The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  One of the morale boosters’ preparations for Moscow were truncated when Coe caught a bad cold and withdrew from a 1500 metres in Stockholm, but Ovett was still backing Britain abroad. Two weeks after his mile record, he returned to Oslo. Unlike the mile record race, there was a top-class international field this time for the 1500 metres, including many of the men who would be forced to miss Moscow because of their various governments’ boycotts – John Walker of New Zealand, Thomas Wessinghage of West Germany, Steve Scott, Steve Lacy and Todd Harbour of the USA – as well as Graham Williamson, who was in the world’s top ten, but ‘only’ British number four. These were also most of the men who had been destroyed by Coe in the Golden Mile the year before. Ovett was going to pay them the same compliment.

  Chris Sly, another British sub-4 miler, was Ovett’s pacemaker this time, but his opening lap of 57.8 seconds was a couple of seconds shy of the required first lap. Scott, always willing to take it on, rushed through the second lap in 55.8 seconds. They were back on schedule. Scott led with a lap to go and then folded. The others were powerless to respond when Ovett made his move with 200 metres to go. Once again, it was that unstoppable acceleration that killed off the pursuers.

  Ovett gave the crowd a wave with fifty metres to go, which doubtless cost him a tenth or two, and hit the line in 3 minutes 32.09 seconds. It was six hundredths slower than Coe had run in Zurich, but, under the prevailing rules, he had equalled Coe’s world record of 3 minutes 32.1 seconds. More relevant was Wessinghage’s evaluation: ‘Never have I seen running like that, never! To run at that uneven pace, to fool around, to play to the crowd and to equal a world record . . . I cannot believe it. A year ago, I felt we were starting to run closer to Steve. I sensed he was human after all. Now I know I was wrong.’

  Ovett was ready for Moscow, and there were ten days of wonder and speculation before the 800 metres heats. But there had been heat of a different nature. If the pressure to boycott Moscow was significant to either Ovett or Coe, it certainly didn’t show in their races. They were both unbeaten for the year, with a world record or two to underline their superlative form. And, as far as the Thatcher government’s call for them not to go was concerned, for once they were on the same track at the same time.

  Most of the Moscow team members, but specially the prominent ones, were getting sackfuls of mail, either supportive or condemnatory, the latter often in the most vitriolic tones. Allan Wells, whose 100 metres victory in Moscow – on the same day as Daley Thompson’s win in the decathlon – paved a golden path for the Ovett–Coe double, thought the pressure from Downing Street was a disgrace. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in early 2004, Wells recalled, ‘I must have received six letters from No. 10, the last of which included a picture of a young girl sprawled dead on the ground, with a doll lying six inches from the tips of her fingers. It made me so angry I became even more determined to compete as long as the British Olympic Association did not insist otherwise. It was a very distasteful and underhand tactic; if at any time I had thought that by boycotting the Olympics one child was not going to be killed, then I wouldn’t have hesitated in staying behind, but in my heart I couldn’t see how my presence in Moscow was going to cause more deaths.’

  As a policeman, shot-putter Geoff Capes had a further burden, since civil servants were being put under extra pressure. Fortunately, each individual sports federation was given the choice, and the athletics federation overwhelmingly voted to go, so he was allowed to participate. Individually, Capes had an opportunity for the perfect response. When he retired a couple of years later, he voiced unequivocal criticism of commerce and industry being exempted from the boycott call – British companies supplied much of the field-event equipment to the Moscow organisers. For those who never saw Capes, either as a shot-putter, or as winner of the trash-TV show World’s Strongest Man, picture, if you will, Bluto in the Popeye cartoon, because Capes could have been the model for the huge, burly, bearded character. ‘There was a by-election the following year,’ Capes related. ‘And the Tory candidate came to my door. I pointed down the path and said, “There’s the gate, son. Don’t ever come through it again.”’

