The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  To make matters worse, when Coe saw Ovett warming up with Dave Warren, he felt it was ominous, because, as neatly as there were Coe and Ovett camps, there are still those who believe that the short period that Warren spent at the front of the race was prearranged as pacing for Ovett. Warren, after all, had paced Ovett in several races prior to Moscow. Alan Pascoe, former European 400 metres hurdles champion, and long-time head of the company which markets British athletics, was just one of the people I interviewed who trotted this out as if it were scripture. Coe’s biographer, David Miller, makes the same allegation in Running Free.

  Ovett says he would never ask someone to do that in an Olympic final, and Warren continues to be exasperated by the suggestion: ‘I’m disappointed, because when you get to the Olympic final, there is no one who could ask you, tell you. It wasn’t even certain that I would get to the final, but once I did, it was never mentioned. And the way the race went was quite extraordinary. Everyone, myself included, thought Sebastian Coe would go off quickly, but he didn’t.’

  Until an hour before the race, Warren also thought that Coe was going to win: ‘I did, until we were held in the warm-up room, in the bowels of the Moscow stadium. They got us into this room for a very long time, over forty-five minutes before the start of the race, in this airless, dim concrete room. And there were seven of us there, and no Ovett. It was last into the blocks, first one out, and I think he was applying this sort of psychology. He did trot in about ten minutes after the rest of us, and I have to say that Seb was very, very nervous. I mean, everyone was nervous, it would be unnatural if we weren’t, but he was very nervous. I looked at him and I thought, My word, strange ...’

  Ovett admits that he got to the ‘call-room’ after the others, but all he was doing was utilising his experience: ‘I didn’t know I arrived late into the call-room. I always make sure that I don’t spend any unnecessary time in there. I think a lot of athletes get panicky and they go in quickly. I remember saying to Harry, “I am not going to sit in there with that lot. That is the last thing I want to do.” So we waited until the final “if you don’t come now, you are disqualified” type of thing. I went into the call-up area, and they were sitting around and I thought, Well, I will shake everybody’s hands now. I shook their hands, and Seb was looking terribly nervous, and I said, “Look, no matter what happens out there, the sun’s gonna rise tomorrow.” Nobody said anything at all. It was all hush, deathly quiet.’

  Ovett says that this was ingenuous – ‘that’s the way I am’ – which may be true. At the same time, it’s the best bit of gamesmanship you could conceive: thanking your competitors for turning up, because you’re not going to see them again. I suggested to Ovett that his were the actions of someone who was supremely confident. ‘Not at all,’ he claimed, ‘probably quite the opposite. I was probably as nervous as any of them, you know. I generally felt empathy for all of us in there. I knew the sort of pressure I felt, and I knew what sort of pressure Seb felt inside, and Dave [Warren] was there as well. So I thought, Well, you know, shake their hands now, and if afterwards everybody is weeping and wailing, there might not be an opportunity to do the same thing.’

  David Moorcroft, who could have run in the 1500 metres but had opted for the 5000, was an enthralled spectator, and an even more avid viewer afterwards. He has watched the race video dozens of times, as has Coe. Moorcroft recalls, ‘As he walked out to the line, Steve Ovett was in control of that situation; he looked in control. Seb looked frightened, and as they were running round on that first lap, Seb lost control, and couldn’t get in the right position and didn’t know what to do and looked very tense. I just don’t think he saw the escape route, and, the thing is, there is a dimension missing in TV, there’s an extra dimension that TV doesn’t show. Things are happening at speed, even at 54 seconds or whatever the pace was, things are happening quickly, and reaction time is much less than television gives the appearance, and Seb just didn’t make the right choices at the right time.’

  Dave Warren saw his opportunity, and took the lead. ‘We ambled through the first lap, which raises all sorts of questions. I mean, when you’re going through at that sort of pace . . . I wasn’t a fast finisher, so you decide what you’re going to do. Everyone’s watching Coe and Ovett, so you make the decision of trying to get ten metres, and if you get ten metres, who knows what’s going to happen? You might get a bronze medal. And, in a way, today, I’m much happier at having had a go, rather than stay at the back, and end up eighth anyway, so no regrets there. But, to this day, I’m still surprised that Seb Coe didn’t go out. Even more surprised he spent most of the first lap running in lane three. Very bizarre.’

