The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  Cram was probably the most confident man in the park. ‘The race started from four hundred metres [from the finish], and there was an air of inevitability of what was going to happen. I knew when I was going to kick, and he knew when he was going to kick. I used to try and vary it, certainly between a hard run from maybe three hundred out or just before then, which is what I did that night.’ They had caught the pack at halfway, and, with Cram still leading, as he’d done since picking up the pace, they gradually drew away from the rest. With the formalities out of the way, now they could just concentrate on each other. ‘From the bell I picked it up and I kicked hard at three hundred and kicked hard at two hundred, and kicked in the home straight again. And then Steve had got no chance to use the acceleration that he had. The yard that I gained, particularly at three hundred to go, was what I won by in the end.’

  By which time, the crowd was on its feet, yelling its heart out. Me included. The idea is that the media should maintain a bit of decorum had gone out of the picture windows of the press box. The worst charge you could have levelled against you by your colleagues in any sport was to be ‘a fan with a notebook’. But this was something else. You didn’t see this every meeting, or even every year. You might see something like this only once in a lifetime. I couldn’t sit still or sit down. It was wonderful stuff. The only place to be was on your feet, applauding. For it was a special race, and I dare say that each generation has races like that. But what gave it the extra cachet was that it came in the wake of that era when Coe and Ovett wouldn’t, for whatever reason, race each other outside the majors. Here was Cram saying, OK, ‘I’m world champion. I beat you in Helsinki, you didn’t even get a medal. But here you are, challenging me to race, when I thought my season was over. I could have stood aside and let you get on with it.’ But he didn’t, which is why Cram deserves all the kudos he received for this race, and this victory.

  To Ovett’s credit, he concurred. ‘It was a good clash. I mean, I enjoyed it. OK, it was a defeat marginally, and I think for both of us, Steve having won the World Championships, and me coming back into form, it was probably the right combination. The fact that it was slow to start was probably a saving grace for me. If it was going to be an all-out world-record attempt, I would have been knocked to the back straight away. It developed into a two-horse race over the last lap, and I think that’s what pulled the crowd to its feet. It was good to run against Steve. We’d run against each other quite a lot. It’s not a case of avoiding people sometimes – if anything, I should have avoided that race, because it was probably one of the hardest ones at the end of the season to tackle, after being exhausted from the record attempt. I got beat, but it didn’t worry me, because I thought I’d done my best. It was a good race, and everybody was happy. You can’t win them all.’

  Cram was going to struggle in 1984, with an even more serious injury than the one he’d had the previous year. It is credit to him, and to the previous level of fitness that he achieved, but more importantly to the depth of his self-belief, that he could go so unprepared to Los Angeles and come away with an Olympic silver medal. But his time was still to come, and when it did it would result in a wonderful year of world records in which he would finally overcome not only our heroes, but their times as well. But that would be after the final act of the greatest rivalry in the history of track and field athletics.

  22

  Revenge

  Although he was pre-selected for the Olympic 800 metres – with Ovett and Cram pre-selected for the 1500 – it was far from obvious that Coe would even make it to the Games in Los Angeles, let alone create sporting history. After the Gateshead debacle, Bob Hague, on examining Coe, had known instantly that there was a serious problem. ‘He was clearly out of sorts and he was rather pale,’ recalls the doctor, ‘and he drew my attention to some lymph nodes he’d got in his groin. He’d got a huge bunch of lymph nodes there that were grossly abnormal. You normally get a few in the groin, but nothing like that. There was obviously something going on. I put him in touch with a friend who was an expert in infectious diseases in Leicester. He investigated it, did biopsies and found it was toxoplasmosis.’

  This was a relief to Hague. Although he had not said so to the Coes, he was worried that it might be leukaemia. But it was bad enough, for an elite athlete. It is one of the contradictions of being so fit that a minor ailment can bring you down. Toxoplasmosis is similar to glandular fever. It is something that a ‘normal’ person could have without knowing or noticing, apart from being a little more tired or debilitated than usual. But with a world-class athlete, it can stop them in their tracks. That is exactly what happened to Sebastian Coe in mid-1983. He may have got it from the family cat, notorious carriers of the disease, and his case was severe.