  Ovett was equally unsubtle, or rather, there were many who thought so. When he had broken the world mile record in Oslo, he had been wearing the Soviet vest that he had received in a swap following a European Cup match a couple of years earlier from Valery Abramov. He wore it frequently, he claimed, because it fitted perfectly, and there was no particular significance other than that. But, given the political furore over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and how it was going to affect the Olympic Games, in tandem with Ovett’s working-class-hero (and media hate-figure) status, this was seen as a left-wing statement. He recalls, ‘I am not naïve enough [to think] that sport should be divorced from politics, but I can’t see how politicians can argue the case for boycotts and whatever when they don’t do the same. I mean, Thatcher getting on her high horse, saying we should boycott this regime and God knows what else, it’s so naïve. I thought she was totally out of order. I’m glad that the Moscow Olympics didn’t fold up under the pressure of politics, because I think the sport would have suffered. And I’m equally sad that in LA the Russians boycotted, because at the end of the day it’s the athletes that suffer and no one else. There was no way I wasn’t going to go to Moscow and I don’t think there was any way Seb wasn’t going to go to Moscow. And I think the Russians were more than happy that we went, because if we’d have chucked in the towel, I don’t know what would have happened to the Olympics.’

  The irony of Coe’s opposition to the boycott was that he was a known Tory supporter, would end the decade as a candidate for the party, and ultimately be elected an MP in 1992. Now Lord Coe, he rubs shoulders occasionally with another Tory peer, Lord Hurd, later both home and foreign secretary but as Douglas Hurd a junior minister at the time of the Moscow Olympics. ‘I think we were all really paranoid,’ recalls Coe. ‘I was paranoid because I had a rearguard action here [we were talking in the Houses of Parliament]. My dad was brought in by a young Douglas Hurd to say, “Look, call your son off.” Dad always laughs about it, because when he was in the room, he could smell the perfume, and thought the PM [Thatcher] had been in. Four or five years ago, Douglas said, “I had a meeting with your father; he didn’t half argue well.” My dad said, “Look, he’s twenty-two, he has a degree in economics and history. I coach him, I don’t write the scripts. If you want to speak to him, I suggest you speak to him directly.”’

  The pressure was even worse in the USA, where at least President Jimmy Carter did try to suggest an alternative, even if it was risible. Kenny Moore, who had finished fourth in the Montreal Olympic marathon and was now athletics feature writer on Sports Illustrated, the world’s biggest-selling weekly sport magazine, was summoned by Carter and promised 2 million dollars to organise an alternative Games. ‘There was a lot of that going on,’ says Coe. ‘That was before we got there, but I was always aware, having made the point that I didn’t then want to do anything that overstepped the mark, and have the accusations flying back, “Yeah, we told you, these guys only wanted to get you there for PR purposes.” The joke of that is [Colin] Moynihan and I got portrayed as some sort of closest Commies. He ended up as Sports Minister and I ended up as Sports Council chairman, and members of the party, and still are. It was just grotesque.’

  The political preliminaries over, the athletes could get down to business. And business as usual meant that while Coe held a press conference, to which a multitude of 600 turned up, Ovett avoided the media – apart from signing a contract for three ‘exclusives’ with the Sunday People. I put it to him that that was not just contradictory, but hypocritical. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he retorted. I genuinely thought that it was time to have my own say. I was getting an awful lot of rather malicious press, rather snidey press, at the time, and I thought, Well, I’m not like that, I am not what they are portraying, this sort of arrogant brat, bastard, would never speak to the pr
ess, waves at the crowd . . . And I wasn’t like that and I thought, OK, I won’t try and rectify this, but I can say what I feel, and the People came along and they offered me a reasonable amount of money for an exclusive and I said, “Why not?”’

  The quotes were rehashed in ten thousand newspapers, magazines and television shows across the world. There might have been dozens of sports in the 1980 Olympic programme, with thousands of competitors, but, as Steve Scott said, and many other interviewees concurred, ‘It wasn’t the Moscow Olympics, it was the Coe–Ovett Olympics.’ Dave Moorcroft says, ‘It was an equal split: you were an Ovett person or a Coe person. It was brilliant. The world stopped at Moscow.’ Even in the USA, which ultimately boycotted, of course, Craig Masback recalls, ‘To the extent that the Moscow Games existed at all in the United States, the only significant stories related to Coe and Ovett and the 800 and 1500. My recollection was [that] those were the only races shown on television.’

