The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  There was a strong element of local rivalry in Paish and Elliot throwing their hats in the ring, because Elliott hailed from Rotherham, an area often referred to – because of its left-wing politics – as the Republic of South Yorkshire. Coe and his father lived in Sheffield, only a handful of miles away, and still in Yorkshire, but a very different political colour. What’s more, as Coe admits, as transplanted Londoners they suffered from perceptions of snobbishness, added to which it was already abundantly clear that Coe himself was a Conservative.

  Elliott feels that Coe was never really accepted as a Yorkshireman. ‘He was born in London for a start, and supported Chelsea. He was based down in Loughborough. Things like that stick with people up our way. I had worked at the steelworks, I think that was why people got behind me, they could relate to that, they could relate to a working person.’

  Since Elliott was a factory worker, who made a virtue of his status as a part-time athlete, this was a tabloid wet-dream, another Toff versus Tough scenario. The great English class divide swung into view, fuelled by Elliott’s homespun philosophy of being a down-home boy from the backstreets who worked hard for a living, ran hard in training, then ran from the front in races. I would venture that only Paula Radcliffe (for similar reasons) has been more admired world-wide than Elliott. Nobody in their right mind could have disliked him. If Ovett was the Athletes’ Athlete, Elliott was Everyman’s Athlete. He was such a willing front-runner, you felt he was doing a horse out of a job. And while it is true that anyone with an accent as broad as Elliot’s – sounding as if it had been hacked out of a coal-seam – is immediately identified as ‘thick’ in Britain, Elliot was clearly as sharp as a Sheffield knife. He now works in that town as the athlete services manager at the English Institute of Sport complex.

  Like Cram, he admitted to being an Ovett fan, built on his early experiences training on the famous Merthyr Mawr sand-dunes in Wales with Harry Wilson’s group. But he also admired Coe’s support for the country championships, something which prompted him to turn out as often as possible in the Yorkshires. ‘They were one of the reasons you were an 800 metres runner or a 1500 metres runner,’ says Elliot. ‘I always opened the season with the Yorkshire Championships, and the reason I did that was because Seb did that. But, although Seb was in Sheffield, and I worked in a Sheffield factory, I met Steve at Merthyr Mawr and I thought, what a character, what a great guy! And I became an Ovett fan. I remember at the [1980] Olympics, Seb was supposed to win the 800, and obviously Ovett won, and I was, like, “Ah!” and arms aloft. I worked at British Steel then, and on the day of the 1500, I was working outside, on the roof. I listened to it on the radio and Seb beat Steve and all the lads came out from the factory and they were, like, arms aloft and I’m, like, “Yeah, yeah.” They took the ladder away and left me up there.’

  Well, for a brief period during that summer of 1984, Elliott was going to leave Coe out to dry. But the week before Elliott’s ‘surprise’ at the AAA Championships, a recuperating Ovett and a fit Cram appeared at a meeting in Loughborough, organised by Coe! The organiser himself didn’t run, because, by now, he’d picked up a slight injury. Nevertheless, after Ovett won the 800 metres, complete with mandatory push and obligatory wave, and Cram the 1000 metres, the trio took to the track together – for a television interview. Ah, well . . .

  Ovett won another 800 metres three days later, in Belfast, and decided to sit on his (Olympic) laurels, and miss the AAA Championships, billed as the final selection races. There were others vying for the vacant 800 metres spot in LA – Gary Cook, who had been a member of the 4×800 metres world record squad in 1982, and Ikem Billy, who had won the European Junior title the previous year, a decade after Ovett’s international breakthrough. But Ovett had beaten Billy twice in three days, and he announced to journalists a message clearly intended for the selectors – ‘There’s more to come.’

  Coe was less confident. He thought his muscle pull might not stand the rigours of heats and final of the 1500 metres the following weekend, but, since the Los Angeles team was being finalised on the evening after the AAA Championships, he had little option but to participate. He had reason to feel anxious. He was running into a minefield, with Sapper Elliott looking to trip him up. Elliott recalls arriving at Crystal Palace: ‘I got the programme, and in the middle there was an article on me and Seb. It said, the “Apprentice takes on the Master.” And I thought, Oooh. There was this buzz going around, because it was like people were building it up.’