  Ovett admits, ‘It was a scrappy race, a slow, scrappy race. And I think that was because everybody was assuming that both of us were going to go off like ten men. And I certainly wasn’t going to do it, and Seb obviously decided that was going to be his tactic. Maybe that was Seb’s mistake, because in a physical race, obviously, he is not very strong. He finds himself having to go wide, and not really wanting to make a physical challenge.’

  The most extraordinary aspect of Coe’s tactics in the race is related to that wide position he adopted. Because, out in lane three, he was well placed to see that Ovett was ‘boxed’, blocked by other competitors, in this case the two giant East Germans. It should have given him a crucial edge, and more than offset the fact that by running wide he was wasting precious energy. Coe can see it now: ‘There’s one point in the race where he’s buried, absolutely buried. He is coming down the finishing straight for the first time, and there is a wall of East Germans, and they weren’t small those guys. They were bigger than him.’

  Well, in one sense they were. But, as Moorcroft says, ‘Steve was patient, but there was a point down the back straight where there was an element of fortune. And [BBC TV’s] David Coleman did it perfectly in the commentary. There was a head-on shot of Ovett, and he wasn’t panicking, but he knew he had to do a bit of “physical”, and Coleman said, “Ovett, those blue eyes, like chips of ice.” It was spot-on, because you could see in his eyes absolute determination but no panic.’

  If the East Germans reminded Ovett of anything, it would have been of Prague, where he had made the mistake of concentrating on one man – Coe. Ovett suggests now that, among everything that he had ever learned in training and racing, this was to be the lesson that would deliver him the Olympic gold medal: ‘I didn’t even think of Seb in that race. If you look at that race, I wasn’t concentrating on Seb, I wasn’t looking for him, I wasn’t behind him waiting for him to move or whatever. I ran strictly on my own tempo, my own rhythm, I never watched anybody who was going to be a danger and I just went when I had to. And anybody that bumped off me, which a few of them did, then they just bumped off me.’ That was putting it mildly. As everyone admits, Ovett included, his tactics would get him disqualified today. Because he ran through the tall figures in front of him, scattering them like cardboard cut-outs.

  Call it Zen, call it the zone, call it total commitment, call it what you will, but Ovett had become the race. He was consumed by the race. There was nothing else in his world for those two minutes. He wasn’t thinking of all the training he’d done over the years, all those Sunday mornings over the South Downs with Matt Paterson, all those dark, cold nights on Preston Park with his dad flashing the torch on and off to indicate another 400 metres of effort. He wasn’t thinking of his failure in Montreal four years earlier, and how he had to rectify the fault. He wasn’t thinking about all the times when he’d been in a similar situation, and had twitched into action, and left the opposition in the dust and rubber. He didn’t need to think of any of those things; they were assimilated. Nor was he thinking about his mum, and her care and her chiding, and her righteous anger. He wasn’t even thinking about Rachel, and her love for him and his love for her. He certainly wasn’t thinking about Seb Coe. That was plain. He never gave him so much as a glance. The lesson of Prague had been assimilated. He didn’t have t
o think about it. He didn’t have to think about anything. He was the race.

  Coe, on the other hand, was wandering in a dispirited world. Graham Williamson talked to me about sleepwalking through the 1982 Commonwealth Games 1500 metres final, not knowing where he was, not switched on. This is what Coe was doing in Moscow. I would venture that the sole reason was Steve Ovett. He had seen Ovett win too many times. He had seen Ovett beat him too many times: just twice, but that was two too many. Soon it was going to be three. When Coe lurched into action it was far too late, a lap too late, a lifetime too late. Those prior losses to Ovett had taken their toll. Ovett’s whole demeanour, the bustle, the braggadocio, the hand-off, the panache, the wave, the handshake, even the ‘ILY’ – all staged as they may have been, on the testimony of many, who felt that this was not the ‘real’ Steve Ovett – conspired to convince Sebastian Coe that he could not beat Steve Ovett on that day and at that time.

