The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  ‘You are in a zone really once it’s finished. The first thing you want to do is just go back to your bedroom and close the door. You don’t go round saying, “I’ve won, I’ve won, great, let’s celebrate.” There is a huge tidal wave that comes after it, but it’s almost plaintive, it’s almost a kind of huge sadness that descends on you in a way because of the enormity of what you’ve gone through and the whole history behind you that has pushed you there, being on your back, this kind of liberation. It’s like a man coming out of jail, just like Mandela coming out of Robben Island. Everybody wants him to cheer and in fact he’s a stranger in this land, he’s a different person now. Steve was a different person. And suddenly [there are] all these complicated things that you can’t realise or analyse. Nevertheless, he burst into hysterical laughter at this leprechaun.’

  Coe was having a rather more sober interlude with his father, which must have begun from the premise that he couldn’t sink any lower. ‘We had a long chat, but we didn’t agonise. There was no long post-mortem, that wasn’t the time. We had to get the wheels back on the bicycle as quickly as possible. The following morning, I went out for ten, twelve miles on the road. I didn’t even notice all these photographers hanging out of a car, which is probably symptomatic of the way I was at the time. Of course, the Sunday papers came in a few days later. There was a photograph of me with the headline, “COE’S TRAIL OF SHAME”.

  ‘The following day I ran six-by-800 metres fast, and then I started to feel quite good about things. I was sleeping again, and feeling quite confident. Then I remember whacking somebody quite hard in the semi-final of the 1500. That is the only time he [Peter] bollocked me, and bollocked me big. It is the biggest bollocking I’ve ever had after a race. I ran a good race in the semi, and I just got caught on the bend and I got boxed. Now, two things came out of that. One was that I got the mother and father of all bollockings; I mean, I cannot begin to describe to you the language. It was the Somme without the mud. He just came at me big-time, and basically the general thrust of the argument was, “You do that tomorrow, and you’re dead. Do that in the race with Ovett, and you are history.” But the interesting thing was that I got into a tangle, and I came out of it, and I knew the speed was back. I had a great night’s sleep, and I was genuinely looking forward to going out there and having a real punch-up.’

  When the pendulum swings, it goes as far in one direction as the other. While Coe was crawling out of the pit, Ovett was sliding into it. The press back in England had finally tracked down Rachel Waller to her parents’ home in Maidstone. Rachel had never understood the Ovett family’s antagonism towards the media. As she argues, ‘My parents are rather polite people, and if somebody knocks on the door and says, “May I take a picture of your daughter for the local paper?” they actually think that is rather nice. I was in this awful position where I knew that if I suddenly appeared on the front page, or whatever page, of the newspapers, it was all going to be very awkward. But then, Steve did actually put me in that position.’

  Matt Paterson was at ground zero when the nuclear reaction was triggered. ‘I think it was the semi-final of the 1500, and I was sitting having breakfast up in the lobby with Steve, and Mick was there and Nick [Ovett’s younger brother]. And Gay came in with this bloody newspaper and slapped it down on the table and said, “What the fuck is all this about?” I didn’t know what she was talking about. There was a picture of Rachel, and then all hell broke loose, screaming and shouting and everything else, and it must have affected Steve – big time. It was very, very humid in Moscow and I think Steve was suffering from the heat, and of course the pressure was on him to keep on winning all the 1500 metres races, because he was favourite. I was still certain that he was going to win the 1500. I thought he would win both gold medals, and even walking into the stadium on the day of the final I just could not see him getting beaten. I knew what shape he was in and everything else, but what I probably didn’t know was the effect of his mother and the family upheaval on him as well.’

  The people whom I was always going to be most interested in talking to for this history were Ovett and Coe’s rivals. They were great athletes themselves, so would be better judges than any of us county-class runners and journalists. There was a hierarchy, even among the elite. Most of them – John Walker, Thomas Wessinghage, Eamonn Coghlan, Steve Scott, Ray Flynn, Craig Masback, and even Steve Cram, back then – knew that they could beat the British pair only by default. One of the leading questions about Moscow was: does winning one Olympic gold medal diminish your desire to win another, especially if it is a few days later? Or do you receive extra impetus to do the double?

