The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  I got a rapid result. Early one afternoon a month later, The Times asked if I could high-tail it to Loughborough to cover Coe’s race for the Colleges in the annual match against the AAA. Driving up the M1, I got a blowout. On my first assignment! I arrived late and fairly flustered at the university track, only to discover that Coe had had to pull out, suffering from a fever. He was confined to the university sick bay, as I wrote, ‘a mere hammer-throw away, but a hammer blow to the organisers’. When I went back to Loughborough twenty years later to interview long-time resident coach George Gandy for this book, he recounted to me that he’d had to take the sponsor’s representative and the TV producer to Coe’s bedside before they would believe that Gandy hadn’t pulled a fast one on them. That incursion, in turn, annoyed Peter Coe, whose relationship with Gandy was strained at the best of times. By now, it had virtually broken down altogether.

  Nevertheless, Coe or not, the event gave me my first piece in a national daily. It turned out that The Times’ athletics man, Norman Fox, would be covering the World Cup football in Spain, and later that year was going to become sports editor. This was a try-out for me, as a prelude to being offered the job as the paper’s athletics correspondent. I was on my way. And it wouldn’t be long before I would encounter Ovett.

  After a gentle reintroduction to track racing in mid-June, with a winning 1500 metres heat at the Southern Counties AAA (he withdrew from the final), Ovett had his first serious race in Oslo on 26 June, finishing second in a 3000 metres to Suleiman Nyambui, who was the only world-class Tanzanian, apart from the great Filbert Bayi.

  I’d secured an interview with Ovett through Andy Norman. I later discovered that Norman was always trying to get Ovett back in touch with the media; for whatever reason, this time Ovett agreed. Norman got me to pick up Ovett and Rachel from Heathrow and ferry them to Gatwick, where they’d left their car when they had flown out to a race in Budapest. He had run in and won what was for him a rare outing over 2000 metres. Ovett was very laid-back and chatty, and everything went well, including him telling me he was going to run in Paris the following Friday, 9 July.

  As a reward for my initial efforts, The Times sent me on my first international assignment to cover that race. The rest of the British athletics press corps had gone to Birmingham for the English Schools Championships, the annual meeting which regularly throws up prodigiously talented teenagers like Ovett, Coe, Cram et al. Indeed, the majority of British squads could point to their beginnings in schools athletics in those days, until the rot set in during the middle of the Thatcher administration, with the sale of school playing fields and pressure on the teachers’ unions to ‘modernise’. The result was that thousands of people who saw teaching as a vocation which benefited the whole populace started to see their work as a job, to be picked up and dropped as whim and bank balance determined. Fine athletes still emerge from the schools system, but nowhere near the numbers of two decades ago.

  The Paris meeting that Ovett was to run in was held in the tiny Jean Bouin Stadium, tucked in the lee of the massive Parc des Princes, then the national rugby stadium, and subsequent home to Paris St Germain football team. Jean Bouin was a French Basque who won the silver medal in the 10,000 metres at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. He was killed in the First World War. It was an extremely humid evening, following a hot enervating day. As I strolled around the stadium, I found Ovett relaxing on the terraces with Rachel. This would be almost unthinkable nowadays – the stars mixing with the crowd pre-event – but it was a reflection both of Ovett’s insouciance and the fact that there were only a couple of thousand spectators at that point. The atmosphere was very much that of a minor meeting. Ovett complained of the heat, maybe just for something to say, but I did notice that he was sweating profusely, and he hadn’t even warmed up yet, something that seemed superfluous, given the conditions. A couple of laps of the field behind the stadium, and a few ‘strides’ (half-sprints) were probably all he was going to need before he went to the start.

  There was plenty for the small crowd to cheer. Fernando Mamede of Portugal, a future world record-holder, ran a European best of 27 minutes 22.95 seconds for the 10,000 metres. The irrepressible American, Mary Decker, ran a women’s world mile record. But I missed it, because I was a couple of kilometres away in the emergency ward of the Ambrose Paré Hospital. After looking distinctly uncomfortable through the first couple of minutes of the 1500 metres, Ovett had collapsed a lap from the end, and had been rushed there, with me alongside as his interpreter.