  Ovett cruised through the line, and into a twilight zone. The huge crowd was cheering and applauding, but it was muted. The great confrontation had not happened. It wasn’t Ovett’s fault: he had done everything necessary to win, frightened the life and speed out of his principal opponent, and all the others, and run the perfect race. He was entitled to grin, and raise a clenched fist, a gesture captured in a thousand photographs. He looked over to his parents and Matt Paterson and shared their joy. He wrote another love letter to Rachel, and then he looked up into the stands and became aware of what he’d done. ‘I looked up at the press and the TV and the athletes and everybody there, and there was just indifference and shock and disbelief,’ he recalls. ‘And I thought, God, that is bloody amazing. In the Olympic stand with the press and the athletes, there were only two people standing there clapping: Geoff Capes and David Jenkins. It was very strange. You reached the pinnacle of your career, and I had won everything that I wanted to win up to the Olympics, and I wanted to win the Olympics, I won the Olympics, and I thought, There should be more than this. I am not saying it was something which I couldn’t deal with, but I did feel that other people’s reactions were strange.

  ‘I went out to Moscow to win. I hadn’t been beaten in any races. People forget that I beat Seb before at the 800, in Prague, and they said that he ran badly in the 800 metres in Moscow. I don’t think they gave me credit for running the way that I ran. I ran to win. I had always dreamed of winning the Olympics, you know, and after the disappointment of Montreal, I said to my father, “Look, if I ever get to the Olympics again, I will not make any mistakes.” So I was very determined that any chance of winning a medal was going to be given a hundred per cent. No matter who was in the race, no matter how their credentials stacked up.

  ‘I think one of the headlines was “THE BAD GUY WINS”! And I thought, Where has this come from, where has this bad guy come from? Because I didn’t ever think that I was a bad guy. I mean, OK, I was slightly unorthodox, but I thought I had won enough races to make people appreciate that I was talented enough to be accepted. In the village, there were a lot of people who didn’t know what to say or do. That is probably one of the things that at the time was very hurtful to me.’

  Ovett was equally disappointed by the reaction of the British media then, and later: ‘Even Mary Peters. I recently heard her on the radio, saying that she was devastated, or something like that. She rushed off to see Seb at the Olympic village to sort of try and rally him, and I thought, What was the matter with me? Why didn’t somebody say, “Well done, Steve?” It was like a vacuum, I ran into a vacuum. I ran the race, and no one seemed to be bothered, and it was a very strange thing. I remember walking back to the Olympic village and thinking, Is this all it is? Is this all you get for winning the Olympics? I thought, God, what have I done? It wasn’t as if I had committed a heinous crime. I mean, OK, so I rubbed the press up the wrong way, but I still won for Britain. And yet I looked up, I literally crossed the line, looked up to the press box, and there were people sitting there with their arms folded. There weren’t many people coming up to pat me on the back. They were generally shocked. I think there was a genuine feeling of shock throughout the team, and team management, and from the press.’

  There is an intriguing, graphic footnote to the Moscow Olympics 800 metres, and Ovett’s post-race clenched-fist salute. Prior to the Golden League meeting in Rome 2003, my good friend, former Italian international runner and now journalist Franco Fava, mentioned to another colleague, Augusto Frasca, that I was researching this book. Frasca turned up to the meeting in the Olympic Stadium carrying a large volume under his arm. It was a beautifully produced book – as only the Italians know how – reproductions of paintings by modern artist Angelo Titonel. Prominent on its pages are three dozen studies of Ovett’s Moscow victory pose, entitled Il Vincitore (The Winner). Even better, one of the studies is on the front cover of the book. There is also a postcard of one of the images, with a very Italian interpretation of Ovett’s gesture: the card has ‘Ciao Mamma’ written across it. While we were leafing through the book, British photographer Mark Shearman came across to take a look. He immediately identified the painting as taken from one of his photos in Moscow. This could have raised copyright issues, but Titonel had foreseen the possibility: in place of the clenched fist, he has made Ovett’s hand open, with fingers outstretched.

