‘I was actually living it, the raw politics of the Eighties’
➤ Lord Coe’s rivalry with Steve Ovett peaked 40 years ago as they twice duelled for gold in boycott-hit Moscow Games
The passing of 40 years has done little to dim Lord Coe’s recall of the Moscow Olympics or of the Cold War tensions that shadowed his every turn. Before he even set foot in the Soviet Union, a swastika had been daubed on his garage door, which he ascribed less to geopolitics than to the fact his maternal grandfather was Punjabi. When he landed at the airport, his copy of The Spectator was confiscated for fear that it was subversive. And in the athletes’ relaxation area, he found his eye drawn to a man he knew only as Boris.
Evidently, Boris was there solely to listen in on conversations, a fact he tried to disguise by reading a paperback hidden inside a brown wrapping.
Coe broke the ice by asking him what he was reading – Corridors of
Power, it turned out, a novel about the nuclear arms race by CP Snow – while Brendan Foster inquired where the nearest nightclub was. Without even looking up, Boris replied: “Helsinki.”
“Moscow was an extraordinary place to be,” Coe says, reflecting on a 1980 Games framed as much by the spirit of Dr Strangelove as by his own complex rivalry with Steve Ovett. “When I look back on my career, I recognise that sport gave me a feel for things that I was being taught in theory at university. But I was actually living it, the raw politics of it all. I can’t think, in the history of sport, that there has been a more politically charged decade than the Eighties. Moscow, for me, was in large part about what happened beforehand. It was once there that athletics took centre stage: the story of two people from the same country at the same time chasing the same spoils.”
The Coe-ovett duel has since been cast as the defining dynamic of British track and field, but in the build-up to Moscow they had faced each other only once, in a European 800metres final where they both lost to a little-known East German called Olaf Beyer. “Who the f--- was that?” Ovett asked Coe afterwards. The fascination sprang instead from a strategy of mutual avoidance, as the two men engaged in a tit-for-tat on the middle-distance timesheets, with Coe breaking three world records in 41 days in the summer of 1979. By the time of the Olympics, they were such established prime-time stars that the BBC broke off
Match of the Day to show one of Ovett’s runs.
“In the back of our minds,” Coe says, “we both knew that in order to come home with at least something, we were going to have to demolish 10 years of hard, unremitting slog in each other’s lives.”
For Coe, memories of Moscow are dominated not just by the thought of facing Ovett as by the vexed decision to make the journey at all. Margaret Thatcher had loudly opposed the notion of any of the nation’s athletes burnishing the Soviet regime so soon after its invasion of Afghanistan, with a House of Commons motion passing 315 to 147 in favour of a boycott.
“It’s difficult to separate the Moscow experience from the months of uncertainty that people like me went through just trying to figure out where we stood on the issue,” Coe says.
Only the nimble negotiating of Dick Palmer, the British chef de mission, helped persuade the Government that his team should not be held hostage to a diplomatic stand-off. A two-part Coe-ovett confrontation was sealed, first over 800m and then 1500m, with all the danger men from the Communist bloc, not least Andreas Busse and Nikolay Kirov, thrown in for good measure. It was enough to make Coe, normally a picture of composure, feel the first stirrings of anxiety.
“I found myself in very alien territory,” he says. “Normally I can sleep through anything, even when the world is crashing around my feet. But this was the first and only time in the lead-up to a race that I’ve ever had a problem sleeping.” The morning of the 800m in Moscow did little to quell his disquiet.
“I was sitting with my father in the athletes’ village having breakfast,” he recalls. “I was putting milk on whatever cornflakes were there and I dropped the jug. I felt very out of sync with myself.”
The chaos of the final – the 40th anniversary of which is tomorrow – would soon confirm those fears. With Ovett boxed in by two muscular East Germans, Coe failed to take tactical advantage, running wide on the outside and slipping back to last place with 300m to go. While his signature sprint finish earned him a silver medal, Ovett was under so little threat for gold that he later wondered in his memoir: “What was all the fuss about?” In a supposed clash of the century, Coe was an also-ran, calling it the “worst race of my life”. Peter, his notoriously strict father and coach, was rather more blunt, telling him: “You ran like an absolute c---.”
Only the cajoling of Daley Thompson, his team-mate and close friend, could rouse him from his torment the next day. “I was buried in bed. I didn’t particularly want to get up – there was no great incentive,” Coe says. “Daley marched in and I asked, ‘What’s the weather like out there?’ He ripped open the curtains and said, ‘It all looks a bit silver to me’. That was the Daley school of psychotherapy.”
Coe insists he did not care that it was Ovett who vanquished him. “It was just the realisation that something I thought was so within my ability to have wrestled, I didn’t,” he says. “The only thing that drove me for those days between the 800 and the 1500 was that I never wanted to feel like that again at the end of a race. I’ve been beaten by better people, faster people than me on the day, people who have got more talent. But I had to know that I was prepared to die with blood in my boots in the stadium for the 1500.”
To prepare, Coe broke the habit of a lifetime and took himself off for a 10-mile run. “Nobody runs for 10 miles in the middle of a championship,” he acknowledges. “But I knew instinctively that I had to clear my head.” The ruse would prove a masterstroke. After two absurdly slow laps, Coe, who had been sitting on the shoulder of Jurgen Straub, made his kick for home at a pace that not even Ovett, unbeaten over the distance for three years, could hope to match. Despite so much self-reproach, the gold was his at last.
Coe had little personal affinity with Ovett before Moscow and has barely seen him since. While he is now athletics’ most powerful administrator, his former nemesis lives quietly below the radar in Australia. In the call room just before the 1500, Ovett had said to him: “When this is all over, it would be nice to sit down and have a drink.” It is a drink for which they are both still waiting. In the meantime, they can take comfort from how their Moscow showdown produced not just a score draw, but perhaps the most compelling antagonism athletics has yet seen.
‘I was putting milk on my cornflakes and I dropped the jug. I felt out of sync with myself’