  It had been clear that something was wrong with Ovett right from the gun. Even in a relatively low-key race such as this, he would not normally have lingered long near the back of the pack, especially with Mike Boit leading the charge. Boit may have been past his best, but he was still no slouch. Ovett certainly couldn’t give the veteran Kenyan a thirty-metre lead with a lap to go and be sure of catching him. But that was the situation at the bell, and with everyone expecting a grandstand finish, Ovett just stopped and walked off the track. Then he stumbled to the middle of the infield and fell to his knees. He stayed on all fours for about ten minutes, while a collection of people – Andy Norman, assorted officials, Rachel and eventually myself, having come down from the press box – wondered what to do next. Ovett could barely talk, but readily acceded to an ambulance.

  He was conscious, but contorted with stomach pains, and sweating even more profusely than he had been pre-race. Rachel held his hand and tried to comfort him, while he complained that he couldn’t catch his breath. He was given a mild sedative and Rachel and I were asked to stay outside the emergency room while the doctor examined him. His condition didn’t seem life threatening, so I was relaxed enough to smile wryly when the doctor asked if he was a tennis player. The Jean Bouin Stadium, and the hospital where we’d been taken, were adjacent to the Roland Garros tennis centre, venue for the French Open, which had been on the previous week. It was perhaps an inevitable mistake by a young intern who obviously wasn’t into athletics, but I was thrown by her next question: ‘Did he lose his race?’ It was obvious that there was nothing radically wrong, and she was looking for psychological frailty rather than physical cause. In fact, Ovett was severely dehydrated as a result of the oppressive weather and had suffered stomach cramps. An hour on a saline drip did the trick.

  I returned to the meeting, and by the time I called in at the hotel a couple of hours later, Ovett was tucking into a meal. He still didn’t look 100 per cent, though, and admitted he’d been suffering stomach pains and wind all day: ‘I could only take shallow breaths right from the start [of the race], there was no way I could go after Boit. I knew something was wrong, but I’ve never dropped out of a race before.’ He and Rachel decided to put the incident as far behind them as quickly as possible. The organiser supplied a car, and they set off for the coast, to get the night boat from Dieppe. They arrived in Newhaven, just along the coast from their home, at 6 a.m. on Saturday. With no public transport to Brighton available that early, and unable to raise a taxi, they hitch-hiked home. The driver who picked them up didn’t recognise Ovett.

  He suffered no further ill-effects from the incident, but it seems that many people in the sport – including the press contingent in Birmingham for the English Schools – were worried at the similarity of Ovett’s collapse to the early stages of Lillian Board’s problems. Board was the ‘Golden Girl’ of British athletics in the late sixties. She was young, extrovert, and widely loved for her determination on the track and her ebullience off it. She won Olympic silver in Mexico 1968 at 400 metres, and European gold the following year in the 800 metres. She was immediately dubbed favourite for the championship titles in the next three years: the 1970 Commonwealths in Edinburgh, the 1971 Europeans in Helsinki, and the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

  She would end up in Munich far sooner than anyone expected, for at the beginning of 1970, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a chronic disease of the intestines. Her rapid demise – including a series of operatio
ns, and a widely publicised attempted cure at the ‘alternative’ clinic of Josef Isserls in the Bavarian mountains – was reported in great tabloid detail. After yet another operation at Isserls’ clinic, she was transferred to the Munich University Hospital just before Christmas 1970. She died on Boxing Day aged just twenty-two. A decade later, this startlingly sad sequence of events was still fresh in the memories of many in the sport. But, although Ovett would never really get back to his previous form during 1982, fears for his general health proved unfounded.

