by Pat Butcher
Cram had nothing to worry about. He had seized the moment. His decisiveness had made the difference. He had displayed the courage that separates the champion from the support act, the also-ran. He was running the last 800 metres in 1 minute 52.5 seconds, that’s to say as fast as Gunder Hägg ever ran for a solo two-lapper, and he was away to his first senior international championship title. It was due reward for his audacity, and the rest of Europe’s middle-distance men were left struggling in his wake. Their frustration would have been compounded by Nikolai Kirov finishing second. The Russian had finished third behind Ovett and Coe in the Olympic 800 metres two years earlier. The lesson was as clear as those signs at railway road crossings in France: ‘Be careful, one passing train can obscure another.’ This was worse. Even with Coe and Ovett indisposed, the Brits had found someone else to take on and beat the rest of the world. And so it was to prove over the next twelve months.
A month later, Cram went on to win the Commonwealth 1500 metres in Brisbane, more or less as he pleased. He now had two major titles, as well as the win in Zurich over the best of the rest, including the leading Americans Steve Scott and Todd Harbour. He had beaten everybody whom Ovett and Coe would expect to beat, and no matter what the media might say – and I was one of them – about his times being slower than theirs, at a rate of progress like his, the good times and records were going to come. More importantly, in that extraordinary context that Dave Moorcroft had mentioned – ‘You were number three in the world, but only number three in Britain’ – Cram’s attitude now was ‘I banished all thoughts of I can’t beat ’em.’
Nevertheless, he began 1983 with injury problems of his own, first a groin strain then an unlikely incident while training which resulted in a turned ankle – stepping on a soft-drink can! Mean-while, the Old Firm were making their tentative comebacks. Coe, gloriously, set a couple of indoor world records – 800 metres in 1 minute 44.91 seconds and 1000 metres in 2.18.58 (three and six seconds respectively slower than his outdoor records over the same distances, incidentally). He followed those with an early summer win in the Emsley Carr Mile, which, despite a slow time, was a further reminder to their rivals that no matter the indisposition, they were still the men to beat, because second yet again was Soviet fall-guy Nikolai Kirov. The Russian edged on to Coe’s shoulder on the final bend, but the Brit refused to let him pass and won easily in the end.
A track race would have been too easy for Ovett. True to type, he chose to demonstrate that the breadth of his range and talent was undiminished by competing in a 10-kilometre road race in one of his old stamping grounds, Oslo. He didn’t win, but finishing second behind specialist colleague Eamonn Martin was no disgrace.
By the middle of June, Seb ’n’ Steve were back in the roles they had long created for themselves: both running an 800 metres race, but 1000 miles apart. Coe won in 1 minute 45 seconds in his backyard in Loughborough, with Graham Williamson, still attempting to challenge for a place on the rostrum, setting a Scottish record six tenths behind in second place. Ovett, in the meantime, was struggling against a mediocre field in Udine, Italy. But, tellingly, he still won, 1 minute 47.64 seconds.
Despite these victories, the pair were far from their previous dominating form, and there were doubts that they were going to regain sufficient ground in time to stage duels of Moscow intensity at the inaugural Athletics World Championships in Helsinki in mid-August. Against a background of controversy over whether Coe was being paid in the first European meeting under the new trust fund system (his agents IMG were upsetting promoters with their inflated demands), he was defeated in a 1500 metres in the same Jean Bouin Stadium in Paris where Ovett had dropped out the previous year. That was one unwelcome coincidence, but another was worse for Coe. His defeat by the Spaniard José-Luis Gonzalez had uncomfortable echoes of his loss in the European Championships in Athens.
The meeting was a novelty for reasons other than the payment debate and a rare win for Gonzalez (which he would repeat against Cram, with similar repercussions for the Briton, in the European Cup in Prague in 1987). It was the first time I’d heard music used as a background to a race. The organisers chose a disco version of ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ – this was the country which gave us Johnny Halliday, remember. Speaking immediately after his defeat, Coe, to his credit, said it should have been the ‘Death March’. For he folded in the finishing straight, exactly as he had done against Ferner in Athens. Similarly, Coe was again at a loss to explain his loss of power in the final metres.
