The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  But Ovett kept the media pot boiling when he suffered a surprising setback. Poised at Peter Elliott’s shoulder on the final bend of the AAA Championships 800 metres, Ovett clutched at his thigh and dropped out. He had been spiked on the first lap, and had a three-inch gash on his right foot. He then suffered an attack of cramp. With a quote that should be put up in lights at the Olympic Academy in Lausanne, Ovett complained, ‘It seems that the 800 metres is getting more and more physical, and I seem to be on the receiving end.’ The selectors remained oblivious to Ovett’s thus far undiscovered talent for irony, but they finally decided that he would not compete in the 800 metres in Helsinki.

  More astonishingly, neither would Coe. After another defeat, by an in-form Steve Scott in the mile at the AAA Championships, Coe chose to run in an 800 metres in Gateshead, Cram’s stamping ground. Horror at Coe’s ultimate demise that season was equalled only by the elation and amazement of Cram and his home crowd, when the local man surged past the leading group, including Coe, in the home straight to win. Coe could finish only a dejected fourth. The packed stadium erupted. Cram recalls, ‘A lot of people remember that as one of the great races at Gateshead.’ At this juncture, remember, Cram still thought that he was on his way to eventually becoming a 5000 metres runner. ‘I didn’t consider myself an 800 metres runner. I didn’t win 800s, I just didn’t win. But in those days, you always thought that championship races were slow, tactical affairs, so speed was the thing you wanted to work on.’

  Ovett won the 1000 metres at Gateshead, holding off a fast-finishing Don Paige, who Steve Scott felt would have challenged for Olympic 800 metres gold had the USA gone to Moscow. Paige had once beaten Coe over two laps, but most people ridicule Scott’s assessment, pointing out Paige was a good man for a one-off race, but would have toiled with heats and finals.

  Unusually, Coe fled Gateshead without talking to the media. His despair on the track post-race when he shook Cram’s hand was tangible. The following day, Coe withdrew from Helsinki completely. When he got home to Sheffield, a fortuitous first visitor was a family friend, Dr Bob Hague, who took a look at him, and quickly counselled a visit to the specialist who had treated him for a lymph-gland infection after Athens.

  One man’s disaster could prove another’s opportunity, but an application from Ovett to replace Coe in the 800 metres in Helsinki was turned down by the organising committee because it had arrived four days late. Who knows, four races at 800 metres might have tuned him up to win the 1500m title rather than breaking the world record later in the season? But Ovett was going into Helsinki lacking the sort of spark he had shown for the six previous summers, and it was the Third Man who was coming into world title-winning form.

  Helsinki is one of the world’s greatest venues to watch athletics. IAAF boss Primo Nebiolo found no dissenters when he referred to the 1952 Olympic Stadium as the Temple of Athletics. The broad, clean curves of the stands afford integral sight-lines, and the giant pines lofting against a Klein-blue sky offer a perfect backdrop. Of course, you got wet when it rained, but that only happened once, as far as I recall. And, thanks to Paavo Nurmi, whose statue stands on the stadium forecourt; thanks to Matti Järvinen, whose 1933 world record (one of eleven) in the javelin determined the 76.10-metre height of the stadium tower; thanks to those legions of distance runners, pre- and post-Nurmi, and those battalions of javelin throwers, men and women, a Helsinki athletics crowd is the most knowledgeable on the planet. It was the ideal place for the inaugural championships. And we got some great competition.

  Denied an outing in Moscow at the 1980 Olympics, when he might in any case have been a little too young, Carl Lewis set out on a major championships career which would end with him emulating the great Nurmi, with nine Olympic golds. Jarmila Kratochvilova confounded commentators and opponents alike, winning the 400/800 metres double. Alberto ‘Caballo’ Juantorena looked to have ended his career when he stepped on a kerb and broke an ankle. Willi Wülbeck gave West Germany its second major 800 metres title in successive years. After finishing fourth, which he aptly characterised as ‘the loneliest place in the athletics’, in two Olympic Games, Eamonn Coghlan finally won gold, in the 5000 metres. In winning the javelin with her final throw, Tiina Lillak raised the national sperm count (well, at least in the case of Sports Illustrated’s Kenny Moore, who wrote what many people joked was a soft-porn piece on her). And Steve Cram won the blue riband, the 1500 metres. In doing so, he relegated Ovett to fourth, and set up a show-stopping season’s finale at Crystal Palace.