  The proposed Coe–Ovett matches were foundering on the rocks of their indispositions. Because Coe had sustained a stress fracture of the shin, fine, hairline breaks caused by the continuous stress of pounding roads and track surfaces. The cracks knit quickly in fit athletes, but necessitate rest, so, after his usual introduction to outdoor track racing, a 1500 metres at the Yorkshire Championships and an unusual 2000 metres in Bordeaux – both wins – Coe was forced to drop out of the Crystal Palace 3000 metres, and the subsequent 800 metres in Nice. Fortunately for British fans – and here was yet another example of the burgeoning talent in the middle-distances in Britain – there was a saviour at hand in the shape of Dave Moorcroft. Although he had disappointed with his first major race when he moved up to 5000 metres, at the Olympic Games in Moscow, Moorcroft had broken the world record, with 13 minutes 0.41 seconds in Oslo the month before.

  There is no question that this was the greatest era in the history of British middle-distance running. The two biggest stars were indisposed, out of races for the rest of the season, and what happens? Two other guys lurking on the sidelines jump on to the track and beat all-comers. Steve Cram was to be one, winning European and Commonwealth titles, rehearsals for his even greater achievements. For Moorcroft, though, this was his year.

  Moorcroft had decimated Henry Rono’s long-standing world 5000 metres record in Oslo, and in doing so had had an experience that lesser mortals, even lesser athletes, barely recognise. That night changed his life. ‘The first lap was quite slow, and I led from then on, and it felt so natural, just like one of those days when you’re out for a run, and you just float, but you’re normally running along Tipton High Street or something, and it just happened to be in Oslo. I can count on one hand the number of races I’ve run, literally four or five, when you just float. It didn’t hurt, it just didn’t hurt.

  ‘It was only at the bell that I twigged I was going to break the world record. So the whole of the last lap I was aware of it, and that was bizarre. What frustrates me now is, could I have found something else, and got under 13 minutes? At the time I thought, Well, I’ll do it next time. Someone once said to me, “Never be an ‘if-only’ person,” and I’m a world record-holder, like Steve Ovett, Steve Cram, Seb Coe, but I’m not a multi-world record-holder. With that lot, they’ve got the frustration of not knowing which of their world records to pick. I’ve only got one and I’m dead lucky. I did race the 3000 at Crystal Palace ten days later, one of the races that was set up to be part of the Golden Challenge. Steve ran it, and wasn’t at his best by any means; I think it was his last race of the season. Seb didn’t run.

  ‘I was part of a very special era. For that one period, I was a major player and experienced what it was like to be at the very highest level, which was great, it really is something special, it puts things into perspective. I’d have loved to have won an Olympic gold medal, and everything that goes with that, but I’ve absolutely no regrets about the breadth of experience, the ups and downs, it’s a huge educational experience. There’s a massive amount of cherished memories; the Coe–Ovett period and how Cram came into that, the laughs and the emotion that went with it were so special. It was particularly special because it was 1500 metres, the mile, the Bannister bit and everything else. It added an extra dimension.’

  Moorcroft won the Golden Challenge 3000 metres at Crystal Palace, after a tight race with Sydney Maree, in 7 minutes 32.79 seconds, which was second only to Rono’s world record of 7.32.1. Moorcroft also ran under 3 minutes 50 seconds for the mile that year, and improved all his personal bests from 800 metres upwards. But he ran too many races. By the time the European 5000 metres in Athens came around, he was exhausted, and Thomas Wessinghage, who admits he was forced up a distance by Coe and Ovett’s excellence, won the race, with Moorcroft third. Moorcroft regrouped in time to win the Commonwealth title later that year in Brisbane.

  When Coe returned to competition in the middle of Moorcroft’s annus mirabilis, we were to see a side to him that no one had ever seen before. His stress fracture healed, he went on holiday with his parents and Irene Epple prior to racing in Zurich. Coe might have been a fighter on a track, but, with that slight frame, nobody ever expected to see him in a brawl. After all, he had the where-withal to escape confrontation if necessary. So it was something of a shock to get an agency report on 18 August, the day of the Zurich Weltklasse meeting, of Coe’s involvement in a fracas at the Swiss resort of Interlaken.