Intriguingly, this should have been Saïd Aouita’s first big race after his early season crushing of Graham Williamson in Florence, where the Moroccan had posted the fastest 1500 metres time of the year, 3 minutes 32.54 seconds. But another argument over appearance money had resulted in his withdrawal. Which was a great shame, because Coe and Aouita never got to race each other. What a match that would have been! I suspect that Aouita was content not to show anything more pre-Helsinki than he had already demonstrated against Williamson. Despite his defeat in the 1500 metres, Coe had run 3 minutes 35.17 seconds, a qualifying time for the World Championships, for which he’d already been selected at 800.
Ovett was having problems of a different order. The previous weekend, he had been knocked off the track in the Southern Counties 800 metres at Barnet, north London, by his old pal Bob Benn. Ovett had dropped out, and characteristically couldn’t remember this incident, blaming it on cramp. Nor could he recall the reason for the fall-out with Benn. And Benn had been reluctant to tell me. In fact, it was one of those fortuitous questions that an interviewer throws out in passing, or, in this case, in leaving. I’d concluded my interview with Benn, at the offices of his architectural consultancy in Portsmouth, and casually said, ‘I suppose you know Steve lives in Australia nowadays.’ ‘No, I didn’t,’ he replied ‘we haven’t spoken in twenty years.’ I virtually had to force it out of him, switching my recorder back on and badgering him. I took it for a sort of fidelity to the memory of their times together, and he’d certainly given me no indication during the hour we’d been talking that there had ever been bad blood between them. On the contrary, he’d been as complimentary towards Ovett as Matt Paterson was. (Then again, Paterson and Ovett had had their fallings out.) But I’d even asked Benn about Ovett’s disputes with various people, and Benn had come up with a ‘black-and-white’ characterisation, without so much as an indication that he’d been excommunicated too.
The spat went back to a bout of glandular fever Benn had had before Ovett’s accident with the church railings. ‘I became quite ill at one point,’ he recalled, ‘and Rachel, who I’d been speaking to on the phone, said, “Come over to Brighton and spend the weekend with us. Steve is racing round Preston Park.” I said, “Well, I’m not sure I’m up to it.” I was pretty groggy at the time. But I eventually decided to jump in the car and go over there, and what became patently apparent in the meantime was that she had mentioned to Steve that that was the case. And she shouldn’t have done that, she shouldn’t have invited me, because he was worried about picking something up, even though he’d already had glandular fever. No one rang me to say don’t come over, so I drove all the way to Brighton and got out of the car . . . Gradually [I] realised I was being blanked and came away from that feeling very upset about it and drove all the way back to Portsmouth. I dropped him a line and said I was upset about that, but I had checked with the doctor and once you’ve had glandular fever, you can’t get it again.’
I put this to Ovett, who maintained that you could contract glandular fever again, and had said as much to Benn at a Sportswriters’ Dinner later that year. In fact, Benn is right, but that’s not really the issue: it was the lack of contact that had upset Benn. He never received a reply to the letter he sent to Ovett. The next time they met was on the track at Barnet.
Benn recalls, ‘He was boxed actually, on the inside, and he got in the straight and started pushing his way round. I wasn’t going to be pushed out of the way by him, given the slight
bad taste in the mouth that I had. I gave him a good old shove and then he pulled up with his hamstring. I don’t know if it was for real or not, but Andy Norman came up to me and said . . . fight outside, you know. So that was that. That was the last time I saw him.’
It was only cramp, as Ovett recalls, and after a massage he ran and won the 1500 metres at the same meeting. A week later, and two days after Coe’s disappointment in Paris, Ovett ran at a meeting in Edinburgh. With everyone eager to see whether he could still cut it at international level, he kept us all guessing with typical Ovett serendipity. In a 1000 metres race, he tripped over local international Geoff Turnbull, got spiked in the process, then waited to see that Turnbull was OK before giving chase to the leaders. Despite a last 400 metres in 53.6 seconds, he could make no impact, and trailed in well behind Peter Elliott, who won in 2 minutes 21.92 seconds.