  But that wasn’t the only attraction. Even without Ovett, the soap opera that was British athletics had an omnibus edition that weekend. Cram had given the selectors a bit of leeway by renouncing interest in the Olympic 800 metres, but, although he won the national title at the distance that weekend, he hobbled across the finish line, due to a torn Achilles tendon. He limped onto the infield and lay there, surrounded by photographers, for a half-hour while ice and strapping were applied. At least he had a grandstand view for the next drama. Neither Coe nor Elliott acquitted themselves well in the rough-house that was the 1500 metres.

  In the Southern Counties race a month earlier, Coe had given the impression that he was staying in the pack, the better to experience the sort of hustle and bustle that he had so studiously and elegantly avoided for most of his career. He ultimately won the Southern with an extravagant burst that took him ten metres clear at the line. He would not have that privilege at Crystal Palace. Elliott was even less tactically astute than Coe, but with a better excuse: this was only his fourth race at the distance. The final lap was classic knockabout. Elliott, who had been bumped and boxed for most of the race, stormed around the pack to take the lead with 300 metres to run. Coe passed him on the final bend and took the inside lane, a little too abruptly in Elliott’s estimation. Elliot sidestepped as neatly as any fly-half and came again. With the crowd on its feet, his final drive took him an ace past Coe, and he won in 3 minutes 39.66 seconds. The Olympic champion finished thirteen hundredths behind.

  I felt and wrote at the time that Coe’s congratulation to Elliott post-race was indicative of his acceptance that his chance of defending his title had gone. Coe said that Elliott saw him walk off with Andy Norman, and thought that he, Elliott, had not done enough. Coe says, ‘If only he knew. It was Andy saying, “Look, you are not going to get the 1500, just concentrate on the 800 now.”’

  The selectors’ meeting that night was as fraught as the race. Initially, they decided to give the last places to Ovett in the 800, and Elliott in the 1500. When the meeting broke up, that was still the consensus, and the news agencies, who were always given advance notice, were advised of the blow to Coe. But there was a spate of late night phone calls, and the team was changed early the following morning. Coe was in! ‘I knew that they were picking the team. I can’t even remember who I rang, from a phone box in Cromwell Road. I had just finished training, and he said, “You’re in.” I said, “What? The 800?” “No,” he said, “both.” Then, of course, all hell opened up, because Peter [Elliott] had been left out [of the 1500] – the North–South divide!’

  There were a few days of media recrimination, briefly obscuring the fact that, once again, Coe and Ovett, while as distant yet as inseparable as North from South, were selected to defend their Olympic titles as well as their world-record distances. Cram, meanwhile, was in a plaster cast, however temporarily. It would later emerge that Elliott also had the beginnings of a stress fracture, which would ultimately eliminate him from the Olympic 800 metres final. Safely selected, Coe and Ovett went again to the Bislet Games in Oslo. No heroics this time; it was enough to stay out of trouble. Coe won the 800 metres in 1 minute 43.84 seconds, and Ovett won the 1500 in 3 minutes 34.5 seconds. Both times were the third fastest in the world at that stage.

  Coe was overjoyed. His was a world-class performance, the first substantial indication that his comeback was on track. He went into Oslo to celebrate, an evening which would end up with Anne-Lise Hammer, the Oslo press officer, spendi
ng two weeks in gaol. Hammer is a political journalist who helped out at the Bislet Games during the great decade of record breaking. She went on to manage athletes, including Linford Christie for a while, and wrote a book on drugs in sport, which was never published in Britain for legal reasons. That evening in Oslo has been the subject of speculation for years. Dave Warren and Coe’s agent Brad Hunt were also at the party, but there is collective amnesia on their part, and all Hammer will say is that Coe was so ‘happy’ that he was leaning out of the car window, arms outspread, yelling his satisfaction while she was driving round town.

