by Pat Butcher
As Coe said after the race, he had done everything right: he had started briskly, to avoid getting boxed at the break from lanes, stayed in front through the bell, accelerated out of trouble in the back straight, ‘then put daylight between myself and the others with ninety metres to go’. But that’s where the trouble, or rather Ferner, began to come. Coe had easily outpaced him at the end of the first heat two days previously, and, although the West German had won the other semi-final the day before, his time was almost a second slower than Coe’s semi victory. But when Ferner caught Coe with twenty metres to run, the world record-holder could not respond, and Ferner won by a couple of metres. Like Ovett, the lack of training had caught up with him. He had missed three and a half weeks in spring, then six weeks in mid-summer. If Ovett had broken down, Coe had ground to a halt. As he said, ‘I’ve taken a lot out of a shallow well.’
The press, meanwhile, ensured that Ovett could not recover in peace. When he had dropped out of the Athens team, BBC TV had signed him up to do commentary. Having told the nation that there was no way Coe could lose, Ovett was caught on camera smiling embarrassedly at his gaffe after the race. At least one newspaper interpreted it as pleasure at Coe’s demise. Ovett proved more accurate with his next comments: he asserted that something must be wrong with his rival. Coe withdrew from the 1500 metres a day later, and didn’t go to the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, either. Ferner, by the way, not only never won another major race; he hardly competed in another major race.
In the absence of both Ovett and Coe, Steve Cram seized the opportunity to begin his reign. His willingness to race all-comers, including Coe and Ovett themselves, was both a refreshing change and an indictment of their timorousness towards racing each other outside of championships.
20
The Third Man
Steve Cram never made a secret of the fact that he was an Ovett fan, citing a similar social background, with the traditional club experience of road and cross-country running as back-up. In any case, like most other people, he said he found Coe remote, and certainly couldn’t get a handle on the father/coach situation. Cram himself can seem aloof, but it may simply be a manifestation of a seriousness of character. He certainly is not as immediately affable as Ovett was among his peers. But, like Ovett and Coe, he has also thought about his sport, and his position in it, and put that into a wider context than most. It took some time and several cancellations before we could fix up our interviews; his BBC commentary dates and commitments as chairman of the English Sports Institute must entail a lot of juggling. But we managed one session in Zurich, and a second at the World Championships in Paris in 2003. It says a lot about Cram that he broke off during one declamation to reflect, ‘I’ve told this story so many times, I wonder if I’ve made it more important than it was?’ That, of course, could serve as a critique of any recollection.
But Cram’s thoughtfulness is representative of many middle- and long-distance runners. Maybe it has something to do with the long hours of training, for, even if you do much of it in company, there are inevitably many times when it is convenient only to be on your own. It’s a great time for reflection, since for much of that time you’re not extending yourself, not ‘eyeballs-out’, and the blood is thoroughly permeating the brain. In short, you’re in prime thinking mode, to the extent sometimes that you’re on cruise control physically. Occasionally at the end of a long run, I will reflect that to get from point A to point C, I must have gone through point B. But I cannot even ‘see’ point B in my mind, no matter how hard I try to summon it up. You’re just somewhere else.
Cram was already established as a leading junior when the Ovett–Coe rivalry began in earnest in 1978. He was already physically different. None of the trio could remotely be described as well built, it was just that Ovett, with those beginnings of a barrel chest, seemed to be, in contrast to the light and elegant Coe. Cram was another contrast: lanky, with an aureole of blond curls which gave him a patrician look. Comparisons with a thoroughbred race-horse came easily, especially when you saw him high-stepping round a cross-country course, while those round him plodded, fought and dragged themselves through the mud. Like his elder peers, Cram had been an English Schools champion, but, while the young Geordie conceded that the pair had had an effect on his rise, there was someone much closer to home who would have a bigger influence initially. Even so far as to persuade Cram that his future lay in England rather than Germany.
