The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  Three days later in Lausanne, Ovett ran his fourth sub-3.50 mile. The bad news was that he announced that he was pulling out of the field for the fourth Golden Mile in Brussels the following month. Having won the first and third editions of the Golden Mile, with Coe winning the second, there seemed to be complicity and synchronicity. Coe was to have the fourth one to himself. If Ovett had known what was going to happen in Brussels, he might not have been so willing to step aside, but that was still over a month away. Coe rectified a curious omission, and won his first national outdoor title at 800 metres. Ovett went to Budapest for a crack at his 1500 metres world record.

  When you’re as good as Ovett and Coe were – and, of course, only they were as good as each other – maybe you can afford to be casual. Coe told me that on a couple of occasions he ‘played’ with a field that he knew he could beat, and he felt sure that Ovett had done the same. Bob Benn was doing a lot of pacing for Ovett by this time, and he saw another side to the coin in Budapest that night. ‘I can remember warming up outside the stadium, and Steve was going to have another crack at the world record. There was a pretty good field there and I was kind of thinking about what I had to do and all the rest. And he just looked at me and said, “For goodness’ sake, Bob, enjoy it!” It was incredible, I was more wound up than he was.’ The Budapest meeting was not one of the usual televised events, but with one of our national treasures threatening to break a world record, BBC TV interrupted the Nine O’clock News. I watched in a pub in Kilburn High Road as Ovett ran the second-fastest 1500 metres in history, 3 minutes 31.57 seconds, just a fifth of a second shy of his own world record.

  Ovett was building up a corpus of great times, but just failing to make the final breakthrough and add to his world-record tally. Coe would show him how it should be done. At the Letzigrund in Zurich on 19 August, he removed Ovett from the top of the mile list. He had made the mistake before the race of predicting a major reappraisal of the record, ‘maybe 3.46, 3.47’ (Ovett’s record was 3 minutes 48.8 seconds). Coe had to make do with 3 minutes 48.53 seconds. If he wanted to send a message, other than breaking his record, to Ovett, he started off well, because Tom Byers was enlisted as the pacemaker. But the move almost backfired. Byers, suffering from a cold, wasn’t up to it, and, after a decent first lap, he allowed the pace to drop. Coe had to take over himself and really work for it in the last 600 metres. Nevertheless, he prevailed and secured his sixth world record, with every other top miler (aside from Ovett) trailing home in his wake. So began a ‘nine-day wonder’.

  After the Oslo aberration against Byers, Ovett had suffered a leg injury, and watched, doubly impotent, as Coe broke his mile world record. There’s nothing like a challenge to speed recuperation. One week after Zurich, Ovett was back in Koblenz, at the tiny Rhine-side stadium where he had broken the 1500 metres world record the previous year. He requested the 1500 metres be lengthened to a mile. Some of the others, already sick of being beaten week after week by the British pair, rebelled, and demanded the 1500 metres stay on the schedule. The promoters acquiesced and added the mile, rather than substituting it for the 1500. In the latter, Steve Scott broke the US record, with 3 minutes 31.96 seconds.

  But Dave Moorcroft and Craig Masback went with Ovett to the mile. Maybe it was a diplomatic move, the sort of thinking which presaged their elevation to their current posts – as the heads respectively of the UK and US federations. Or maybe it was simply an awareness of the Great Tradition. Because they were involved in one of the mile’s historic staging-posts. Bob Benn paced Ovett to the halfway, then US 800 metres runner James Robinson took over. He lasted until around fifty metres before the bell, when Ovett realised that he had to go it alone, something he was never too comfortable doing. But he hung on, and was rewarded with 3 minutes 48.4 seconds.

  Moorcroft finished down the field, but he was to have his own annus mirabilis the next year, breaking the 5000 metres world record and winning another Commonwealth title, and beating Ovett en route. Moorcroft, from the wonderfully named Coventry Godiva club, recognised just how much he owed Coe and Ovett: ‘[They] took me to a new level, took me to under 3.50. For me, under 4 minutes was mind-boggling; under 3.55 was out of this world; to go under 3.50 was just beyond the pale. But, because Ovett and Coe did it, and I was racing them, I thought, If they can, I can. And then others came along and said, “So can I, so can I, so can I.” And that was one of the great legacies of the Coe–Ovett generation, and Steve Cram. It lifted the likes of [Graham] Williamson, [John] Robson, [Steve] Crabb and [Peter] Elliott and others to think, We can do that as well.’