  Ovett told me, ‘Yes, definitely,’ it did diminish his desire, and that he wasn’t speaking here with hindsight. ‘All I ever wanted to do was to become an Olympic champion. I have always said this: had the 1500 been first, and I’d won [it], I would have lost the 800. But that is not taking anything away from Seb or any other athlete. The pressure that was on us at the Olympics stopped for me after the 800. I had won it, but for Seb it was still there, if not more so.’ Bob Benn, a training partner and sometime pacemaker, even went so far as to make the extraordinary suggestion that Ovett let Coe win the 1500.

  Steve Cram has a different view: ‘I think he was probably a little bit complacent and thought, I’ve beaten him on his territory. I don’t think it was anything to do with Ovett not wanting to win it: he hadn’t been beaten in goodness knows how long, [and] why on earth would you not want to be the double Olympic champion? It was his event. It’s the blue ribbon; the 1500 is the big one. I just think that he probably went in a little bit under-prepared mentally than he might have been. He wasn’t under-prepared because he was “Oh, I’m not that bothered.” I think that’s rubbish.’

  Craig Masback says, ‘You know, once he won the 800, it’s a cliché of everyone who saw the race, I don’t want to say he didn’t care about the 1500, but it could not have been as important as it would have [been] if he had lost the 800 and didn’t have the Olympic title.’ Ray Flynn, though, feels that Ovett is being disingenuous: ‘Of course he is, but that’s typical Steve: he was always able to shrug off things that didn’t go his way, but I didn’t have any less admiration for him. That has always been Ovett’s trait, he plays everything down: “I was just taking it easy,” or, “I didn’t train very hard,” or whatever. He is one of those people who always played down what they achieved, and almost makes a joke of it. But I never really believed that.’

  There’s nothing like a parallel experience to effect a change of mind, as Coe admits: ‘If you’d asked me that at the time, I’d have laughed. I would have said, “Well, he won the 800, he could have gone out there and historically put me in a box.” But doing both is very difficult. I should have done it in ’86 [European Championships] against Crammy in Stuttgart, and I didn’t. I got caught up in traffic 600 metres from home, and he got five strides, and I closed it to two, and that wasn’t enough. Having been there a couple of times myself, once you have won an Olympic title, it is very difficult.’

  Information like this was difficult to come by in 1980. Accordingly, the British bookies had Ovett at 11–4 on to win the 1500 metres. As in the 800 preliminaries, both Ovett and Coe won their heats and semi-finals, although Coe’s tactical problems in the semi had convinced many commentators – multi-world record-holder Ron Clarke and former Olympic champion and then Observer athletics correspondent Chris Brasher among them – that he had learned nothing from the 800, and that he was destined to lose the 1500 metres, too. Brasher and Clarke had written a letter to Coe prior to the heats, telling him he could win the 1500, but after the semi-final mess, Coe’s biographer David Miller reported them saying, ‘He’s had it, he hasn’t got a tactical brain.’

  Ovett had other concerns. Following the 800 metres final, both he and Coe had been dope-tested. While Coe saw the short time – ten minutes – that it took him to provide a sample as more proof that he hadn’t given his all in the race, Ovett
found himself over-heating. He went red and became hotter and hotter, and had to lie down semi-conscious with wet towels over him for twenty minutes, with doctors feeding him cooling drinks before he recovered. A similar thing happened after his 1500 semi-final. ‘On the bus going back to the village, I don’t know if it was nervous tension or exhaustion. I superheated. I remember getting a towel out of my bag, and drenching it full of water and lying in this thinking, What is happening to me? I made another mistake of not going to the doctors back at the village and saying that is what happened, because when I got back to the village, it had gone. I should have perhaps taken some salt, or extra glucose or whatever to compensate for that, but . . .’

