Sebastian Coe: 'I wouldn't have missed Ovett rivalry for the world'

Precisely 40 years since the greatest two-act drama in British sporting history played out at the Moscow Olympics, Sebastian Coe still recalls every sensation in panoramic 4D: the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain. Especially the pain.

“In the back of our minds we knew that in order to come home with at least something, we were probably going to have to demolish 10 years of hard, unremitting slog in each other’s lives,” Coe says, smiling, as his mind races back to a time of high intrigue, political boycotts and – of course – those two thunderous encounters over 800m and 1500m with his arch-rival Steve Ovett. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

In truth there wasn’t much else for the country to be cheery about during the dank, drizzly summer of 1980. England’s football team had come home early from the European Championship. The cricket team were losing against West Indies, again. Unemployment was at a 44-year high of 1.9 million. But in Coe and Ovett, Britain undoubtedly had the two greatest middle-distance runners in the world. And after years of avoiding each other they were suddenly squaring off twice over six days. The stakes, as they both knew, couldn’t have been much higher.

Long before Brexit, Coe and Ovett split the nation down the middle. You were either for one or the other: there was no middle ground, no compromise, no safe space. The 24-year-old Ovett, the son of a market trader, was seen as blue-collar and aloof, while the 23-year-old Coe, more middle-class and media-friendly. Both were hugely popular, though. Ovett had won the BBC’s Sport Personality of the Year award in 1978. Coe, having broken three world records in 41 days after graduating in 1979, snatched it off him a year later.

In fact just about the only thing that everyone agreed on was that Coe, as the reigning world record holder, was the piping hot favourite over 800m – while Ovett, who had not lost over 1500m since 1977, was the man to beat over the longer distance. Only it didn’t turn out that way. Far from it.

Coe had been imperious on the track over the previous two summers, but he was about to learn that chasing times was very different to hunting after Olympic gold medals. During the first lap of the 800m final he was repeatedly bumped and blocked, strong-armed and shunted back, an assault that began on the first bend when the East German Andreas Busse deliberately kept him out wide. With the race more like a game of dodgems, Coe was unable to rev up towards his top-end speed until Ovett had flown clear to take gold.

However Coe was also the author of his own misfortune, repeatedly running down blind alleys and thus rendering impotent his talent. As Hugh McIlvanney sagely put it in the Observer: “Coe looked like a man who had been stabbed in the back, and then found that the knife was in his own hand.”

Coe was so disgusted that when Ovett offered him his outstretched palm on the rostrum he reacted, in Clive James’s immortal words, “as if he’d just been handed a turd”. His father, coach and mentor, Peter was even blunter. At the post-race press conference he used the rudest four-letter word to describe his son’s run.

“I think I lost that race before I stepped on the track,” says Coe. “It was just a suffusion of inexperience and just not controlling my own head in the 24 hours leading up to the race. I found myself in very alien territory. Normally the world can be crashing around my feet, as occasionally it does, and I still sleep. That was the first and only time that I’ve ever had a problem. Then at breakfast I was putting milk on my cornflakes when I dropped the jug. I felt very out of sync. Championships racing is just so totally different.”

Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Nikolay Kirov, the 800m silver, gold and bronze medal winners at the 1980 Olympics.



Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Nikolay Kirov, the 800m silver, gold and bronze medal winners at the 1980 Olympics. Photograph: Giuliano Bevilacqua/Sygma/Getty Images

Coe now believes the East Germans deliberately used team tactics to try to stop him and Ovett. “But I don’t think in their team talk beforehand they figured out that Steve was going to muscle his way through,” he says with a laugh. “And good luck to him, he did. He wasn’t intimidated.”

The following morning Coe was buried in bed, not wanting to lift his head from his sheets when the Olympic decathlon champion Daley Thompson marched into his room. “‘Come on, you’re getting up,’” Coe recalls him saying. “I said something lame like: ‘What’s the weather like out there?’ And as he ripped open the curtains he said: ‘It all looks a bit silver to me.’ It was the Daley school of psychotherapy.”

