The Perfect Distance

by Pat Butcher

  That is pretty much what happened. Initially, Coe must have felt he was back at Loughborough on the first lap, because a Sudanese student, Omar Khalifa, who had blossomed into a world-class middle-distance man under George Gandy’s tutelage, took the field through 400 metres in a businesslike 58.9 seconds. Then Scott, as promised, took over. He led for the best part of two laps, but it wasn’t like Straub in Moscow: Scott was nowhere near that sort of form because he hadn’t raced enough. Even before the bell, he had to concede the lead to the Spanish number two, José-Manuel Abascal, who was closely followed by Coe, Cram and Ovett. And that was the order as they hit the bell.

  There are many things associated with a clanging bell – curfew, from the Old French cuevrefeu, the practice introduced to Britain following the Norman Conquest of extinguishing fires at night, prior to sleep. The ringing bell is also the last act in excommunication. After the book (of life) is closed, and the candle (like the fires) is extinguished, the bell of renunciation is tolled. The bell is also a summons to prayer, and communion. Running was their religion, their communion with nature, with their spirit, with their ego, with their ambition. All of that was going to come together for Sebastian Coe. And he knew it.

  23

  Making History

  The Los Angeles Coliseum was the stage for many dramas during the 1984 Olympic Games. But few as riveting as this. The trio of English milers was poised to pounce with just 300 metres to run to the finish line. Then came the seismic shift. Coe had only been given the opportunity to come to Los Angeles to defend his title after an acrimonious debate over the final spot on the Olympic team. Cram, the reigning World, European and Commonwealth champion, had been so badly injured that his participation here was a minor miracle in itself. But if he had problems, what of Ovett? He had been stretchered out of the stadium five days earlier, after a fruitless attempt to defend his Olympic 800 metres crown, while Coe won silver again. Cardiac specialists had advised Ovett not to run, but he had threatened court action when the British team officials tried to stop him.

  But the strain was too much. Ovett stepped off the track on the crown of the bend, and the stretchers were readied again. Up ahead, Coe looked fearfully over his shoulder, as he had done in Moscow four years earlier. That quick glance was invested with so much pain, anxiety, desire. This time when he looked back, though, he did not see Ovett, the man who had gone into Moscow having won forty-five consecutive 1500 metres and mile races. He did not see the man who had made his life, his career, a misery, the free spirit who had effortlessly taken the Olympic 800 title that the whole world had agreed was his.

  He had endured the six worst days of his life, and then overcome his fear, to beat Ovett in the 1500 metres in Moscow. It was the single most defining race of his career. But now, there was still somebody right behind him. It was Cram, who had won the three titles that Coe had been unable to contest in the previous two years. While Coe had been indisposed, the world order had shifted, was still shifting inexorably, and was threatening to shift him into history. But Coe put that behind him as he put Cram behind him. The youngster would have his day, but for the moment it was Coe, gradually easing away as the pair ghosted past the Spaniard Abascal and headed for the haven of the finish line.

  Entering the final straight, it looked as if the whole race had gone into slow-motion. Coe had often pointed out that an 800 metres race is won not in a sprint, but by the athlete who slows down the least in the final stages. Here the phenomenon translated to the 1500 metres, which had been run so fast at the start (unlike in Moscow) that it was to end in an Olympic record which lasted almost twenty years. In the absence of Ovett, Abascal’s attempt to run the legs off the Brits would earn him the bronze medal. Cram’s late entry to the fray after injury meant that he now began to wilt. The build-up of lactic acid in his muscles was drowning their capacity to function properly. He began ‘treading water’. Even Coe was slowing down, but less so than Cram. The gap gradually opened as Cram’s head began to roll with agonised, unfulfilled effort. He was destined for silver.