  At the warm-up track prior to the final this time, it was Ovett who seemed unsure of himself. Steve Cram, who still saw the duo as untouchables, was shocked. Still only nineteen, Cram had done wonderfully well to edge into the final, another testament to Britain’s middle-distance domination. ‘I saw Moscow at close quarters and I think that was where I realised that these guys aren’t gods; they worry as much as I worry. Watching Ovett on the day of the 1500 final, travelling down to the stadium with him, and Seb for a little bit of the way, and then watching Steve’s demeanour in and around the warm-up and then in the call-up room, I thought, Hang on, here’s a guy who isn’t exactly handling this, just breezing through it. He was as tense as anybody else and he was concerned about where Seb was – “Where’s he warming up, what’s he up to?” – which is just what we all do.

  ‘Because once he won the 800, you thought, Well, he’s just going to turn up and win the 1500. That’s what we all thought. Bloody hell, Coe needn’t bother turning up. I remember thinking, If I was in his position, I would just feel confident. And he was nervous and he was getting locked into “What’s Seb doing?” In the call-up room, Seb was the one who was very, very focused. I’ve told this story quite a lot and I sometimes wonder whether in the telling I’ve made it more significant than it was at the time. But it must have made some impression on me, that in the call-up room Steve was trying to make conversation, which I think is the reaction of a nervous person who wants to have someone else sort of holding their hand. Whereas Seb [had a] frown on his brow . . . There were nine or ten of us in there and it was quite cramped, so it was better to sit down, [but] Seb was pacing up and down.’

  If Coe was primed for action this time, so was Jürgen Straub. The East German had stretched Ovett in the heats, to a rapid 3 minutes 36.8 seconds. And he was going to stretch the final into a classic race. Straub had begun his career as a steeplechaser, but a hip problem, which would end his career altogether shortly after Moscow, caused him to switch to the 1500 metres flat. He had had some fine runs, notably beating Wessinghage earlier that year, but, because East Germany greatly restricted its athletes’ freedom of movement, he rarely had an opportunity outside championships to prove himself. He was determined to do so in Moscow.

  Sitting in the Mommsen Stadium in suburban Berlin a dozen years after the fall of the Wall, it seems ridiculous to think that these people were demonised, that this urbane, middle-aged man – whose daughter is coached by his former colleague Olaf Beyer – was the ‘enemy’. I’d seen Coe a few days before going to Berlin, and asked if he had anything to say to Beyer and Straub. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘ask Olaf what he was on, and tell Jürgen I owe my Olympic gold to him.’ Well, as I said earlier, I did ask Beyer what he was on, and he said he wasn’t on anything (as did Straub). But Straub agreed with Coe about the gold. Of the result in the 800 metres he had been ‘Definitely surprised. Perhaps it would have been better for me if the results had been reversed. I considered Ovett the favourite [for the 1500], but I had to concentrate on my strengths; everything else was out of my hands. I knew that I was going well. I’d had a couple of problems which were later traced to my hip which affected me in the build-up and that gave me problems in trying to run the qualifying time. But otherwise I was in good shape and confident. I’d spent a long time working out the tactics. I ran the East German championships in similar fashion to Moscow. There I’d raised the tempo from 400 metres; it hadn’t quite come off. So we decided in Moscow to wait till 800 metres before increasing the speed. I wanted a medal. I was annoyed in the build-up that Filbert Bayi had decided to run the steeplechase and not the 1500 metres. He would have gone out hard from the start. That would have been better for me. Everyone in the final had a good kick; they were all faster than me over the short sprint. So I had to work something out. My tactics grew out of that.’

  Straub had studied his Olympic 1500 metres finals, and said he knew the first lap would be slow, but, because he wanted to be ready to go after 800, he found himself in the lead, with Coe right behind. The first 400 was run in 61.6 seconds. The second lap was even slower, 63.3 seconds. Coe was alongside Straub, with Ovett and Cram in tandem behind. Then, the torpor was suddenly shattered when Straub took off. And so, within a very short time, when he realised what was happening, did Peter Coe. ‘I just whooped for joy,’ he says. ‘I thought no one could stand the extended pace like that, as Straub wound it up and wound it up. He was winding it up, and it was very good.’

  Within fifty metres, the tight pack had sprung open like a ruptured concertina. From 2 minutes 5 seconds 800 metres pace, Straub had switched to 1 minute 46 seconds tempo. Only Coe and Ovett could respond. ‘I concentrated completely on my race,’ recalled Straub, ‘you can’t do anything else. From 800 to 1200 metres was a very fast split, just outside 54 seconds.’