Despite the family name, it was his mother not his father who was German. In early 1977, Cram had run a British record for a sixteen-year-old, of 3 minutes 47 seconds for 1500 metres. ‘I remember going on holiday to Germany that summer, and there were real overtures, and talk about me running for Germany. But Brendan [Foster] was a big factor in me thinking, Hang on, you can be from the north-east of England, and get your chance. Brendan came from round the corner from where I lived. He had three or four fantastic years. He was the biggest athletics star in the country between, say, ’73 and ’77. When you turned your television set on, Crystal Palace on a Friday night, and then the European Cup, the European Championships as well, he won in Rome [1974], even the Olympics in Montreal, he was the only medal winner. [He was] a Geordie bloke who [didn’t] seem any different to me, and I’d met him and talked to him. Then, suddenly, I found that the 1500 was what I was doing best, and then these two guys came along and started setting the world alight.’
But Cram had a number of obstacles, or rather opponents, to overcome before he could even contemplate taking on those global fire-raisers. First of all, he had several national colleagues with better claims than his to being the ‘third man’ of British middle-distance running. That itself would be a major step. As Dave Moorcroft pointed out, ‘You were the third-best miler in the world, but only the third best in Britain.’ If Moorcroft was the most established of the ‘rest’, clipping at his heels were Frank Clement, John Robson and young Graham Williamson, as well as Cram. Peter Elliott, Jack Buckner, Tim Hutchings, John Gladwin and Steve Crabb would follow. And that was just at 1500 metres and the mile.
Moorcroft won the 1500 metres at the Commonwealth Games that Coe and Ovett chose to miss in 1978. Although that was Cram’s first major Games for England, at the time he had yet to beat Graham Williamson, whose omission from the Edmonton team for Scotland – already represented by Robson and Clement – was disgracefully short-sighted by the Scottish selectors. The experience of a relatively laid-back championships like the Commonwealths would have been invaluable to Williamson. Ovett still claims that he might have done better in Montreal if he had gone to Christchurch in 1974, and Cram reckons that Edmonton contributed much to the realisation of his ambitions. ‘There was a large group of new, very young eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds,’ says Cram. ‘I think you felt very much part of it, but a general buzz, rather than the Coe–Ovett thing.’
But Williamson remained a nemesis. With the Scot taking priority of selection for the European Junior Championship 1500 metres in 1979, which he duly won, Cram was selected to run in the 3000 metres in Bydgoscz, Poland. He won too. Williamson also took the Universiade (World Student Games) 1500 metres title in Mexico that year, with a neophyte Saïd Aouita finishing last in the final. But those promising results for the young British pair were obscured in the blitz of praise for Coe’s three world records in forty-one days. The following year, competing on the fringes of celebrity, and with only weeks to go until the Olympic Games, Cram was still trying to figure out how to beat Williamson. And when Cram fell in the AAA Championships, the official selection race for Moscow, with Coe and Ovett already inked in for both 800 and 1500 metres, the Geordie thought his chance had gone for that year. But fate, or rather his mentor Brendan Foster, would lend a hand. Moorcroft had won the 1500 metres trial for Moscow, but opted for the 5000 metres at the Olympics, so the third 1500 place was still open. As has been mentioned the selectors ordered a run-off between Cram and Williamson, at the Bislet Games Mile in Oslo. Cram followed home the world record-
breaking Ovett in 3 minutes 53.8 seconds, while Williamson, running with a bad cold and in borrowed kit, finished third two and a half seconds behind. Cram concedes he was fortunate even to be granted the run-off. ‘I honestly thought my time had gone. I ran at a meeting for my club on the Monday [two days after his fall in the trial], and I ran seven races, I was that frustrated. I ran the two miles, the mile, the 800, the 400, the 4×100 and the 4×400 all in one night. Then I got home and there was a phone call, through Andy [Norman], asking if I can run in Bergen, I think on the Thursday. I ran a pretty decent time, and, from Bergen, they said, “OK, we’d better give Cram and Williamson a run-off.”’