  According to Bob Hague, ‘It’s an infective agent that gets into the lymphoid system and causes an illness. It can last for a long time and make you feel very below par. The majority of people who get it don’t get it very badly. It frequently goes away on its own, but if people have a really severe illness, which he did, there are treatments, and he had a full course of injections. Clearly it was messing up his ambitions a great deal.’

  Coe had obviously had the illness for some time, and in a burst of Ovett-itis had done little or nothing about it. Peter Coe was annoyed, but his son was now twenty-seven years of age, and Dad’s influence was evidently waning, although his opinions were still being offered at full volume. ‘That was the one time we came very close to really falling out,’ says Peter. ‘He tried all sorts of alternative stuff to get better. Very early on I said, “Look, it’s not working, we need a really good analysis of what is wrong. You won’t get it from physiotherapy, you won’t get it from osteopaths or anybody.” I was really arguing with Seb, I said, “Stop and get this thing done.” Athletes are buggers for that.’

  Despite that semi-jocular tone, there was going to be nothing remotely funny about the next six months, which would be the lowest of Coe’s career. He couldn’t run, something that had been his daily anchor for more than half his life, he was on a course of drugs which made him feel sick, and he was being written off on all sides, including by his peers, who may just have felt some degree of Schadenfreude, satisfaction at his demise. As Gore Vidal once said, ‘It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.’ I suspect that Vidal was sacrificing the truth for a memorably bitchy line, but you know what I mean. John Walker, who never shrank from offering a quote when asked, said, ‘Great athletes get perhaps two years when they can do almost anything. Seb was maybe the finest middle-distance runner I’ve ever seen. But he’s had his two years.’

  Coe concedes that he might already have had the beginnings of the problem in Athens in 1982. ‘I wasn’t feeling well in Athens. I was lumpy under the arms, and some days I was feeling OK, and other days I was just feeling tired. The day of the [800 metres] final, I felt very ordinary. Looking back, the signs were very obvious. I remember having a good break, getting back into training, but never at any stage during that winter [1982–3] feeling anything other than a couple of degrees below most of the time.

  ‘I remember one day driving down the motorway from Loughborough to London, I was finding it very difficult to stay awake. I thought I’d stop for forty minutes to sleep, and I woke up two hours later. I was working on something, and I just lay on Steve’s [Mitchell] floor. Three hours later, I woke up. So the signs were there. Then the articles started appearing, you know – “BURN OUT”, “MENTAL BREAKDOWN”. We went through the whole lot.’

  By now, Coe had definitively left Sheffield, a move he underlined by joining Haringey AC in north London. Granville Beckett, the Yorkshire Post journalist who had followed Coe’s career from a child, remembers a typically grass-roots reaction to the news of the athlete’s move. ‘One chap who later became Hallamshire Harriers’ secretary rang to say that Seb had joined Haringey. I said, “I’m sorry to hear that,” and he said, “Well, he never did nowt for our club anyway.” I thought, Just by being
a member, you are attracting people to that club, aren’t you? He was so short-sighted.’ I was able to reassure Beckett that the only reason I knew Hallamshire was even in Sheffield was because of Coe’s link to the club.

  It would be close to six months before Coe could do any sort of training. A gap like that as a teenager would have been almost incidental, but Coe was entering his late twenties, with well over a decade of intensive training behind him. That background might serve him well ultimately, but it could also make it much more difficult to come back, both mentally and physically. He was fortunate in one sense that the illness prevented him putting on weight, so that wasn’t an aspect he had to bother about when he began training in early 1984. He was also on massive doses of antibiotics, designed to kill off the virus.

  ‘The hardest period was the weeks and weeks of very heavy drug treatment,’ he says. ‘I remember being at a book launch in one of the big bookshops in Dublin, and having to leave halfway through, and throwing up. I was just feeling like death warmed up, and that was the pattern of the day. Not long after Christmas, I started jogging with fourteen-year-old kids at Haringey, eight-minute-mile pace. Crammy and Ovett are running 3.33–3.34 [1500 metres races] in Melbourne, so if you ask at what point in the year did LA seem as remote as it possibly could be, it was probably that period.’