But at the Bislet Games in Oslo a week later, Ovett and Coe were back to their copy-book best. Which is to say that Coe won the 800 metres in a rapid 1 minute 43.8 seconds, after being paced away from his pursuers. And Ovett outstripped Coe’s Paris vanquisher Gonzalez to win the 1500 metres, but only after barging his way out of a box behind Ray Flynn, knocking the Irishman into the other leading Spaniard, José-Manuel Abascal, who went sprawling to the track. Abascal was furious, as was Flynn. But that was then. True to his good nature, Flynn cannot help laughing at the memory now. After all, he had once conceded, ‘If Ovett ran a mile in 4.16, I’d run 4.16.1.’
Of Bislet, Flynn says, ‘It was typical Ovett. He always waited very late in races, and liked to find himself involved in situations. He probably could have found a way around a lot earlier, but Ovett was dramatic, if anything, and maybe he was always going to win the race anyway. I mean, anybody else probably would have been disqualified, but Steve Ovett, with Andy Norman, in Oslo, was not ever going to be disqualified, despite any kinds of criticism from athletes or officials.’
Ovett admitted that his aggressive tactics, worse even than those he’d employed in Moscow, would deserve disqualification in a championship, but he was well pleased with his time of 3 minutes 33.81 seconds, his fastest since the halcyon days of 1981. He followed Bislet with another 1500 metres win in Birmingham, and, although it was much slower, the fact that he’d come through three races in six days was enough to convince him that he should attempt the double in Helsinki. It was not going to be so easy convincing the selectors and public this time, however. But Ovett was back on a roll, and at his anarchic best.
Cram had a low-key reintroduction to competition, running 3 minutes 37.53 seconds on his home track at Gateshead, fast enough to qualify for Helsinki, and sketching out a makeshift programme, which he hoped would deliver him to the World Championships with at least a chance of adding to his titles of the previous year. After his injuries, the biography he was shooting with Tyne-Tees TV had all the makings of a disaster movie, but he was doing his best to salvage it. Ovett, meanwhile, seemed to be doing his best to sabotage it.
With only six weeks to go to the World Championships, Cram wanted to run an international 1500 metres in Enschede in the Netherlands, but Ovett entered the race at the eleventh hour. Ovett says that he can’t recall doing this deliberately, but Cram has no doubts about his elder rival’s intentions. In retrospect, the Ovett plan backfired, because Cram switched to the 800 metres and won in a qualifying time for the distance. Ovett still had not run one at that stage. He won a slow 1500 metres.
Cram’s take on such tactics is illuminating. ‘I was doing a documentary at the time, and did a walking piece with the camera. I can’t believe I did this on the day of the meet, [but I said], “Ovett has come here, I’m sure it’s part of a plan to mess up my preparations. I’m not ready to run against him yet.” This gives you an insight into my mindset then, because, had I still been thinking he was better than me, I wouldn’t have minded getting beaten by him.’
This begged the question, did Cram ever indulge in such tactics himself? When I interviewed him at length in 1986, after the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh (where he had won the middle-distance double after Coe had dropped out of the 800 metres with another illness, and Ovett had won the 5000 metres), Cram had admitted using the media to ‘get at’ his rivals. The piece ran over three days in The Times. Kim McDonald, by then the world’s leading athletes’ agent, told me later that he was astonished by this admission, believing Cram was too honest for his own good. Maybe that said more about McDonald, a notoriously hermetic man, than it said about Cram, and Cram remains forthright. ‘I think we all played these games occasionally. I was getting to know the meet promoters quite well, and, yeah, there was a little bit of chess about where you ran, and obviously we didn’t want to run against each other. But I realised then [that] I didn’t mind running against them. But you’ve got to run against people when you’re ready to run against them.’ In living up to this testament at the end of that 1983 season, Cram (and Ovett) would provide us with one of the twentieth century’s indelible athletics memories.