Two things kept Coe going: the knowledge that he couldn’t surely run as badly again – and the fear that if he did, people would question his character. He also had help from unusual directions. Two days after what he considered his humiliation in the 800m, he was brooding in the Olympic village when his father brought in a telegram from England. It was signed by a Mrs Mullory, and said simply: “Get your bloody finger out, Coe, I’ve got money on you.” The Coes never found out who she was but they decided she was right.

Meanwhile the Observer’s athletics correspondent Chris Brasher, a 3,000m steeplechase gold medallist at the 1956 Games, and the Australian Ron Clarke, who took 10,000m bronze at the 1964 Games, decided it would be good for the sport if Coe won the 1500m. So, they sent him a letter outlining the tactics that could help him to win gold. “Relax on the pace, move into position and strike – remembering that he who strikes first is generally the victor,” they told him. “The only person that can beat you is yourself.”

It meant that when the bell tolled for Coe in the 1500m final he was ready. Having steadily wound up the pace after a dawdling first couple of laps, he struck for home as he entered the straight. Ovett, whose electric acceleration had been dulled by the sustained pressure of Coe’s speed, searched for fifth gear but found only third and had to settle for bronze behind the East German Jürgen Straub.

Coe’s face – two parts exhilaration, one part sweet relief – made the front pages of papers across the globe, while Ovett was left shaking his head. But in hindsight, Coe wonders whether his old rival had subconsciously switched off after winning gold in the 800m.

“In the call room before the 1500m I remember Steve saying: ‘Can you imagine what this would be worth in Atlantic City?’ and also telling me: ‘When this is all over it would be nice to sit down and have a drink.’ It wasn’t that I was particularly not up for that. I just couldn’t believe that anybody was at that moment talking to me. I just grunted and went back into my own little zone.”

Afterwards Coe did not hit the bright lights of Moscow, preferring instead to have a quiet couple of drinks with teammates. “We had a guy called Boris who sat with us in the relaxation area,” says Coe. “He’d got a paperback covered in brown wrapping which he was reading while obviously listening to our conversations. I remember Brendan Foster asking him where the nearest nightclub was. He didn’t even take his eyes off the book. He just said: ‘Helsinki.’”

Of course history could have turned out very differently if Britain had expected to join the Americans, Canadians and West Germans in boycotting the Games in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Coe, then a rising star in the Conservative party, was one of the more prominent voices calling for Britain to go to Moscow – something not everyone was happy about.

“I actually ended up with a swastika being painted on the front door of the garage of my house in the middle of that debate,” says Coe, who has been the president of World Athletics since 2015. “But at the same time that we were being told that we shouldn’t go to the Games, pipe deals were being signed with BP and Russia, the Bolshoi ballet had arrived in London, and it just seemed a rather disproportionate response to target sport.”

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Incidentally, a few years ago Coe and Ovett, who sadly only raced seven times in 17 years, met over dinner and found they had a lot more in common than they had thought back in their heydays. Yet, inevitably, the same one-upmanship they had felt while chasing each other’s world records had not completely gone away.

“We were chatting about the buildup to Moscow and in a rare moment of candour I told him that on a wintry Christmas Day of 1979 I’d done a run from the Peak District, 13 miles uphill into Sheffield,” says Coe. “I got back, had my Christmas lunch, sat down to watch the 800th screening of The Dam Busters and I remember feeling vaguely uneasy. I knew suddenly what it was. I sat there thinking: ‘I bet he’s out training again.’ So compulsively, I went upstairs, put my kit on, ran another five miles.”

There is a Pinteresque pause. “When I told Steve that story he laughed,” adds Coe, with a twinkle in his eye. “And then he said: ‘Did you only go out twice that day?’ That was years afterwards, yet we were both still in the mindset where we couldn’t let it just rest.”

source: theguardian.com