  The last word on the Moscow 800 metres should go to Seb Coe. Over twenty years after the event, his summation is concise and damning, of himself: ‘It was just a fuck-up from beginning to end. If you ever wanted to [show] somebody [how] to make every mistake in an 800 metres, just [tell them to] watch this! You won’t need to watch another video of any race because every mistake you can make at 800, I made. I was too far off the back, too wide, too diffident, [there were] exit routes available which I didn’t take, not covering the breaks, then coming too slow, too fast at the end. You know the whole thing was completely wrong, but actually we are talking logically and there was no logic that day.’

  Coe admits that, had he lost the 1500 metres, too, he might have given up. That is not something to confess lightly. There were times during our interviews in 2003 that I felt he was glossing the past, which makes this admission – and the possibility – even more extraordinary. Having seen the way he ran in the Moscow 1500 metres, and in Los Angeles four years later, it’s difficult to imagine that such resolution could have been short-circuited.

  But Brendan Foster had little doubt that another defeat at Moscow would have finished Coe. ‘That was the time when Seb literally could have given up his career, between that 800 metres final and the 1500. He was almost like, “This is not what I want to do any more,” and I felt he was at breaking point then. If he hadn’t won that 1500 in Moscow, he might never have run again.’

  Peter Coe was going to leave no insult unsaid in his bid to ensure that ‘his athlete’ came good. It was not done privately, either. Even the media were shocked at the immediate, public dressing-down. ‘When he came off the track after the 800,’ Peter recalls, ‘I said, “You ran like an idiot, I can’t believe it.”’ It only got worse. As Coe came into the press conference, Peter was already seated there, even more incensed, and told him bluntly, ‘You ran like a cunt.’ Coe told me it was mouthed, or whispered, but, to those present, it was as soft as a stage whisper at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. Alan Parry was BBC radio’s athletics correspondent at the time, and was shocked to hear Peter’s brusque assessment of his son. In a BBC radio programme in early 2003 – another example of the enduring interest in the pair – Parry recalled it as ‘a very audible whisper. I thought it was a bit over the top to do that in front of all the press.’

  Coe could not mask his disappointment on the victory rostrum, and Clive James, writing for the Observer, described his handshake with Ovett, ‘as if he’d just been handed a turd’. Coe believes his attitude was misinterpreted: ‘It’s always taken out of context. I was grey and I was sullen, and it was nothing to do with Steve. I got the silver and I was disappointed. I knew how badly I’d
run; nobody needed to tell me that.’ Dave Moorcroft concurs: ‘Seb was less good at hiding his frustration. Steve has always been better at treating success and failure with equanimity. But I’ve seen Steve in private moments, and he’s not a great loser.’

  But Ovett was not a loser, at least not this time. After all the years of effort, it was time for a little celebration, but first he went to find Harry Wilson, who had gone out to paint the town with fellow coach Ron Holman. Ovett scribbled a note to Wilson and left it on his pillow. It read, ‘Tiger! I hope you’re as proud of me as I am of you – Steve.’ In his book Running Dialogue, Wilson describes finding the message: ‘I couldn’t speak, but really that little old bit of paper is probably the most important thing I’ve ever had out of athletics.’

  While Coe went to face continuing recriminations with his father, Adrian Metcalfe, who would produce television documentaries with both men over the next two years, witnessed an unusual side to Ovett at his parents’ hotel that evening. ‘After the 800 metres, all the Ovett clan and Andy, of course, and lots of hangers-on, we all went back to the Ukrainia Hotel – dreadful thing, a skyscraper hotel, nasty, seedy sort of place. But we sort of took over the dining room and we ordered all the champagne that they had in the building. There was a little Irishman who suddenly appeared from nowhere, and he jumped up onto the table with all this cutlery and glasses, and food and champagne bottles and everything. And he starts dancing on the table and shouting, “Steve Ovett, you are bloody, fucking brilliant,” and Steve started to laugh. It was like suddenly he let everything go and he was just weeping with laughter. He was laughing and laughing and laughing at this funny little leprechaun who was jumping up and down, and you could see finally he was beginning to understand what he’d done. That was two or three hours after the race.