Williamson still believes he was shabbily treated. ‘My old coach at the time said, “You lost your place because you were Scottish,” and I said, “No, you’re joking.” But Brendan had got the ear of the selectors, and if I think now about it, you know there was no logical reason for the selectors to do what they did. They put me into an extra race, with Cram and myself. But the difference was that Cram had never beaten me. I had been in my bed the week before with a very, very heavy cold. So 3.56 straight out of your bed for a mile wasn’t too bad, and two weeks later I ran 3.35 (for 1500 metres), so it was there, you know. But it wasn’t there that night.’
And it wouldn’t really be there for Williamson ever again. He was tripped in the 1982 European 1500 metres final – a stumble which gave Cram the impetus to take off and win. In the Commonwealth Games later that year, Williamson admits he ran round in a daze, and finished fourth. The following year, he was among the first to witness the start of Aouita’s rise to fame, comprehensively beaten by the Moroccan in an early season 1500 metres in Florence. He was in contention for the first World Championships in Helsinki, but injuries put paid to that and to the rest of his career.
Cram, in contrast, was only just beginning. ‘Once [I’d] got the third spot and stopped looking behind, then [I could] start to focus on what’s ahead. And it was those two. I didn’t look any more at Graham Williamson, or anyone else. After that, it was much more “Right, how do I get up to their standard?”’ He would surprise himself in the run-up to Moscow, when, while not yet even selected for the Olympic Games, he ran Ovett so close in a 1500 metres at Crystal Palace that the Ovett wave broke on the reef of Cram’s resistance. It says much for the unreliability of memory that, in recalling this in 2003, Cram thought the race had come in 1981, when it would have slotted better into the time-frame that he had in his mind charting his rise to prominence. In fact, it was in the Talbot Games, where Ovett was theoretically attempting to get close to Coe’s world record of 3 minutes 32.1 seconds. A slow third lap ruined any chance of that, and Cram then caught back half a dozen metres on Ovett in the final lap. ‘We’d already had three meetings at 1500 metres, and I was waiting for the Ovett “oomph”. I came up on him on the last lap on the back straight, and I was with him going round the top bend. The first kick came, and I went with him. We got into the home straight and I was still on his shoulder. I remember thinking, There’s something wrong here, you should be gone by now. And in that second, he was gone. He beat me by three tenths, which isn’t a huge amount. I kind of walked off the track that night thinking, Right, I’m much closer now. That was the first time I really felt I had got closer to either of them.’ His time, 3 minutes 35.6 seconds, made Cram the fastest teenager in history, yet, a month later, he was left so far behind in the Olympic final that he finished oblivious to who had won. While Coe was calming his hysteria, and kissing the tartan track of the Lenin Stadium (it’s now the Luzhniki Stadium), having run the greatest race of his life, and Ovett was reflecting on his first defeat in forty-six mile and metric-mile races, Cram was so caught up in trying not to finish last, he crossed the line thinking Ovett has done the double.
Coe was going to give Cram another surprise in Moscow, with a bit of advice on how best to structure his future training. He told the younger man to forget going to Loughborough as the next step in his development. Cram had once been better known as an academic at school than as a runner, but then training and racing had become more important, and he’d had to do an extra year at school in order to pass his university entrance exams. His parents, inevitably, were ‘really disappointed’. Like Ovett some years before, he had already visited Loughborough, with a view to going there. But, again like Ovett, he chose to stay at home. So we are left with a tantalising ‘what-might-have-been’ – the world’s three top milers all living in a small town in the rural East Midlands of England, and competing for the same university team.
‘It was the only real bit of advice that Seb gave me,’ says Cram, ‘but it was brilliant. He said, “Forget Loughborough, there’s no magic wand, there’s nothing there that you can’t have at home.”’ Accordingly, Cram chose a degree course in nearby Newcastle. He continued to train with his old club-mates and coach Jimmy Hedley. And remained near his folks and girlfriend Karen.
Coe may have had different reasons for wanting to get away from home himself, but as any serious athlete must recognise, the most important thing is a settled regime – the training, the meals, the social life, the racing – everything in its place, coupled with the recognition, the knowledge that this is what is going to work, this is what is going to produce results. Frank Duffy, the old Donegal coach to 800 metres Olympian Noel Carroll, once characterised the optimum day in the life of an athlete: ‘Doing what or who you did the day before.’ He was extolling the virtues of continuity.