  Peter Coe had enlisted the help of Dr David Martin, an exercise physiologist at the University of Atlanta, whom Peter had met at various coaching conferences. They would eventually collaborate on a book, Better Middle Distance Running, a volume which became a seminal work for serious students of coaching. Peter was going to send the results of all Coe’s blood tests to Martin, who would use them to evaluate the amount of work that Seb could do without harming his immune system further.

  ‘The thing about toxoplasmosis is that it can stay in your system for a good fifteen, twenty years,’ says Seb. ‘The risk was stressing the body too much, and dropping back into it [the virus]. There was also the risk of piling on the training so quickly that you ended up getting a stress fracture. It was probably Peter’s finest hour, just managing that, and not on a day-by-day basis, that was hour by hour. And Dave Martin was fantastic, because he was doing all the blood chemistry analysis, so any time that the chemistries were looking like we were entering dangerous stress areas, we’d have to back off.’

  Despite the dozen of more years of competition, there was still an element lacking which Peter sought to add. Seb was still uncomfortable in company in his races. He had been so good, and used what he calls the ‘front-running tactic’ to such good effect, that he had still not got used to the rough and tumble associated primarily with 800 metres running. Peter asked John Hovell, one of the Haringey AC officials and coaches, to supply relays of youngsters to accompany Coe during his speed/endurance sessions. Peter liked what he called, ‘up and down the clock sessions’. Other coaches call them ladders or pyramids. This is the practice of running, say, 1200 metres at three-quarter race speed, taking anything up to two minutes rest/jog, then another ‘effort’ of 800 metres, rest, 600 metres, rest, and so on, down to 200 metres, then back up to 1200 metres. This has the additional benefit of teaching pace judgement at different distances, and getting the athlete used to using the shorter distances to effect mid-race surges.

  ‘He [Hovell] knew quite well the strengths of the kids in the team,’ Peter recalls, ‘so I arranged that he could put me in a new face without interrupting the flow too much. Very short recoveries, just get another man in for the next time, going down or coming up. My job was to go into the stands in a position where I could see all the markers around the track. They [club runners] were instructed to get him into a bunch, rough him up a bit, it didn’t matter, real racing conditions. People make a basic mistake: they train to train, they don’t train to race.’

  Coe repaid the debt to his new club-mates by turning out in the road relay season. These are major events on the club calendar, emphasising club spirit and solidarity, while being less stressful than either cross-country or track running, yet providing a good pointer to form. Coe will have been overjoyed, in his first race in eight months, to run the fastest leg in the Thames Valley Harriers road relay on 31 March. He was again fastest on the short (five-kilometre) leg of the Southern Counties 12-stage road relay the following week, and second fastest in the National 12-stage another couple of weeks later.

  With Ovett and Cram in Australia, Coe would normally have been the centre of attention, but, although many of the national press attended those relays, there was something else to divert our gaze. It needed to be pretty extraordinary to keep us away from the prospect of Coe, Ovett and Cram at the Olympic Games. And it was. It was Zola Budd. The South African waif became a cause célèbre on and off the track. An eagle-eyed sub-editor on the Daily Mail had spotted that the teenage running phenomenon, barefooting around the bush in Bloemfontein, had a British grandparent. David English, the Mail editor with an eye for the main chance, had immediately done a deal with his Conservative government contacts for her to get a British passport in double-quick time. Depending on your politics, this was either one of the greatest coups of the Thatcher administration or a blatant disregard for the sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa.

  Zola Budd is one of the greatest natural running talents I have ever seen – and on the testimony of several British internationals, men who ran with her, she trained harder than any woman athlete they had ever met. But the manner of her ‘acquisition’ for Britain was a disgrace to all right-thinking people. It was a passport of convenience, and it should never have been countenanced, but it was passed on the nod by the rump of the administrative ‘old school’, those who were being bypassed in the rush to professional athletics. And it did give us plenty to write about. I was one of the sternest critics of Budd during her time in the UK, something that she remarked upon in her autobiography, published after she returned to South Africa in 1988. But she also records in Zola that I was the first to tell her that she could win the World Cross Country title, something she did twice, 1985 and 1986. I would like to claim this as admirable foresight and qualitative judgement, but any fool could have told her that, and I was amazed no one else had done so.

