And vanishing over the horizon are... (The Perfect Distance: Ovett and Coe - Pat Butcher)

Member Name: greenierexyboy

Product:	The Perfect Distance: Ovett and Coe - Pat Butcher
Date:	10/03/09 (317 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A thorough exploration of a supreme era in British sport

Disadvantages: Dry where it needs to be exciting

Let's start with a bit of context, shall we?

Modern televised sport. It's all rubbish really, isn't it?

Not the TECHNICAL standard of the coverage, you understand. A few hundred thousand new camera angles (never mind new cameras), computer analysis-cum-reconstruction, multi-screens, etc etc etc have seen to that. And there's certainly a volume of sport available that the generation before ours (mine?) would find utterly impossible. Maybe it's the very wall-to-wall nature of it that makes it seem so mediocre?

I don't think so. I contend that we're living through a deeply average chapter in sporting history in terms of those taking part, and the fact that we seemingly cannot escape from this relentless mundanity makes it all feel worse. Amongst all the contemporary 'stars', I think that just two stand out as all-time greats: Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. Think of all the other sports contested worldwide and I think you'll agree. Football has had nobody globally exciting for years (Ronaldinho briefly shone to that extent before retreating to his ancestral home of the nightclub, and I DARE anyone to suggest Cristiano Ronaldo), there is no-one in athletics (Usain Bolt has had ONE good season), no-one liable to unite all opinions in cricket, far too many boxing organisations to throw up any unequivocal superstars...I could go on. So why are some folk labouring under the delusion that we're fortunate to be living in a golden age?

Well, it's the media. Obviously. Never before has a generation (which loves to consider itself cynical and knowing) been so vulnerable to naked, unadulterated hype. The Premier League is the best football league in the world. Why? Is it a) because it genuinely is, or b) because Sky paid well over a billion pounds for the rights, and as such is highly unlikely to do a Gerald Ratner when it comes to selling it, ably assisted by the rest of the Murdoch media behemoth? In most sports there's far too much money at stake to allow honest reportage to imperil it, hence everything is (usually) the 'best thing ever!' or very very occasionally the 'worst thing EVAH!', and most of the audience can't muster the intellectual enthusiasm to rise above it.

If anyone out there has worked out that this was all a set up for some gratuitous nostalgia...was it that obvious? I'm sorry if it was. Anyway, I'm going to look at an era of genuine sporting heroes whose exploits invaded the consciences of the nation as pitilessly as the 43rd President of the United States went after anyone with oil who was mean to his dad. And it centres on the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

We did win far more gold medals last summer, I'll admit. But most of them were in the hard-to-get-THAT-worked-up-about fields of track cycling and rowing. Think about how often you care much about either: you watch the Boat Race because you want to see if one or both of two boatloads of oiks and international rowers studying dubious subjects like 'land economy' while pretending to be oiks will sink, and while I used to love the Tour de France, that passion subsided somewhat once I realised that while the race was being sponsored by L'Equipe, most of the competitors were peddling under the Glaxo SmithKline banner. In 1980 our gold medals were in events that the rest of the world (well, those parts that had turned up: America led a boycott based on the Russian invasion of Afghanistan) wanted to win too. Duncan Goodhew shone (arf) in the 100m Breaststroke...and the other four were all won in the Olympic stadium, on the track.

In the mid to late 70s, British athletics was in the most profound doldrums. The Montreal Olympics had brought forth the glittering yield of a whole bronze medal (Brendan Foster) for the track and field team, the gloom being only slightly illuminated by an encouraging fifth in the 800m final for the 20 year old Steve Ovett. Four years later, Ovett and a new generation of British athletes were older, wiser and dominant.

The Men's 100m champion was Allan Wells, a fiercely competitive (although nowhere near as fierce as his wonderfully demented and bellowing better half Margot, whose declamatory 'COME!!! ON!!! ALLAN!!!!!!!!!' must have terrified everyone else in the final into running in reverse) Scot blessed with the cracking middle name of 'Wipper'. The Decathlon was won by the outlandishly talented (and to these eyes, tediously boorish: his T-shirt casting aspersions on the sexuality of Carl Lewis at the '84 Games being especially tasteless) Daley Thompson. And the middle distance events were to feature the clash that defines these Games in the memory: Sebastian Coe vs Steve Ovett.