Incongruously, given how his career would turn out, Cram still considered that he was going to end up as a 5000 metres runner. He said as much in the wake of the narrow defeat by Ovett in the Talbot Games. In Moscow, Ovett’s coach Harry Wilson told him that by the time of the next Olympiad he would be running the longer distance. It was not necessarily the Coe–Ovett effect, driving others to different events, but rather a combination of his own background, in road and cross-country, and his win in the European Junior 3000 metres in 1979.
But in 1981, Cram suddenly found that his own improvement was bringing him closer to the untouchables at ‘their’ distances. First, he was called on to deputise for a briefly injured Ovett at the eleventh hour in the European Cup 1500 metres in Zagreb. Pitched into his biggest confrontation since the Moscow final, he ran ably enough and finished third, to Olaf Beyer, who was having his best race since Prague. It is a Beyer victory that is conveniently forgotten by those who want to dismiss the East German’s earlier run as an aberration. But Beyer had had an ankle operation in late 1978, after his shock defeat of Ovett and Coe in the European Championships, and, although he had competed without distinction in Moscow, that was following another injury. By mid-1981, he was back in form. He finished a very close third to Coe in the 800 metres on the first of the two-day competition in Zagreb, then put his exhilarating finishing speed to good use with a 50-second last lap in the 1500 metres the next day.
‘With the benefit of hindsight, I could say I might have beaten anyone in the world that day,’ Beyer recalls. ‘I wanted to race against Steve Ovett and beat him, but Steve Cram ran instead. The time wasn’t anything special, but I knew that I could do anything that day, I was in really good form. That was only the second time that I felt that good. In 1981 there were no European Championships, no Olympics, but that was my bad luck, that’s sport, I don’t regret it. Ovett wasn’t there, and no one knew Steve Cram at the time.’
The last remark is an interesting reflection on just how much the famous pair obscured everyone else, particularly their young pretenders in Britain. Cram, after all, had been an Olympic finalist. Yet he still saw himself as a tyro, despite his mentor Brendan Foster doing his best to make the youngster consider himself otherwise. Like Peter Coe, Foster knew how and when to put in the verbal boot. ‘I was sitting in his office in May 1982,’ recalls Cram, ‘and I remember Brendan saying to me, “When are you going to stop being a promising youngster, and when are you going to win something?” I walked out thinking, Shit!’
2
1
Race of the Century
Coe’s first act immediately after the disappointment of the Athens 800 metres was a generous one. He went straight to Cram and told the youngster, still only twenty-one, that he (Coe) would not be contesting the 1500 metres in the European Championships. Cram was primed for his first major success as a senior. His resounding victory over a world-class field at the Zurich Weltklasse a month earlier had made him a clear favourite, now that Coe was out, but it remained to be seen what he could do in a senior championship. He had won the European Junior title, of course, but this was a different league. Was he going to be an Ovett, that’s to say a winner in the rough and tumble of a championship? Or was he going to do a Coe, and fall at one of his first competitive hurdles? In fact, he was going to be his own man, and win in his own way.
Circumstances were going to provide him with the opportunity to underline his success with a cavalier touch. Given the cool and rainy conditions, unusual for Athens, even in mid-September, the two Brits, Cram and his former nemesis Graham Williamson, had good reason to feel at home. But, after a couple of steady laps up-front for Irishman Ray Flynn, misfortune blighted Williamson’s chances again. He was moving up towards Cram and Flynn when he clashed with José-Manuel Abascal. The Spaniard was sent reeling, but Williamson went down. There was mayhem in the middle of the pack.
Cram quickly sized up the situation. ‘If nobody had moved by then, I was going to wind it up from maybe 500 metres out. This was just after 600 metres, when Graham goes down, and someone clips my heels. You react quickly, and move forward a bit, but there was a big screen, and I could see something had happened behind me. I thought, Right, I’m off, but by the time I got to two hundred or a hundred and fifty to go, I’m thinking, Oh, you daft bugger.’