  I thought I was merely stating the obvious when she was expressing reservations about her chances a couple of weeks prior to the 1985 race in Lisbon. She won the 5-kilometre race by almost 200 metres. I was ambivalent. I knew how good she was, and I loved watching her race – she was as aggressive as any good runner should be – but she should never have even been in Britain. Budd, of course, would figure in one of the indelible memories of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles 1984 – the fall of America’s darling, Mary Decker, in the 3000 metres final. That was something you couldn’t make up, but so was the final act of the rivalry of Seb Coe and Steve Ovett. It was all going to keep us on our toes, and poised over our typewriters, throughout the summer.

  Ovett was back from his Australian trip, where he had been edged out of victory in all three of his 1500 metres races. But the races had paid for the voyage, which was principally a training exercise, and he declared himself fitter than he had been in the two and a half years since the Church Railings Incident. He proved it with a welcome return to Paris, two years after he had dropped out of a race for the first time in his career. That had been due to the heat and humidity, something that was going to assail him again before the end of the season, but the spring weather in Paris was perfect for his demolition of a classy field in a road mile down the Avenue Foch.

  The wave of big-city marathons over the previous decade had given rise to a parallel, albeit short-lived, fad for city-centre mile races. The Fifth Avenue Mile in New York was the model. It had been launched by Fred Lebow, the entrepreneur who had persuaded the city fathers to let him take the marathon out of Central Park and into the Five Boroughs. Lebow didn’t know much about running, but he was a great salesman. He persuaded Mark McCormack’s International Management Group, Coe’s agents, to stage a serie
s of mile races around the world. There was a lot of criticism of the events, since some were blatantly downhill. Mike Boit had won one in New Zealand in 1982 in 3 minutes 28 seconds, twenty seconds faster than the track record. Just about the only one remaining nowadays is the original, the Fifth Avenue Mile. Ovett was back to his magisterial best in Paris, dominating the Spanish stars, José-Luis Gonzalez and José-Manuel Abascal, in 3 minutes 56.12 seconds.

  Coe might have had a good reintroduction to competition in the road relays, but track running is a very different matter. A month after Ovett’s Parisian win, Coe was very edgy prior to his track comeback, and uncharacteristically didn’t want to talk to journalists. His traditional county championship ‘opener’ was not in Yorkshire this time, but in Middlesex, at Enfield, north London. He was happy to talk afterwards, since in his first track race for ten months he led all the way in one of the stronger county races, winning the 800 metres in 1 minute 45.2 seconds, the year’s fastest time. Cram won the North-East Counties 5000 metres on the same day back at Gateshead.

  Everything looked to be on track for the trio to wheel up their preparation for Los Angeles, and both Ovett and Coe were being given the broadest latitude to qualify as well for their Olympic-title distances. But Ovett then went down with bronchitis and was still in bed when Coe strayed onto his territory and won the Southern Counties 1500 metres at Crystal Palace. He ran nowhere near the Olympic qualifying time, but for the first time in three years things seemed to be conspiring in his favour. Graham Williamson was injured, and doubtful for the final selection race, the AAA Championships, again at Crystal Palace in late June.

  Then, at the eleventh hour, a joker emerged from the pack, yet another world-class British middle-distance runner. Peter Elliott was already an accomplished 800 metres man. He had finished fourth as a twenty-year-old in the World Championships in Helsinki the previous year, a performance which had earned him a place alongside Coe in the line-up for the two-lap race in Los Angeles. But Elliott had been given impetus to attempt the same double, following a rare outing at 1500 metres when he had knocked ten seconds off his best by winning in 3 minutes 38.84 seconds in Australia in January, a race in which the far from fit Cram had been down the field. Elliott had a canny old coach in Wilf Paish, whose experience was second to none. Paish knew the sport in all its multi-disciplinary glory, proof of which was his coaching of Tessa Sanderson to victory in the Olympic javelin in Los Angeles.