* The Book...In Case You Never Thought I'd Get There *

Pat Butcher was a sports journalist of many years standing, and at the time of publication was the Athletics Correspondent for the Financial Times (who knew they had one, eh?), and his book deals with the evolution of the Coe/Ovett rivalry, and how important it was to a sport teetering on the brink of professionalism. He is laudably thorough in terms of tracing and interviewing others critical to the story: from the obvious (Steve Cram: the man who took up the Coe/Ovett mantle and completed the remarkable trinity of Britain having the 1500m world record holder, World Champion and Olympic Champion simultaneously with three different athletes...Peter Elliott, the hard-as-nails Yorkshireman who snapped at their heels...a raft of other opponents such as John Walker, Dr Thomas Wessinghage, Steve Scott and a beautifully laconic Eamonn Coghlan...and Peter Coe, the father/tyrant who made his son's training his own personal engineering project) to the more obscure (Olaf Beyer, the man who powered past both Coe and Ovett in the 1978 European Championships 800m, prompting Ovett's wonderful question to Coe as they stood breathing heavily at the finish: 'Who the f*** was that?'...and even the teenager who actually won the first race to feature both Ovett and Coe, serving as a tart lesson in the little twists of fate that define lives). It has to be said that the races themselves are described in a documentary style that slightly fails to conjure up the excitement present when actually watching them, but as I recall the impossibly manic thrill I experienced while Coe, Jurgen Straub and Ovett sprinted down the finishing straight of the Moscow 1500m final, perhaps that's just as well. After all, I'm not eight anymore.

We spend a lot of time with Coe and Ovett as people (both were extensively interviewed for the project), and the respective levels of revelation are starkly different. Coe, as befitting the politician he became, is as slick as ever: his articulation has changed about as much as his appearance, i.e. not a jot. Ovett is a different matter: as a 'Coe fan' back in the day (because everyone picked one or t'other) I'd bought into the 'arrogant, cocky, aloof' image that Ovett seemed not to care was foisted upon him by the media. I'd softened over time, but here, while still finishing the book feeling that I scarcely knew Ovett at all, I liked him a lot. Actually very shy and curiously needy, dyslexic but highly intelligent, he's a man who dances to his own drum and backs away from playing anyone else's game. And as he looks back on his own achievements, he seems genuinely baffled as to why anyone else makes a fuss. (He also readily proffers the opinion that the greatest athlete Britain ever produced was Sebastian Newbold Coe.)

http://www.athletics-weekly.com/back-issues/2005/ 59-41-9.htm (Butcher writes about interviewing Ovett)

As anyone with an iota of common sense would have long since suspected, even at the height of their rivalry Coe and Ovett were never enemies the media wanted to paint them as: the book bears out that huge mutual respect begat genuine friendship in time, and their praise for each other is fulsome (see above. And below, for that matter).

(This really is a pet bugbear of mine: as if because someone's not your best friend it somehow implies that you must loathe them. I mean, did Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski despise each other? Or did their conversations go more along these lines?

Tim: 'Hello Greg'
Greg: 'Oh hi Tim, how's it going man?' (Rusedski's actually Canadian, so he probably uses expressions like 'man')
Tim: Oh, not too bad. Making a good living at the old tennis thing. Pretty sure I'll never win Wimbledon though. You?
Greg: 'Yeah, me too. Including the bit about never winning Wimbledon. But hey, I've hooked up with a great girl called Lucy!'
Tim: 'What???? Oh dear me, no!'
Greg: 'Don't worry. Not yours. Another one.'
Tim: 'Phew. Anyway, see you around.'
)

Because my knowledge of the pair is very much '1979 and onwards', it was fascinating to discover that my assumption that Coe's beautiful running style implied a vast natural talent was totally wrong: Ovett was the one born with the ability to be the best athlete in the world, whereas it was built almost from scratch in the outwardly frail Coe. (Ovett's raw talent over a wide range of distances remains astonishing: he once took part in a half-marathon that his friend was competing in just so he could go for a run (he had no experience over such a distance), felt ok a few miles in, and then hared off to win it by a street). And while he went on to break multiple world records (having sworn he'd never go chasing them: racing was his priority, or so he said), I came to realise that Ovett's most impressive period came before I'd ever heard of him. Just watch this 1977 1500m race, as Ovett's blazing speed on the last lap causes the proud, barrel-chested Olympic Champion John Walker to basically give up. According to Coe in the book, this is the definitive 1500m run.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhBXI6v1MNI

And for balance, here's the second of Coe's systematic annihilations (to say he broke the mark seems hilariously insufficient) of the 800m world record: he took it from 1:43.4 down to 1:41.73, an amazing chunk for a track record, and nearly 30 years on, only one man has ever run faster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El702tdt3fs&NR =1

The book makes the not-entirely-unfair assumption that the natural climax of the story is the 1984 LA Olympics: it's still slightly disappointing to see the events that followed (such as Steve Cram's glorious 1985 season) dealt with quite so cursorily. And anyone expecting to discover what happened to the protagonists (OK then: 'what happened to Steve Ovett', seeing as everyone knows what happened to Seb Coe) will feel neglected too. Also, the book (look at the title) makes great play of the mile being the greatest of the middle distance events, the metier of the two men concerned. It's a pity then that as far as I know, they never actually raced each other over it.
With (minor) quibbles like that in mind, it's probably reasonable to say that this fundamentally fine book does better as an aide-memoir for those of us who can remember this era than as a primer for those unfamiliar with it.

But what an era it was, eh?

(Available for £6.99 from Amazon).

An edited version of my original Ciao review.

Summary: A workmanlike summary of a classic rivalry