treat it as a run-off for the remaining place in the 1500 metres team for Moscow. They were about to receive a master-class in miling, and a stunning riposte to Cram’s contention that Ovett lacked ‘zap’. The British ‘third man’ in the Moscow 800 metres, Dave Warren, supplied the early pace, and this time it was spot-on: 55.5 seconds and 1 minute 53.5 seconds. Ovett then took it on himself, ran the hard penultimate lap almost a second faster than Coe had done the previous year, before cruising the final lap to end with 3 minutes 48.8 seconds, taking a fifth of a second off Coe’s record. Behind him, Cram finished second, getting the nod for Moscow over Williamson, who was third.
The shadow of Afghanistan lay over preparations for Moscow, but the Daily Express alluded to hardship at home with its front-page splash, adjacent to photos of Coe and Ovett. Under the headline ‘Smashing For Britain’, and the strapline, ‘Gloom Beaters Coe and Ovett Stun Crowd’, the intro ran, ‘Super athletes Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett put the life and fire back into gloomy Britain last night . . . which can’t be a bad tonic for a country suffering the economic blues.’