  Ovett and Coe and their rivalry were even going to alter perceptions in the USA, whose television had been – more than most national television – almost wholly dedicated to domestic issues and athletes. US citizen Michael Carlson – now a British television commentator on US sports – had just come to live in London, and was working at that time for a television news agency. ‘One of the things we were interested in from the US point of view was the presence of American athletes in other guises, playing basketball for Spain, things like that. But, since athletics was still the focal point of the Games and since Coe and Ovett were as well known as anybody would have been in the States, there was a lot of interest. What it did do was give them the stage all to themselves, and create the impression for American TV that you didn’t necessarily need the Americans in those events to be able to create a competition that the audience would be interested in. Then, after the Olympics, they went into that couple of years’ span of breaking the records consecutively, and alternating, and although we did have American milers who would get in there – Steve Scott, Sydney Maree – it wasn’t that important, because it was “Coe this, Ovett that”.’

  Carlson also crystallised a difference in attitude that many people saw in the pair. ‘Coe was always a very reluctant interview once you were on camera. He’d be fine while you were talking, but when you turned the camera on, he’d be more guarded, as if there were secrets that were going to get out, that would do his opponents some good. You had the feeling he was looking at a larger agenda than at simply that interview at that moment, and was worried about the image he was projecting, or concerned, so wanted to keep control. With Ovett, you got the sense that he didn’t really care, maybe because the British press, that he wasn’t talking to, were going to say what they wanted anyway.’

  Whatever the difference, they couldn’t get away from each other. If Ovett had paid Coe the supreme compliment of changing his whole racing philosophy the previous year in order to chase records, then Coe and his father would return the compliment in kind in Moscow. In their discussions on tactics leading up to the Olympic races, the Coes decided that Seb should run them ‘Ovett-style’ – playing a waiting game before striking with 150–200 metres to go. It looked simple on paper, and so did the rest of the prognoses, because, on paper, Coe was fifteen metres faster than Ovett over 800 metres. But this was a race, not a time trial. There were no pacemakers here. What’s more, it was the Olympic Games.

  Athletes talk about a first Olympics being for ‘experience’, and that was certainly the case for Ovett. He had been out of his depth in Montreal. Yet, that begs a question about Ivo van Damme. He was a little older than Ovett, but had less experience. He had been in the European Junior 800 metres that Ovett had won in 1973, and the Belgian had failed to get a medal. He had not even reached the European Senior final the next year, when Ovett won silver. But in Montreal, van Damme had run out of his skin and it took two greats – Juantorena and Walker – to beat him. But van Damme had won two Olympic silver medals, at twenty-two! Did he ‘know’, somehow, that Montreal was going to be his only chance of Olympic glory? Did he have some sort of impetus, borne of premonition that he was going to die just three months later?

  In a lower register, Coe was even less experienced than van Damme. His first international win had been indoors. In his first big Games, the European Championships two years earlier, he had got carried away, no matter what his father said in justification, and been relegated to a bronze medal. His mile world record had come in his first ‘circuit’ event outside a couple of hops over the Channel to Brussels – at the Memorial van Damme. But none of the pundits cared about the lack of experience; we were interested only in the stats, and the stats said Coe was in a different league to Ovett over 800 metres. The latter had run only three low-key 800s in 1980, the fastest in 1 minute 46.6 seconds, over four seconds (or thirty metres) adrift of Coe’s world record. Similarly, Coe had run only one even lower-key 1500, a university match, in 3 minutes 45.1 seconds. It was plain: Coe would win the 800 metres and Ovett the 1500 metres.

  That was most commentators’ opinion. John Walker, the reigning 1500 metres champion, about to lose his crown no matter what, because of the boycott, was more ambivalent. Shortly after he had arrived in London that season, he had wandered from his nearby hotel down to the Crystal Palace Stadium, and clandestinely timed Ovett doing a session of interval training, also called ‘repetitions’, since the athlete repeats a number of fast runs over a determined distance – anything from 100 metres to a mile – with a brief period of jogging for recuperation between reps. The faster the rep and the shorter the recuperation, the fitter the athlete – in theory. ‘He didn’t know I was there,’ recalls Walker. ‘When I tried to repeat the session he did, I couldn’t do it. The way he was running, he could have won anything. I mean, Ovett could have won the 800 and the 1500. But so could Coe.’