  Now Coe was alone, on his way to becoming the only man in Olympic history to retain the 1500 metres title. Now he could savour it. He had beaten them all. Not just those here, but, more importantly, all the ‘greats’. When their roll-call was read out, his name, Sebastian Coe, would be at the head of it. Ahead of Nurmi, the ‘Flying Finn’ who won nine Olympic golds, but never managed to win two consecutive 1500 metres; ahead of Lovelock, the ‘Dark Destroyer’; ahead of Bannister, who ‘broke’ the 4-minute mile, but could never win an Olympic title; ahead of Elliott, who never lost as a senior; ahead of Snell, who won three golds, but never two 1500s; ahead of Ryun, fated never to win at the Olympics; ahead of Keino, who began the African tide; ahead of Bayi, who was denied Olympic glory by a boycott; ahead of Walker, the first man under 3 minutes 50 seconds for the mile; but most of all, ahead of Ovett.

  A dozen years fell away in those final dozen strides to the line. Somewhere in the vaults of his memory bank, there was hidden the incongruous winter heat haze of that field at Hillingdon, when he could just about see that broad-shouldered figure way ahead of him; similarly submerged, the vain attempt to win from the front in Prague, before Ovett swept past; equally the shame of the Moscow 800 metres, when he was so scared, he couldn’t even compete against Ovett; to the innumerable times he had watched Ovett win with panache. Gone now, the pain. He had won in Moscow, and now he was about to win in Los Angeles.

  Suddenly, it was over. Coe wafted elegantly across the finish line, and the tumult finally broke through at the same time as the wave of emotion which washed over him. He’d done it. One hundred thousand people stood and saluted him as he crossed the line alone. He’d done it. Millions across the world marvelled at the repeat performance. He’d done it. The only man successfully to defend an Olympic 1500 metres title. He’d done it. After almost three years of illness, half an elite athlete’s lifetime. He’d done it. Against all the odds. He had done it.

  24

  Legends

  The following year, Cram would break Coe’s 1500 metres and mile world records within a week, beating Coe in the process. Ovett looked finished. Bronchial pneumonia had weakened his strapping frame to the point of collapse. He was like a ghost. But he would amaze the track world by coming back to win Commonwealth gold at 5000 metres two years later, while Coe would strike back at Cram, and finally win a major 800 metres title, the European Championships in Stuttgart in 1986. But that was the swansong. The phenomenon was that ‘Coe and Ovett’ reached its apotheosis on the last lap of the Los Angeles Coliseum, and it was time to prepare the obituaries.

  It had been the most extraordinary rivalry in British athletics, and the rest of the world had looked on in envy and admiration. In terms of titles and records, Coe comes out a clear ‘winner’, with two Olympic golds and two silvers, and eleven world records (three indoors). As Ovett told me without any prompting, ‘Without question, Seb was the greatest middle-distance runner that we have had in the UK.’

  Yet we can hardly call Ovett, who won Olympic, European and Commonwealth gold, and set half a dozen world records, a ‘loser’. Furthermore, he made the march to his Olympic title look ridiculously easy. He was never quite the same after his church railings injury. Nevertheless, he did go on to set another world record. He may have benefited enormously from innate talent, but no one at that level in athletics – one of the most widely contested sports – achieves what Ovett achieved without extreme effort and application. And he overcame the most difficult transition: from being a junior winner who gets by without doing too much work to becoming a senior winner, which involves the hardest work.

  There is a widespread fascination with people like Ovett, people who, for no apparent reason, display an abundance of what we call ‘natural’ talent. They are born with an inbuilt advantage, however unlikely that may be in many cases, and, given his parents’ addiction to tobacco, certainly in the case of Ovett. Sometimes, as with the English foot
baller Paul Gascoigne, such natural talent will go hand in hand with a certain simplicity of character and/or intelligence. This was not the case with Ovett, who, by all accounts, was a very sharp youngster and is nowadays a very shrewd middle-aged man. But he was dyslexic, and left-handed, factors that maybe conspired to lend a sense of ‘otherness’.

  There is a clue in the terms we use to describe such natural talents – Child of God, Child of Nature, Nature Boy – as if they have some sort of hotline to the Creator; that if we could key into them, we would somehow better understand the Mysteries of the Universe. Ovett, of course, would scoff at such references, and rightly so. Nevertheless, I believe that this is why we are so intrigued and so drawn to such characters. And, despite – or because of – the bad-boy persona that the media created, with Ovett’s complicity, he was widely loved. I was witness to it virtually every day of Ovett’s career – among friends, family, neighbours, or anyone who knew that I was in the milieu.