  The pair had met in a semi-final in Helsinki whose line-up was announced only at close to midnight the day before. Only a year in the job at that point, I raced to a phone, got on to ‘copy’, and surprised myself by ad-libbing 400 words which were eminently readable the following day. I rank this as second only to having my expenses queried as one of the staging-posts in becoming a fully paid-up journalist.

  In the semi-final, it was telling that Ovett did not challenge Cram’s intent to cross the line first. And in the final, Cram gave a master-class of how to plan your way to victory, again with a bit of help from Brendan Foster, his friend and mentor. Cram still believed that Ovett would be the major threat, along with Steve Scott. For the first time in ages, neither Ovett nor Coe, nor Cram, had run in the second Oslo meeting of that season (there would be a third Oslo meeting after Helsinki, an indication of the drawing power of athletics at that time). But Scott, who had finished close to Coe in two world-record races, had finally won the Oslo mile in 3 minutes 49.49 seconds, close to the world record. He had also beaten Coe at the AAA Championships, of course. It was to be his best season.

  Few would argue with Cram’s assessment: ‘Although we’d never seen Scotty as a winner, he was in the best form of his life. I was more worried about Scotty than Aouita, but my tactic was to make a long run for home, and I heard that Aouita was thinking of the same. I thought, Great, but you take those things with a pinch of salt.’ Foster had identified that Aouita had struck for home with 500 metres to run in both his heat and semi-final, and Aouita did go at 500, but Cram was right there, waiting. Not for long, though. He used the Moroccan as a springboard, and was away to victory before Ovett could respond. Scott claimed silver and Aouita bronze. It had been a perfect summation by Cram and Foster, a disaster for fourth-placed Ovett.

  Despite the weeks out injured, Cram was still in his prime, when self-belief can make up for a lot that is lacking. It may seem contradictory, when I have emphasised so much how anything other than optimum fitness is a recipe for disaster in a runner, but there is also a phenomenon which we club runners used to call ‘fresh-fitness’. That is when you are back from a lengthy illness or injury when you are young, and you are so in thrall to your sport, so overjoyed to get back into competition, that you can outdo yourself. Or you could just say that Cram was ‘in the zone’. He did not even contemplate defeat, and there is a lot in that.

  As for Ovett, he was barely recognisable. This was not the Ovett of old. He had not responded when Cram had taken off; he looked jaded and lacklustre. Back at home a week later, Matt Paterson would give his appraisal in typically forthright style. Ovett was surprised by the reaction of the folks in Brighton, and particularly his club-mates. They didn’t speak, went out of their way to avoid him. It was embarrassment more than anything. They didn’t know what to say. Where once they’d avoided him, thinking he was a young god, now it was because they saw him as a lost soul. This was the first time they’d seen him truly beaten. Yes, he’d lost before, most obviously to Coe in Moscow, but he’d lost with honour, with a gold medal already in his pocket, and his dignity intact. Here, it seemed that he hadn’t even tried. Or, as Paterson put it to him, with candour as sharp as a Gorbals smile, ‘Boy! You ran like a cunt.’ ‘He laughed,’ recalls Paterson: ‘“Thank God somebody can tell me the truth,” he said.’

  Ovett takes up the tale: ‘I think people don’t understand failure, and not just in sport. It’s naïve, because they think winning wi
ll go on. I don’t think there is failure as long as you try your best. True failure is not even bothering to try. I mean, I wasn’t in great shape [in Helsinki], and tactically I was all over the shop, not confident enough, and not giving myself a good chance. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. It was the turning of the tides. I should have either not run or maybe trained a bit harder for it. Having said that, if you get selected, then you go.’

  In another twist of the knife, Sydney Maree then broke Ovett’s world record for 1500 metres, in Cologne. Maree was something of an enigma, linked perhaps to his birth in South Africa, where he had tired of the apartheid boycott, which he felt was counter-productive (he’s black). He tried to keep away from the debate as much as he could. That, according to white anti-apartheid campaigners in London, was because he was being sponsored by a South African brewery, who didn’t want him sullying the waters. Anyway, Maree had ‘escaped’ to the USA and become an American citizen. He was more talented than Steve Scott, but, like Scott, few saw him as a winner. At least Scott was consistent, and was always in or close to the frame, whereas Maree, who raced much less, could just as easily finish half a lap down as come close to winning.