  ‘Seb had been injured for more than a year and he got his kick for the first time, so he was very, very happy,’ she says. ‘We had a car incident, that is true. I was the driver. Somebody accused us, or me, for having an accident, but we didn’t actually have an accident. I would think that I was the most sober person, but I had to go to prison for drunk driving, for two weeks. It was a good story, of course, but I think Andy Norman was instrumental in stopping the story in the British newspapers because it was one month before the Olympic Games; it was kept under the lid. I had to promise my chief editor not to tell. I had to handle it. My chief editor did like Sebastian Coe very much, so when he heard that I had to go to prison, I got time off work during the Christmas break. It’s a good story but actually nobody wants to remember that story.’

  Coe had one last race in Britain, winning something called the Brigg Mile in a club meeting in north London in 3 minutes 54.6 seconds. There was a lot of history attached to the race. It was the event where Ovett had first broken 4 minutes in 1974. A decade later, Coe broke New Zealander Dick Quax’s event record, set in 1972, the year that Ovett and Coe had had their only race in England, both beaten by Kirk Dumpleton in the English Schools Cross Country. That night, 4 July 1984, the man who finished second, some 100 metres behind Coe, in 4 minutes 8.1 seconds, was Kirk Dumpleton.

  Coe felt that the British team was not giving itself sufficient time to acclimatise to the eight hours’ time difference between the UK and Los Angeles, so he decided with Peter that he would go early to the USA, first to Chicago – six hours’ difference – where he would complete their agreed training schedule, then the final hop to California. It would be the first time that Coe had spent so much prime time away from his coach, and it prompted much speculation of a rift. Both men deny that, claiming that it was a natural progression – the inevitable shift of balance between coach and maturing athlete, something that both Ovett and Cram agreed with, in respect of their own coaches, Harry Wilson and Jimmy Headley.

  Peter Coe says, ‘We were sitting in the car one evening, discussing the whole thing. I said, “So much has gone wrong for you in the last year or so, and you have been thinking about it too much now, Seb, that it’s compounding it into a greater difficulty that it is. Only you can get it out, and would you prefer to sort this out yourself?” He thought about it, there was a sort of flickering that it would seem a bit disloyal, there was a certain reluctance at first, but I think that is really what he wanted to do.’ Seb himself says, ‘Peter’s role had changed by that stage. He wasn’t there at every training session, he was much more the dispassionate eye, watching and making suggestions and judgements. At fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, the coach makes all the judgements. If he is still making them by the time you’re twenty-eight, there’s something wrong with the relationship.’

  Coe’s time in the USA prior to such an astounding turnaround in fortunes in Los Angeles has given rise to more sinister rumours, too: that he went there to blood dope. He denies it, and says that he suffered those rumours every time he went training at altitude in Switzerland or Italy. Blood doping, or blood boosting, is the practice where an athlete has a pint of blood removed, which is then stored for a month. During that time, the body replenishes its blood supply, but the training is done under additional stress, another conditioning factor. The stored blood is then reintroduced, meaning that the athlete now has a surfeit of oxygen-carrying red-blood corpuscles. The result is similar to turbo-charging a car. Even with a 1 per cent advantage, a 10,000 metres runner could win a race by the length of the finishing straight.

  Some would argue that it was no worse than going to altitude to train, and the practice was felt to be common in some countries during the seventies and eighties. Thomas Wessinghage said that it was a subject regularly debated by the milers, a tightly knit group on the circuit throughout the eighties. ‘Yes, we had long discussions about that, and there were three questions that always stood there but couldn’t be answered. The first question – Eastern Bloc athletes? Second question – Italians, middle- and long-distance runners? Third question – Finnish long-distance runners.’

  Lasse Viren, the Finn who won the 5000 and 10,000 metres gold medals in both the 1972 and the 1976 Olympic Games, was a prime suspect, since he did little to impress outside of Olympic competition. He has never admitted it, and the only person to have done so is his compatriot, Kaarlo Maaninka, who won silver and bronze medals in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. In Los Angeles, another Finn, Martti Vainio, was caught by a roundabout method after winning the Olympic silver medal in the 10,000 metres. Vainio tested positive for steroids, hitherto felt to be useless for distance runners, since water-based steroids bleed fairly quickly out of the system. But it seems that the blood that Vainio had had removed had contained traces of steroids, so when it was reintroduced in time for his race in LA, the steroids showed up in the post-race drug test. Or should that be dope-test?