  An argument had started at the lakeside when a wind-surfing instructor, Peter Baumann, had accused Epple of leaving her equipment on his private beach. According to Andreas Brügger, the Weltklasse organiser, Baumann had tried to push Peter Coe into the lake, whereupon Seb had grabbed a lump of wood and clouted the instructor on the head. Both men suffered facial injuries, and were interviewed by a local judge a day later, but the matter was dropped. The most significant comment to come out of the affair was one of those throwaway lines which nonplusses you once you think about it. Baumann said, ‘He hit me and ran off . . . When I caught him . . .’!

  If Baumann was in the wrong sport, Coe certainly was not. Maybe the brawl had given him an edge in the crowd scenes which characterise 800 metres running, but after the injury setbacks and the lakeside incident, he was back on form in the Letzigrund that night. Following pacemaker Kip Koskei of Kenya through a first lap of 51.5 seconds, Coe was momentarily baulked before blazing away to win in 1 minute 44.48 seconds, just three hundredths outside Cram’s best of the year thus far. Coe looked as if he could have run faster, but his satisfaction was short-lived. For, ominously, Cram’s riposte a few minutes later was to dominate the 1500 metres. With the only absentee from the world’s top ten being Dave Moorcroft, Cram ran 3 minutes 33.66 seconds. As he observed, ‘That was as good as the world record, beating a field like that.’

  Cram was, however, still the third string in the media’s eyes. Two days later, I began my Times piece with, ‘Whether in opposition or adversity, the names of Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett seem destined to be linked.’ The same evening that Coe was winning in the international spotlight in Zurich, Ovett was injuring himself in the relative calm of the Withdean Stadium, near his home in Hove. He had been running a time trial with his club-mates when he incurred the classic manifestation of the hamstring pull. ‘I was halfway through the session when I suddenly shot up in the air,’ he said.

  There comes a stage in an injury-fraught season when efforts to return to premium form become counter-productive: the body gets pushed too hard, to make up for lost time, and it rebels and breaks down again. That, effectively, is what happened to Ovett. The collision with the church railing had caused him to lose four months’ winter training, crucial to building up a solid endurance base from which to hone the speed for racing in the summer. This time the clock had beaten Ovett. Two weeks later, he withdrew from both the European and the Commonwealth championships.

  Coe would go to the first of those, the Europeans, in Athens, but he would have another desolating 800 metres experience there, to add to those of Prague and Moscow. Everything seemed to be going well for him by then: he had been selected for the 800 and then added to the 1500 metres trio, after the withdrawal of Ovett, and finally here was an opportunity, without Ovett to confuse the issue, to win a ‘double’. A prospective first 800 metres title for the man who held a superlative world record was made potentially easier by another withdrawal, that of Peter Elliott. The nineteen-year-old had been a revelation that season,
as much for his work-rate as for his talent. I’d first seen him in the winter of 1980, when he’d won the National Youths Cross-Country at Leicester. In his all-black Rotherham Harriers outfit, he looked like a throwback to the days of Sydney Wooderson. But, whereas Wooderson was slight, the epitome of the cross-country runner (indeed, at the end of his miling career, he won the National Senior, over nine miles), Elliott was the most unlikely-looking cross-country runner I’d ever seen. He was built – in popular parlance – like a brick shithouse, and was correspondingly indefatigable. One year he ran thirty-eight races, all from the front. It was a tactic, if you could call it such, which endeared him to the whole world. Bravery or abandon is common currency, recognisable across the globe, and everyone loved Elliott. He had won the AAA title, thus earning selection for the Europeans, but a loss of form in the week leading up to Athens caused him to reconsider, and withdraw. Fit, he would have been Coe’s major opponent. As it was, no one saw a threat.

  An ‘unknown’ East German, Olaf Beyer, had done for both Ovett and Coe in Prague four years earlier. At least then the time had been world class. No one, least of all Coe, could explain the defeat in Athens by an ‘unknown’ West German, Hans-Peter Ferner, in a time of 1 minute 46.33 seconds. The potential gulf in class was illustrated on the electronic scoreboard: Coe’s world record, at the top of the screen, was over four and half seconds faster; in terms of distance, around twenty-five metres. The gap in comprehension was bigger.