  But Maree had at least one absolutely superb race per season. For example, in Oslo in 1985, he chased home Aouita and ran an unheralded 13 minutes 1.15 seconds, just behind the Moroccan’s 5000 metres world record of 13 minutes 00.40 seconds. That was a special night. Cram took the world mile record, and Ingrid Kristiansen broke the women’s 10,000 metres record, too. It was one of the greatest evenings of athletics I’ve ever attended. However, Maree’s other great performance, equally out of the blue, was to break Ovett’s 1500 record in 1983.

  But Ovett was not down for long, because he was nowhere near ‘out’. That third meeting in Oslo, prior to Maree’s record, threw up a classic British double-header. It wasn’t Ovett and Coe this time but Ovett–Cram. The youngster went first. He had taken precedence over Ovett for the first time in the European Cup the week after Helsinki, and had won the 1500 metres. In Oslo three days later, the man who still believed he was destined to be a 5000 metres runner tackled two laps, and came out with the fastest time of the year, 1 minute 43.61 seconds.

  Ovett’s riposte was more like the athlete of old. He sped around the mile, despatching his peers (including Maree) in a time of 3 minutes 50.49 seconds. As if that wasn’t enough, Ovett paid an uninvited visit to the gents in the press box and announced he was going for a world record in the next few days, date and venue to be announced. Those of us who had endured the full ice-age of Ovett’s boycott were torn between being enthralled by this new openness and hailing his revival, and seeing it as another cynical attempt to deflect attention from the recently crowned king, who was strolling languidly around the Bislet turf.

  But Maree’s record a few days later was just the extra impetus that Ovett needed, and he made good his promise, in the atmospheric surroundings of Rieti, a little town some seventy kilometres north of Rome, in the foothills of the central Appenines. It was close to Rieti, apparently, where the Sabine women were raped, and Rieti had a reputation for violating the norms of competition. It had, and still has, a reputation for fast times, belying the meeting’s late-season date, which has raised much debate about whether the track is the correct circumference. One British journalist – no friend of Ovett – is alleged to have secured a chain and measured the kerb after Ovett’s record. But a couple of years later, Coe also ran a very fast 1500 metres there. Criticism from the same quarter was, shall we say, muted on that occasion.

  Ovett had hoped to break the record in Koblenz – probably his favourite venue – but a slow first lap had scuppered that. In Rieti, David Mack, a member of the Santa Monica Track Club, took Ovett round in 54 seconds. Mack had once distinguished himself in Oslo by having a punch-up on the infield with the Senegalese 800 metres runner Moussa Fall, but here the American was putting his pugnacity to better use. He was fighting a strong breeze, but still delivered Ovett to the 800 mark in just outside 1 minute 51 seconds. Ovett took over shortly afterwards, and shot through the breeze to a new record of 3 minutes 30.77 seconds. True to the Rieti tradition, his first reaction was bemusement: ‘I knew I was fit enough, and ready to take the record, but in those conditions, I thought it was beyond my reach.’ Maree had held the record for one week.

  If Cram had been upset by Ovett’s attention-grabbing in Oslo, he had further cause for annoyance after the latter’s record. As he recalled in 2003, ‘Seb Coe is then in the media, saying, “Well, Ovett has just run badly in the World Championships. He’s still the world number one.”’ If Cram needed any more assurance that he himself was really the best in the world, this was it. To have Ovett seeking to shadow his limelight was one thing; to have Coe then backing up his old enemy, thereby slagging off Cram in the process, vouchsafed it for the young Geordie. His riposte was going to enthrall millions, and be remembered as one of the great races.