  Blood doping is banned by the IAAF and affiliated bodies, but there is no way of testing for it, especially if it is the athlete’s own blood. It is possible to infuse blood from the same group as the athlete’s, as happens in remedial medicine, but that is now old technology, overtaken by blood substitutes and plasmas, which are infinitely more frightening, both as performance-enhancers and as health hazards. I am not generally one of those who think that the drugs athletes use are necessarily dangerous – that was one of the first mistakes that the authorities made when banning performance-enhancers in the mid-seventies. The athletes knew they weren’t dangerous when taken in properly monitored quantities. It is a question of ethics, much like pacing, on which I am equally old technology.

  This is as good a place as any to air any suspicions about both Coe and Ovett. No book on athletics nowadays would be complete without a mention, an essay, a chapter or even the whole volume on performance-enhancing drugs. I have mentioned them in respect of Olaf Beyer and Jürgen Straub, and they have denied the accusations. Equally, I put the question to Ovett and Coe.

  Matt Paterson, Ovett’s long-time training partner, who, like Ovett, now lives in Australia, said that whenever he returned to Glasgow, his old mates always said that Ovett had to be on drugs to run as well, as frequently, as he did. Ovett says, ‘I suppose at the time when we were knocking records off left, right and centre people must have thought, What the hell’s going on here with these two? But I can put my hand on heart, and on my children’s lives, that I never took an aspirin or a paracetamol at any stage in my career. I was frightened to death of doing a thing like that, and I’m very proud that I didn’t. So, you know, they can say what they like because I know the true facts.’

  Coe says, ‘I used to hear those rumours: “Oh, he goes to Switzerland, to Italy, for his blood.” I used to laugh it off, and Steve [Mitchell] and Malcolm [Williams] were mainly with me in Switzerland. I’m afraid it’s the sadness of sport. This is where you’ve got to be so careful about pointing fingers at people making big breakthroughs, because only in public terms is it a big breakthrough. In reality, you’ve been slogging away, mile after mile, weight after weight, ten years at a time.’

  Dr Wessinghage backs them up without question: ‘I never had the feeling that any of the Brits or the Americans used performance-enhancing drugs. I had the feeling, as I said, with a few of the other nations; I wouldn’t say athletes, nations. But not with them [Ovett and Coe], and that gave me a good feeling.’r />
  Chicago was a haven for Coe. It must have seemed like heaven, without the British media breathing down his neck. He was staying with another coach that his father had met on the lecture circuit, Joe Newton, who was based at York High School. ‘I was doing some good training sessions there, I was listening to a lot of jazz, which was nice, and I was just beginning to enjoy it. I remember running one evening on the golf course, and I was suddenly really excited about the thought of the championships. I thought, I’ve got a reasonable chance. I felt I was back in, feeling confident and competitive, and my kick had come back too. This was a huge thing.’

  Back at home, things were not going so well for his rivals. Ovett was suffering a succession of problems – first the bronchitis, then a muscle pull, then a viral infection which caused a skin rash. He missed several race appointments, and contented himself with simply winning the races he did run. He was husbanding his resources. Cram, on the other hand, was having similar injury problems to the previous year. But, having come back so successfully in 1983, everyone was expecting him to do the same in 1984.

  Saïd Aouita, the man who would become Cram’s great rival the following year, was keeping everybody guessing. Aouita was a marvellous character, which is one of the reasons why I ultimately made a television documentary with him, in 1988. He talked as good a race as he could run, which, considering he went on to break five world records, was a storm of words. He had developed into a world-beater since finishing third to Cram at the World Championships in Helsinki the previous year, and was prevaricating between the Olympic 1500 and 5000 metres. He was unbeaten at all distances in 1984, and had run 3 minutes 31.54 seconds for 1500 metres, the fastest of the year, less than a month before the Games. Cram was particularly frank about the Moroccan’s chances, saying, ‘If he isn’t in the 1500 metres, all well and good for me, but I think he’d be better off in the 1500 metres, because he’s the guy I’d be afraid of in Los Angeles.’ Aouita may have been tactically naïve in trying to run the legs off everyone, and providing a springboard for Cram’s surge to victory in Helsinki, but the Moroccan wasn’t stupid. In the end, sanity prevailed, and he won the Olympic 5000 metres at a stroll.