  On the other hand, there was a potential downside. Ovett had retrieved the record, but in doing so he had contributed to a move that was as inevitable as it was unwelcome. The addition of Robinson to the mix meant that ‘secondary’ pacemakers were now being employed. But even they were nothing new. In perhaps the most seminal mile of them all, the first sub-4, Bannister had been paced by Brasher and Chataway. Not bad hares: one was a future Olympic champion and the other an imminent world record breaker. But resurrecting the ploy contributed to a fashion that has got completely out of control nowadays.

  Coe was to have the final word in 1981. And it was at perhaps the most glamorous occasion of the season – the Golden Mile in Brussels. The mini-revolt in Koblenz had underlined their rivals’ lack of belief that any of them could beat either Ovett or Coe. Eamonn Coghlan, who had recently broken the world indoor record with 3 minutes 50.6 seconds (itself an extraordinary time on an indoor track), puts it into perspective: ‘My coach Gerry Farnham tried to instil in me that I was the only guy in the world who could beat Ovett, but I think he only managed to do it about ninety-nine per cent. One per cent, I have to admit in hindsight, was always there. Seb Coe, on the other hand, was a different kettle of fish. It was almost like, “Erm, you ain’t gonna beat Coe.” Because of that grace and elegance that he had, and the speed that he brought to it, it was just beyond my leg speed to handle him. I was now, at this stage, running more 5000 metres, and he was just blowing the world away every time he got on the track.’

  Coe was going to do the same again that evening in Brussels. Thomas Wessinghage had a different, but equally bleak, perspective on his and his colleagues’ prospects of threatening Coe. The German had finished eighth in the Golden Mile in 1979, and was to get another object lesson in Brussels. ‘It was a surprise the way he did it [in 1979], the way his stamina was good enough to get him through four laps instead of two. From then on he dominated the scene by his personality for two or three years at least. He ran in a different way to the way we ran. He was not as [sociable] as the other runners were. He was a little special. But that meant he entered the race with a different attitude.

  ‘In Brussels, he was set to break the world record and he did it. Ovett was not there and the rest of the field was competing for second place. First place was for Seb. Within our heads, we had kind of bowed to his superiority and he cultivated that situation. Maybe that was part of a few of the successes. I was in the car which Seb and Peter drove to the stadium. [Then] we were sitting on the grandstand and watching the track meet go on, wondering, as there was a delay of about twenty to twenty-five minutes, whether the mile would be on time. There was always the question of TV rights, and then there was the word that the mile would be delayed. So we went to the warm-up area about twenty-five minutes later than we originally had expected. When we had jogged over there, Seb was coming in the opposite direction on his way to the stadium, because he knew the mile would be on time. And that was the minute when he had won the race. That is what I felt. He was really outstanding in the way he approached the races and the way he cultivated his position as the best runner of his time.’

  Brad Hunt, who later took over as Coe’s agent at International Management Group, was immediately made aware of the depth of application that Wessinghage described. ‘I had been working in athletics, managing some of the top American athletes, particularly middle-distance runners, for a cou
ple of years. So when I arrived in the UK I had done a bit of background, a little bit of preparation, to sit with Sebastian Coe and talk about his upcoming schedule, and I had what I felt was a fairly comprehensive preliminary plan.

  ‘I had spoken to several meet directors and taken their suggestions as to what it meant, what would be good for Seb that day, what the finances could potentially be for him to participate. I had what I thought was at least a working plan for Seb, and when I put it in front of him he studied it very carefully and then found a pen and crossed out at least half of the events that had been suggested. He said to me, and I remember it very clearly, “If I do my job well, we can make more money doing less events.”