  So there we were, no wiser. And the heats and semi-finals did nothing to disabuse anyone of their beliefs. Ovett won his in 1 minute 49.4 seconds, and 1 minute 46.6 seconds, equalling his year’s fastest. Coe won his in 1 minute 48.5 seconds and 1 minute 46.7 seconds.

  But even here Ovett was going to make, if not a song and dance of his victories, then certainly a mystery-trip. After his first-round win, he slowed to a walk, smiled and seemed a first to be waving. Even his close friend and training partner Matt Paterson, watching from the stands with Ovett’s parents, remembers, ‘I didn’t know what was going on. I thought, Oh he’s doing some sign language. I thought it was just Steve playing games, like he usually does.’

  Few of us get to be actors even on a minor stage, let alone the biggest in the world – live at an Olympics when you are the focus of millions of people. If you get that chance, you can project whatever persona you like; you can be what you want to be. Ovett played a part, and the audience loved it. In the past it had been the wave – of fun, of joy, of victory and, to some, of arrogance. In Moscow, it became a personal message to his wife-to-be. When the audience, millions of times bigger than at Crystal Palace or any other athletics event, discovered what it was, they loved it even more. Ovett says, ‘Women remember that more than the race.’

  After his semi-final victory, Ovett repeated the gesture, and the television commentators were so intrigued that they asked viewers to call or write in with suggestions, since Ovett was keeping his counsel at that stage. David Coleman, the lead BBC commentator, reported dismissively that ‘one lady’ suggested that Ovett was tracing the letters ‘ILY’ in the sky. But even the object of the exercise was ignorant of its intent, as she watched back home in Maidstone. ‘I didn’t know what it was,’ recalls the then Rachel Waller, but ‘my brother turned to me and said, “That’s for you. It’s I Love You.” I realised it then.’

  That simple gesture was going to take on a life of its own. It started a process which would take a few days to come to fruition, but when it did, it was going to have a serious impact, not only on Steve Ovett’s chances of an unforgettable Olympic double, but on his future relationship with hi
s supportive and protective parents.

  In the interim, just about the only people who thought Ovett was going to win the 800 metres were his family, his coach Harry Wilson and the ever-supportive Matt Paterson. ‘When we got to the stadium, I said, “Steve, you’ll win the 800,”’ says Paterson. ‘We knew he could win the 800 and even Steve knew he could win the 800. It was just like it was predetermined. He had never had any other thought about the races apart from winning the 800. We knew that Coe had never beaten Steve in any competitive 800 metres race. The last time was in Prague and Steve had beaten him. Steve was underestimated as an 800 metres runner, and he was in bloody good shape. He was full of confidence and he knew that he could handle the heats and the semis and the final, and everything else. Steve was that kind of person, he loved the competitive edge of these major championships and he looked forward to it. I remember walking to the stadium with his father and his mum, and Mick was saying, “What do you think?” and I said, “Well, who’s going to beat him?” I was surprised that other people thought that he wouldn’t win it.’

  Coe himself had begun to have doubts. His father had realised there was something wrong, that his son was nervous, like he once had been as a schoolboy. But, for once, Peter went against his better judgement, and kept quiet. ‘The day before the race, and particularly the day of it, I was saying to myself, “Do I give him a firm lecture about concentration, or do I compound it?” I think I should have said a lot more of the things that are natural to me.’

  Brendan Foster was sharing a room in the Olympic village with Coe, and recalls, ‘I remember seeing him going off to the track to run the 800 metres final and he looked really confused.’ Coe admits that, for virtually the only time in his life, he had trouble sleeping: ‘In the European Junior Championships, I nearly missed the race because I was asleep! I have never had a problem, but this was the first time I couldn’t sleep. The following morning in the cafeteria, I dropped a jug of milk. I felt uncoordinated. By the time I got to the stadium, I remember thinking, Oh, let’s just get through this. It wasn’t: Let’s go out there and kick some arse.’