  And why aren’t people like Coe appreciated more? He was a front-runner, and that’s the bravest role of all. He was one of those people who make themselves what they are, having started from much further back, without that ‘gift’, or certainly not a recognisable gift. These are the people who are accused of being ‘manufactured’. It’s an insult to their foresight, to their acumen, to their application, to their bloody-minded hard work. Such single-mindedness is somehow an affront to us, because the majority of us know that we could never emulate it. So we begrudge, instead of acclaiming.

  Ovett discovered a talent, and just ran with it, wherever it might take him, whereas the Coes, father and son, created a talent and drove it where they wanted. Ovett dared to be good right from the start, whereas Coe had to be shocked into it. Moscow did that. It could be argued that Coe’s career truly began not with the European indoor victory in 1977, nor with the trio of world records in mid-summer 1979, but in the decisions that he took in the days following the 800 metres and prior to the 1500 metres in Moscow. And it was Coe’s success which forced Ovett to change his whole competitive philosophy.

  Coe did not have the obvious innate talent that Ovett possessed. Coe had to work to a goal that was not as immediately apparent. It takes an extraordinary amount of self-belief to nurture a dream against the odds that a character like Ovett presented. And Coe would have been aware of Ovett right from the start. Coe’s career arc may have lacked the apparent joie de vivre of Ovett’s, but, earnest as it was, it was nevertheless a glorious triumph, and a lesson and a model for generations to follow, even if they are unable to emulate it.

  All of which makes the Coe and Ovett era strikingly different. And extraordinary. So extraordinary that people still remember it with an element of disbelief. Could they really have been so good? Well yes, they could have been. And they were. There was nobody like them. And they were so unlike each other, they were the perfect match.

  Virtually everything, apart from the superlatives about the pair was different. But one thing Ovett and Coe had in common was the event they chose. Despite their success at 800 metres, with Ovett as Olympic champion and Coe as world record-holder, their true raison d’être, their métier, was the 1500 metres and the mile – the ‘Perfect Distance’. And for an unforgettable, unrepeatable decade, through the start of the Afghan wars, through the socially and geographically divisive Miners’ Strike, through the carnage of the Falklands conflict, which extended Margaret Thatcher’s reign and permitted Coe ultimately to enter Parliament, two Englishmen ran the ‘Perfect Distance’ and held the sporting world to ransom.

  Index

  400 metres, Ovett (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  800 metres

  Coe’s choice of distance (i), (ii), (iii)

  European Championships 1978 (i)

  Los Angeles Olympics 1984 (i)

  Montreal Olympics 1976 (i)

  Moscow Olympics 1980 (i)

  Ovett’s choice of distance (i)

  Ovett’s early career (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  world records (i), (ii), (iii)

  1000 metres, world record 1981 (i)

  1500 metres

  Coe’s choice of distance (i)

  European Championships 1978 (i)

  history (i), (ii)

  Los Angeles Olympics 1984 (i)

  Montreal Olympics 1976 (i)

  Moscow Olympics 1980 (i), (ii)

  Ovett’s choice of distance (i)

  World Cup Düsseldorf 1977 (i)

  world records (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

  3000 metres (i), (ii), (iii)

  5000 metres (i), (ii)

  Abascal, José-Manuel (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

  Abramov, Valery (i)

  Akabusi, Kriss (i)

  Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) (i), (ii)

  Championships 1975 (i)

  Championships 1976 (i)

  Championships 1977 (i)

  Championships 1979 (i)

  Championships 1983 (i)

  Championships 1984 (i)

  Championships 1989 (i)

  Indoor Championships 1979 (i)

  Junior Championships 1975 (i)

  Youth Championships 1973 (i)

  amateurism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  Andersson, Arne (i), (ii), (iii)

  Andersson, Kenth (i), (ii), (iii)

  Aouita, Saïd (i), (ii)

  Los Angeles Olympics 1984 (i)

  mile (i)

  pacemaking (i)

  Paris 1983 (i)

  World Championships 1983 (i)

  Athletics Truth (i)

  Athletics Weekly (i), (ii), (iii)

  Bannister, Roger (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)

  Barnet Copthall (i)

  Baumann, Peter (i)