  ‘And the light bulb went off. I mean, my background in college was economics, and he just summarised the most concrete theory of economics – reduce the supply to increase the demand. And as I got to know him, I realised that it wasn’t about racing, it wasn’t about competing; for Seb to get on the track, it was a command performance. It was everything prepared down to the finest detail, everything prepared in terms of race strategy to the hundredth of a second. It wasn’t about the race [but] about a performance, and he maintained that for the years that I was involved with him. Every event had to be perfect.’

  There were 50,000 people crammed into the Heysel Stadium, and Tom Byers was eager to make amends for his poor pacemaking in Zurich. At the end of a brisk first lap, only the veteran Mike Boit of Kenya was brave enough to go with Byers and Coe. Boit claimed to be thirty-two, but admitted that records were vague in rural Kenya in the late fifties. He might have been two years older. Whatever, he tracked Coe all the way, even when Byers finally gave up the ghost with 500 yards to go. Boit was on his way to joining that super-elite club of sub-3.50 milers. He ran an African record of 3 minutes 49.45 seconds. But he finished all of fifteen metres behind Coe, who had kept the cadence going, and crossed the line in 3 minutes 47.33 seconds. Ovett’s world record had lasted for two days! And Coe had excised over a second from it. There was now no argument. Three world mile records in nine days, and Coe had come out the clear winner. Ovett would never get close to that time, and the record would last until after Coe had won his second successive Olympic title.

  Both men were entitled to be exhausted, but the European Athletic Association came calling for their World Cup team. Coe duly won the 800 and Ovett the 1500 metres in front of capacity crowds in Rome’s Olympic Stadium. Over the three days of competition, almost 200,000 people turned up, emphasising just how much of a draw international athletics, starring Seb Coe and Steve Ovett, had become.

  At the end of the season, a tired Ovett succumbed to Sydney Maree in Rieti. The South African-born American won the mile in the fourth fastest time on record, 3 minutes 48.83 seconds, with Ovett ten metres back. Ovett then went on a short, successful trip to Australia, while Coe attended an International Olympic Committee convention in Baden-Baden, Germany. He was one of the founder members of the IOC Athletes’ Commission, whose work would quickly develop into the acceptance of ‘open’ athletics.

  The huge crowds in the Stadio Olimpico suggested professional athletics was going to happen sooner rather than later. That was in no small measure due to the influence of Coe and Ovett. It was clear that they had ‘rescued’ the Olympic Games the previous year. As many had admitted, it wasn’t the Moscow Olympics but the Coe & Ovett Olympics. It was clear, too, that they weren’t turning up in Oslo, Zurich, Brussels, Cologne, Rieti and Koblenz for nothing. They both recall getting low five-figure sums in dollars on the circuit at that point, with the Golden Mile and similar ‘specials’ occasioning more. As Coe recalls twenty-five years later, ‘In 1979, when I went back to Oslo, after breaking the 800 record, and then when I went to Zurich for the third world record, I would say, from memory, that I was getting about eight to ten thousand pounds. The best advice I got was from Brendan Foster: “Get a good accountant. There’s nothing the Board [British federation] or the IAAF can do any more. But there’s a lot the Inland Revenue can do.”’

  Professionally, Coe would soon become the first track and field athlete to be represented by Mark McCormack’s International Management Group. Personally, Coe would strike up a friendship with Swiss skier Irene Epple, whom he had met in Baden-Baden. This would blossom into a relationship which lasted through the next year or so. Ovett, meanwhile, would marry Rachel Waller. Andy Norman was his best man, and he persuaded Ovett’s parents to turn up at the last minute. It seemed a reconciliation might be possible, but that never really happened. The honeymoon included a business trip – three winning races in Australia – and the start of an appreciation of the country which would become their emigration destination twenty years later.