The prelude was equally unforgettable, since it produced a media frenzy, which almost equalled the pre-Moscow rigmarole. But this time there was a significant difference, since there was something other than ‘who will win what?’ to debate. Cram’s return to form meant that we still didn’t even know who would line up at the start. The International Amateur Athletics Federation, which was organising its World Championships for the first time, had chosen to follow the example of the Olympic Games, where a maximum of three competitors per event per country was allowed. There had been much debate on the subject. Many commentators and coaches pointed out that if six of the top ten sprinters in the world were from the USA, as was regularly the case, then why shouldn’t they all be given the opportunity to compete in a world championships? (Incidentally, the Olympics had started way back in 1896 as an open house. Three per event was introduced as late as 1928.) The argument was the same for Soviet hammer throwers, who dominated the event world-wide. Ditto the British middle-distance runners. But, mindful of Olympic boycotts, the IAAF wanted as large a representation of countries as possible, even if some sent just one athlete, and it was a case of keeping the numbers of entrants manageable, as well as ensuring that a handful of countries would not overwhelm the rest.
Ovett and Coe, the Olympic middle-distance champions, wanted to double up again, to run both the 800 and 1500 metres, in Helsinki. But neither was running well at his title event. Ovett had barely raced at 800 metres since Moscow, and Coe was looking vulnerable at 1500, something that was underlined when he lost again, at Crystal Palace this time, to Dragan Zdravkovic, the Yugoslav whom Cram had battled with to avoid the final place in the Moscow 1500 metres. Coe conceded that he was ‘mentally shattered’ by the defeat. Cram, on the other hand, having been told after winning two titles the previous year that he only had to prove his fitness to gain selection, was clearly on the way back. After Enschede, he won a fast 1500 metres in Nice. And the ill-fated Graham Williamson, in the best form of his life, had run the fourth fastest time in the world for 1500 metres. He’d backed that up with a silver medal over 800 metres in the Universiade, a major championship that has never been accorded the significance it deserves in the UK. But, as far as Coe and Ovett were concerned, neither had been so vulnerable since Olaf Beyer had eased past them five years earlier in Prague. Yet, extraordinarily, this was still a domestic argument. Whoever was selected would immediately be installed as a favourite to reach the podium, if not to win.
This time round, Andy Norman, made it public that, in view of these uncharacteristic weaknesses for Coe and Ovett, there should be no doubling up this time. When the selectors took him at his word, and pencilled in Coe for just the 800 and Ovett for the 1500 metres, Norman spent the weekend on the phone trying to convince them otherwise. There was a furore, because a list of selectees was issued which included Ovett, Cram and Williamson in the 1500. It was given to the press agencies, but then changed late on Sunday evening, and published on Monday mornin
g without the two youngsters, and with just Coe at 800 and Ovett at 1500 metres. The implication was that Cram and Williamson, who would be welcomed into any other national team with open cheque-books, would have to race-off again.
‘Joke’, ‘farce’, ‘farrago’, ‘fiasco’, we wrote, and the sub-editors splashed our words in headlines. The audio-visual media followed suit, as is their wont. It was all wheeling up into the national talking point that it had been before Moscow. Cram stayed cool (he could afford to), saying he never expected to be selected straight away. Williamson tried to avoid the press, but I had a phone number for him, and, after a few fruitless attempts, essayed the time-honoured trick of letting the phone ring once, ringing off and calling back immediately. Williamson is such a sweet guy, he didn’t put the phone back down when he realised it was me. ‘This is getting beyond a joke,’ he said. ‘The selectors should get off the fence and pick the team properly. What they’re effectively doing is giving Coe another chance, when I’ve done three times faster than him.’
With respect to Williamson, most of us were getting carried away, being burned and blinded with the heat and light generated by this debate. Coe, after all, or rather before all, was the Olympic 1500 metres champion, and the sort of character who would not go to Helsinki if he thought he couldn’t do himself justice. As I recall, the only member of the media championing this eminently sensible point of view was John Rodda of the Guardian.
Then something happened that no one was expecting. Williamson and Cram did not initially even believe it. Coe opted out of the 1500 metres. In a statement prepared for him by his biographer, David Miller, Coe attacked the selectors, saying they had made his position untenable. In 2003, Cram recalled, ‘I was, like, what is he on about? “Untenable?” I had to go and look it up in the dictionary. I didn’t know what it meant.’ What it meant was that Cram and Williamson were selected for the 1500 metres in Helsinki.