  It’s an overused term, ‘Mile of the Century’. There was one practically every year during the 1930s, when the Ivy League–Oxbridge fixtures were in vogue. And anyone who thinks that Bannister’s first sub-4 qualifies should stop reading now. If Filbert Bayi’s race against himself, the clock and John Walker (in that order) had been a mile rather than 1500 metres in the 1974 Commonwealth Games, that would make it a leading contender. Essentially, however, you need a worthy opponent to make it a real race, and I would hazard that Bayi didn’t even know who Walker was in Christchurch. Walker admits he didn’t know Bayi. The race between Cram and Ovett at Crystal Palace at the end of 1983 would qualify on every count, except a world record, but nobody at Crystal Palace that night cared about that. Nor need they have done. Twenty years later, in 2003, Athletics Weekly readers voted it the ‘Race of the Century’. They could be right.

  Initially, Cram did not see why he should run, and Brendan Foster agreed. But this time, after some thought, Cram finally contradicted his mentor. After his 1500 metres world record, Ovett had decided to make a last attempt to recoup the kudos he had lost in Helsinki. Cram was down to run the mile in the final meeting of the season at Crystal Palace, so Ovett decided to enter it, too. Andy Norman was getting closer to Cram, but, for the time being, he was still perceived as Ovett’s man. In fairness, by this time, Norman was probably as sick of the evasive tactics as everyone else. He asked Cram to stay in the race, and accept Ovett to the field. To Cram’s eternal credit, he did, eventually. ‘Brendan was very much against it initially, [but] I was thinking, If I don’t run against him, I might as well just pack up and accept that he’s better than me. But I certainly believed I was better, and I think the only way to prove that to yourself, never mind everybody else, you can kid yourself as to how good you are, but you’ve got to go and put yourself on the line. I had done it once at the World Championships and I was happy to do it again.

  ‘They [Ovett and Coe] had gone through this kind of thing about protecting their position – two number ones was better than one number one and one number two. I couldn’t handle that. I would rather be the number one and the only number one. And I would actually rather be number two. Then you know what you have to do. So for those reasons I decided to run, even though the race was always going to be set up more for him than it was for me. But I was confident I could win.’

  The race lived up to all the expectations, and more. Because Cram was so confident, he decided to have a bit of fun. Instead of going off with the pack at the gun, he settled in behind Ovett, something that the elder man couldn’t handle at all. The détente lasted only 200 metres, with the pair dawdling 50 metres (and increasing) behind the fast-disappearing pack, before Cram took off. No one could have doubted that Ovett would have been content to stay there and let the rest go. It was another credit to Cram. Ovett, who had decided after Prague never to concentrate on just one opponent again, was doing exactly that. It was the supreme compliment to Cram.

  He was in his element, for he too saw the mile as something special
. ‘I like the mile because you have to think. It is a bit of a game of chess at times, and guys like Ovett and Coe were great to run against, and even Aouita, because they made you think. Steve was the easiest to run against and I don’t mean that in terms of how good he was, I mean in terms of what he was going to do. There wasn’t that much variation: you knew he wasn’t going to lead. Seb could on occasions take it out. So, yes, that night, I would say it was one of my favourite races, because of the result, but also [because] there was a real sense of cat and mouse. It was good fun, the first two hundred metres was a laugh. I’d decided I was going to run behind him in the early laps just to see how he felt about it, and he wasn’t obviously having any of that. So we were running down the back straight, the pair of us looking at each other, while everybody hares off. Had anyone in the race had a bit of nous and gone after the pacemaker and opened up a thirty- or forty-yard lead on us, we might have been in trouble.’

  Indeed, Pierre Delèze of Switzerland was no slouch, and he was leading the charge, but once Cram switched on the after-burners, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the pair would be back in contention. The crowd was in no doubt. Although Cram and Ovett still had a lot of catching up to do, no one in the stadium ever believed that anyone other than Cram or Ovett would win. But which one? Ovett was the darling of the Crystal Palace crowd; the place was virtually his home stadium. He might have begun his career in Brighton, but his first big races had come at the Palace, and his fame and reputation had spread from there. The crowd loved him, and still saw him as a winner. They weren’t antagonistic towards Cram, far from it, but Ovett was their man. Cram might have won the world title, but they’d seen Ovett run down ‘Sir Henry’ and give him a good pasting in the season that Rono had broken four world records. But nobody knew who was going to win. That’s what made it the perfect match. Crowd anticipation was as palpable as the athletes’ sweat.