  But what Ovett had called ‘the best of years’, 1981, was going to end on a sour note. Having had a couple of weeks’ rest, he started back in training, and a run he had done dozens of times ended with a career-threatening injury. Like many accidents, it all began ordinarily and innocently enough. Matt Paterson felt that Ovett was going better than ever: ‘Steve had just had his break. He used to have anything between four and six weeks [off] at the end of the track season. And I trained all the way through, because I was ready to take him to the cleaners when he came back into training! And he knew this. I would be ready for that first week when he came out with me and I’d be trying to run him into the ground. Then, I’d go home to my wife and say I screwed the bastard. He had only been training a couple of weeks, and, looking back on previous years, he was the fittest I’ve ever seen him. He was just absolutely champing at the bit. We had run a hard seven miles or something, and I really flogged him, and he was just absolutely relaxed and in really good shape.’

  They had gone out with a group from Brighton & Hove AC, including Sam Lambourne, a long-distance specialist. Lambourne now owns a running shop in Brighton, but he was a handyman at the time, and doing some jobs for the newly-weds: ‘I was painting his new house down in Adelaide Crescent, and Matt turned up and a couple of others, and we went for a run. As usual, Matt was sticking it and as usual it was fast. It always gnarls me a bit when people stick it in from the start; I always feel vengeful. Being more of a distance runner, I thought, If I can hang on to the pace, once I’ve settled in, I can then push it later. So it got to about five or six miles and I started to feel good and was pushing the pace. We were coming back and we had broken everyone, really. There was just Steve and I left. We were coming back in towards Hove from port side and I was running on the inside of the pavement and he was running on the outside. Then we turned right to cross the road at the zebra crossing. It’s a sort of ninety-degree turn to cross, then another ninety-degree turn to go along the road. I took quite a tight little turn when we crossed the zebra crossing to go left on the other side of the road and he swung wide, and I was thinking, What is he doing? He wasn’t looking where he was going. He was looking up at something and he just went straight into the railings, a really solid iron railing, and he just went straight into it with his knee. Oh, it was terrible, really awful. We had to carry him home.’

  Ovett’s first thought was that it was the end of his career: ‘Without any question, yes. As I was lying on the road, and seeing what had happened to my leg, I thought it was the end of it. Because I was in great shape in ’81, fabulous shape. I think ’82 would have probably been my best year, without any question, if I was in that sort of form. I was at the peak of my career.’

  Extraordinarily, Ovett did not call for a doctor immediately. Even Paterson, who had largely got used to his famous training partner’s pathological bloody-mindedness and sense of personal well-being, could not believe it: ‘He phoned me, and said, “I’ve had an accident.” He came up that night to my house and showed me. It was like a balloon on his leg. I said, “For Christ’s sake, get that fixed.” So he phoned Andy Norman and got surgery on it straight away. Any time he had a cold, you’d say, “I think you should go to the doctor.” “No, no, I’m all right,” he’d say. He was his own
person; you couldn’t tell him what to do. That was his whole attitude about so many things.’

  The Church Railings Incident, as it became known, happened on 7 December 1981. Ovett’s recuperation was delayed, as his wife Rachel recalls: ‘On the night, it all seemed quite drastic. He got this infection afterwards, and went off and had it lanced, which was probably the worst possible thing. Because it opened up the scar, and that elongated things.’ Nevertheless, three months later, Steve Ovett appeared with Sebastian Coe at a press conference in central London to announce a series of three head-to-head races during the summer of 1982. The opening race, a 3000 metres, was scheduled for Crystal Palace on 17 July. It was to be their first encounter in Britain since the schoolboy cross-country in Hillingdon, west London, ten years earlier. At last!

  19

  Fools’ Gold

  I was working part-time at the London listings magazine Time Out, and a little subterfuge that I learned from a colleague there was to pay off handsomely, and effectively launch my career in national newspapers. I needed to make an impact outside of the cosy but penurious world of specialist magazines – whether Athletics Weekly or Time Out – so in early 1982 I called the sports editor of The Times and told him I had an interview one day the following week with the sports editor of the Sunday Times, which was housed in the adjacent building in London’s Gray’s Inn Road. Could I drop in and see him afterwards? He agreed to see me after my first interview. Except that I didn’t have a first interview. Until I called the sports editor of the Sunday Times, and told him, truthfully this time, that I had a meeting next door.