Coe’s finest hour

Press, 16 August 1985, Page 10

Coe’s finest hour

Sebastian Coe: Coming Back. By David Miller. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984. 175 pp. $19.95 (paperback). When the almost painfully slight figure' of Sebastian Coe added the Moscow Olympic 1500 m gold medal to the silver he had won a short time earlier in the 800 m, there were those who felt that he might not have achieved such success had it not been for the widespread boycott of the Games over the Afghanistan invasion by the Soviet Union.

There were certainly some top middle distance runners absent, not the least of these being the winner of the Olympic 1500 m four years earlier, John Walker. Any doubts about Coe’s ability to win under pressure, however, were removed when he repeated his Moscow performance — silver in the 800 m and gold in the 1500 m — at the Los Ar 'eles 01 last v»-

.ngeles lympics last year. This was Coe’s finest hour, coming at the end of a long period of despair and uncertainty. In August, 1983, the well-spoken Englishman was in hospital being treated with drugs for a debilitating blood disease. The discovery of the illness explained a string of earlier failures, and it also threatened to end his career on the track.

But Coe is nothing if not

determined. A course of drugs cured the illness, but it was four months after leaving hospital before he was strong enough to begin training. This book, the second in which he has had the title role, is chiefly concerned with his remarkable fight back to the top. The author, David Miller, the chief sports correspondent of “The Times,” has been a close friend of Coe’s for more than eight years and it was on his typewriter that Coe’s first book, “Running Free,” was first pounded out. Miller obviously has an unequalled knowledge about Coe, and he puts this to good use. The detail and the background make absorbing reading. At the same time, one cannot, help feeling that Miller would have been better to have allowed Coe to tell the story in his own words. One does not easily become emotionally involved in the traumas and triumphs. Coe has his say, but it is almost reduced to comment after Miller has described the event. The subject, the athlete, is a trifle distant from the reader.

“Coming Back” should still prove very appealing to the athletics follower. The rather unusual relationship between Coe and his coach, his father Peter, is interest-

ing. Miller attributes much of Coe’s success to the training schedules prepared by Peter Coe.

The courageous performances by Coe’s long-standing British rival, Steve Ovett, at the Los Angeles Olympics is well documented. Ovett, suffering from bronchitis, competed in both 800 m and 1500 m although he had no chance of winning and a very good chance of doing himself some permanent injury. His failure provides the tragic background Which serves to highlight Coe’s triumph. The runner-up in the 1984 Olympic 1500 m was yet another Englishman, Steve Cram. He has since rebounded from this reversal by breaking the world records for both 1500 m and the mile. The scene seems set for a great 1500 m encounter at the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games next year — or does it?

Coe indicates that he intends stepping up to the 5000 m for the next Olympics, and that will probably mean he will use the Commonwealth event as a testing ground. But the man who has held world records at the 800 m, 1000 m, 1500 m and mile, is certainly not finished yet with the international scene. ROD DEW