  Bayi, Filbert (i), (ii)

  Commonwealth Games 1974 (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  Emsley Carr Mile 1976 (i)

  Kingston 1977 (i)

  Montreal Olympics 1976 (i)

  Moscow Olympics 1980 (i)

  BBC Sports Personality of the Year (i), (ii)

  Beckett, Granville (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  Bedford, David (i), (ii), (iii)

  Benn, Bob (i), (ii), (iii)

  Budapest 1981 (i)

  Koblenz 1981 (i)

  Moscow Olympics 1980 (i)

  row with Ovett 1983 (i)

  training with Ovett (i)

  Beyer, Olaf (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

  Billouin, Alain (i), (ii)

  Bislet Games

  1980 (i), (ii)

  1983 (i)

  1984 (i)

  blood doping (i)

  Board, Lillian (i)

  Boit, Mike (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

  Boston Marathon (i)

  Bough, Frank (i)

  Bouin, Jean (i)

  Brasher, Chris (i), (ii), (iii)

  Brigg Mile 1984 (i)

  Brighton & Hove Athletics Club (i), (ii)

  Brighton Art College (i)

  British Athletics Writers’ Association (i), (ii), (iii)

  British Milers’ Club

  Coe (i), (ii)

  Harry Wilson (i), (ii)

  Ovett (i)

  pacemakers (i)

  British Olympic Association (i), (ii)

  Brown, Pete (i)

  Brügger, Andreas (i)

  Budapest 1981 (i)

  Budd, Zola (i)

  Busse, Andreas (i)

  Butler, Sean (i)

  Byers, Tom (i), (ii), (iii)

  Capes, Geoff (i), (ii)

  Carlson, Michael (i)

  Carroll, Noel (i)

  Cerutty, Percy (i)

  Chataway, Chris (i), (ii)

  cheating (i)

  Chelsea Football Club (i)

  Clarke, Ron (i), (ii)

  Clement, Frank (i)

  Cocksedge, Dave

  Coe’s 800 metres world record 1981 (i)

  Crystal Palace 1970 (i)

  Dubai Golden Mile 1979 (i)

  Gay Ovett (i), (ii)

  meeti
ng Ovett (i)

  Ovett and the press (i)

  Ovett’s world records attempts 1979 (i)

  Coe, Angela (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  Coe, Miranda (i), (ii)

  Coe, Percy ‘Peter’ (i), (ii)

  becoming Coe’s coach (i)

  choice of distance (i)

  George Gandy (i), (ii)

  influence on Coe (i)

  Moscow Olympics 1980 (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  politics of sport (i)

  Sebastian’s illness 1983-84 (i), (ii)

  split with George Gandy (i)

  training methods (i)

  Coe, Sebastian

  1973 season (i)

  1975 season (i), (ii)

  1976 season (i), (ii), (iii)

  1977 season (i), (ii), (iii)

  1978 season (i), (ii)

  1979 season (i), (ii)

  1980 season (i), (ii), (iii)

  1981 season (i)

  1982 season (i), (ii), (iii)

  1983 season (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

  1984 season (i), (ii)

  AAA Championships 1984 (i)

  amateurism (i)

  Andy Norman (i), (ii)

  choice of distance (i), (ii)

  doping accusations (i)

  Dubai Golden Mile 1979 (i)

  Dubai Golden Mile 1981 (i)

  early career (i), (ii)

  English Schools Intermediate cross-country 1972 (i)

  European Championships 1978 (i), (ii), (iii)

  fight 1982 (i)

  IMG (i)

  Los Angeles Olympics 1984 (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

  Loughborough University (i), (ii)

  mile (i)

  Moscow Olympics 1980 (i), (ii), (iii)

  Ovett’s win World Cup 1977 (i)

  pacemakers (i), (ii), (iii)

  politics of sport (i)

  public image (i)

  relationship with Peter Coe (i)

  sargent jump (i)

  stress fractures 1974 (i), (ii)

  toxoplasmosis (i), (ii)

  World Championships 1983 (i)

  world records

  800 metres 1979 (i)

  800 metres 1981 (i), (ii)

  1000 metres 1980 (i)

  1500 metres 1979 (i)

  mile 1979 (i)