  If Ovett had been in the ‘zone’ in the 800 metres, Peter Coe had advised his son to do something similar in the 1500, but with a graphic difference. Seb recalls, ‘He said, “I don’t care if the guy goes off the track into the gents’, I want you so close that you’re in the gents’ before you even realise you followed him there.”’ The ‘guy’ to whom Peter Coe was referring, of course, was Ovett. But Ovett would not figure until it was too late. It was the 800 metres revisited, but with a different star sporting the same union flag.

  Straub was still flying. With only 200 metres to run, he had four metres on Coe and half a dozen on Ovett. But, finally, here was to be justification for the adoption of that five-pace training that Peter Coe had borrowed from Frank Horwill and instilled into his son in session after painful session. Peter had seen it as the missing piece to the puzzle. And Seb was going to slot it into the final space. Coe raised the pace, and was level with Straub. Ovett remained two metres adrift. Coe raised the pace again, and was past Straub. Ovett was still two metres behind. And running out of track. Straub was in a zone of his own: ‘I was thinking entirely about my running and I didn’t even know who had gone past me, whether it was Ovett or Coe. I just ran.’ George Gandy would say later that if anyone deserved a gold, it was Straub.

  Dave Warren had had a go in the 800 metres final – all credit to him. It’s the only way to approach any race, let alone an Olympic final. But Warren, as he knew himself, wasn’t up to it. Straub was, and was giving his all. As he told me, ‘There’s no point saying afterwards, “If only this and that.” What counts is the medal you’ve got and I was very happy with silver.’ Because that final surge had taken Coe away to glory, and Ovett was not even going to make up the ground on Straub.

  Ecstasy might seem a curious word to use in connection with sport. Its religious connotations and its modern sense of calm, quiet, even trance, run counter to the impulsive and explosive nature of physical, often violent movement. When we journalists talk of ecstatic reactions to success, it is usually trade hyperbole. But maybe this notion of ecstasy is an artistic one. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes about the ecstasy of the perfect ‘faena’, the use of muleta or cape in the prelude to the kill, when the bull has been subdued. Perhaps it is the trance of the bull that gives rise to the word, and many will argue that bull-fighting is not a sport anyway. But Hemingway is very convincing in his lengthy, pervasive argument that it is an art. The only other use of the term that I know relative to sport is in
Werner Herzog’s short film about ski-flying, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner. The use of slow-motion for the flying sequences, coupled with the quiet scenes of Walter Steiner sculpting wood, conjure calm and tranquillity. As do the slo-mo sequences of marathon man Abebe’s impassive profile, emphasised by the pearls of sweat gathering on his brow, sliding slowly down the slope of his nose, and swinging into space in Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad. Ichikawa heightens the effect with a monotone of shallow breathing counterpointing a sudden explosion of stadium noise. The artists saw a corollary in that quiet. But this is a relatively modern reading. For the ancient Greeks, ecstasy involved inhibition and the frantic movement of dance. It was part of the cult of Dionysus. Like the dance of dervishes, the object was an altered state.

  Sebastian Coe’s explosion of joy and relief is ecstasy of a yet another kind – one that relates to that other Sebastian, the saint martyred by arrows. It was the ecstasy of salvation. It may not look very pretty, and, over the years, Coe has spoken about his embarrassment at that crucifixion scene that he passionately played out when crossing the finishing line. Nevertheless, after he had thought that all was lost, perhaps irrevocably, he had won Olympic gold.

  This time, the whole stadium was upstanding, arms outstretched, to join him in his ecstasy. They had witnessed a classic chase and race. And the better man, the best man, had won. But he had not only won the race; he had won back his life, vindicated his past and secured his future. Full house! ‘It was complete relief,’ he recalls. ‘I don’t think I ever thought that I had won until I crossed the line. It was the days before the diamond screen, so you didn’t have the luxury of looking up and thinking, God, I’m clear here! I was just driving as hard as I could, thinking, At some stage . . . But it didn’t happen!’