The Perfect Distance
Page 11
The strength of the Met Police Athletics Club – due largely to Norman’s administration and management – reflected well on the force, and Norman was soon given a virtual sinecure in a substation near his home in Bromley, the south London borough which includes Crystal Palace National Sports Centre. He was already expanding his horizons through his Coke contacts. Even before he moved out to Bromley, coach Frank Horwill, an early associate of Norman, recalls regular visits to his central London base in Chelsea. ‘I used to call in and see him on a Friday,’ says Horwill. ‘He’d say hello, then a policeman would appear and say, “Andy, call from Norway,” then, “Andy, call from Sweden.” And it went on and on like this. He was virtually running an agency from there.’ The amount of police work that Norman did at Bromley after that must have been even less, judging from the experience on myself and others, who would phone him there and have our calls answered with ‘Three As [Amateur Athletic Association]’. It was another measure of his commitments elsewhere that when he retired, in the mid-eighties, he was still just a sergeant.
With his increasing portfolio of contacts, Norman became as instrumental in the organisation of meetings in Oslo, Brussels, even North America as he was in Britain. Yet he was still a desk sergeant in a south London cop-shop. He was a pivotal character to the athletes who wanted to race in Britain or at those meetings abroad that he helped organise and the vast majority of international athletes and meeting organisers I’ve interviewed for this book won’t have a word said against him. Adrian Metcalfe goes even further: ‘Andy Norman should be president of world athletics.’ Although he has always denied it, Norman was suspected, in the early seventies, of being involved with ‘old mucker’ Frank Horwill in the distribution of Athletics Truth, a scurrilous mimeographed magazine which attacked the leading lights in the amateur administration at the time, Arthur Gold and Marea Hartman. Horwill was the principal author, and hardly a model of self-restraint. His abrasive style was apparent in a public meeting during the same period to discuss selection policy. He accused a national coach of favouring a female athlete for Olympic selection, ‘because he is fucking her’. The magazine articles were written in a similar vein, and it ceased publication only under threat of legal action. But no one pressed charges, fearing adverse publicity. That lesson would not be lost on Norman.
By the time of Ovett’s breakthrough to world class in 1977, Norman was assuming a dominant position in the organisation of athletics in Europe, albeit from an ostensibly minor role officially. The AAA invitation meetings, with stars like Foster, Ovett and, soon, Coe, were the envy of Europe. And Norman’s other major asset was the huge pool of US athletes he could invite to the first meeting of the season, in Britain, paying their expenses. They then headed out to the Continent for the summer, on the proviso that they would return for the season finale, the Coke Meeting. With increasing television coverage of star-studded meetings, sponsorship money started to pour in.
With his gift for making things happen, and his single-minded devotion to the cause of athletics success, he was a man with whom increasing numbers of elite athletes were happy to do business. He was effectively becoming both agent and promoter, an obvious potential conflict of interest, but, since British athletics was beginning to boom as never before, he still had more supporters than critics.
The latter group comprised mainly the enraged ‘old school’, who were shocked by some of his stunts, as when he sold television rights for a meeting to one US network but coverage of the highlight event, the mile, to another. But New Zealander John Walker, the 1976 Olympic 1500 metres champion, who was one of the first to benefit from Norman’s largesse, summed up the athletes’ attitude: ‘Andy justified his whole means by the number of gold medals he won for Britain.’
Other critics were summarily dismissed. David Bedford, the former 10,000 metres world record-holder (and now an elite-race organiser for the London Marathon) was a rival promoter to Norman at the time, having taken up the running of the International Athletes’ Club. Bedford began touting a file of photocopies from Companies’ House, trying to prove that Norman was profiting personally from his de facto agency. Nobody in the press was much interested, myself included. We still felt that Norman was the lesser of two evils – the other being the incompetent, old-style national administrators.
Norman had another coup in 1982, at the IAAF Congress, which preceded the European Championships that year. In a speech written for him by Ovett’s biographer, John Rodda of the Guardian, Norman called for the end of amateurism, warning that if under-the-table payments were not formalised, the sport would fall into the hands of the increasingly powerful agencies, such as Mark McCormack’s International Management Group. The possibility was immanent: IMG was already managing Coe by then – he was the first track and field athlete on their books. The company had also arranged a three-race series between Ovett and Coe, which should have taken place six months earlier. That hadn’t come off but IMG was also promoting the idea of a Grand Prix athletics circuit, which was of great interest to the independent promoters of the ‘spectaculars’ like Zurich, Brussels and Oslo.
A result of Norman’s speech, which was widely applauded, although not by the communist bloc, was the setting up of trust funds for athletes. This was a halfway house to professionalism, but essentially a sop to the Eastern Europeans, whose athletes were either ‘students’ or ‘military personnel’, and thus strictly amateur, or so it was claimed. They were actually about as amateur as the US college ‘students’ who had trouble reading and writing, but this was international politics, played out on the sports field. Anyone doubting it has only to recall the Olympic boycotts of Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984.
Despite his acumen, the street-fighter side of Norman would ultimately lead to his downfall. It would take a while, until the mid-nineties, but the bad seeds were already being sown. As organiser of the Crystal Palace meetings, Norman was responsible for ensuring the collection and delivery of urine samples to the dope-testing laboratory at King’s College, Chelsea. Dr David Cowan, then assistant director of the Drug Testing Centre at King’s, has revealed that, in the early eighties, his staff had doubts about the samples that Norman was delivering personally.
‘We were very surprised’, Cowan told me, ‘that we didn’t find any positives from the samples, given the positives we were getting from other branches of athletics. We weren’t even getting ephedrine traces – that’s to say, from accidental, over-the-counter cold remedies – showing up. Either Norman was being super-careful, to make sure none of the athletes were taking drugs, or we were not getting genuine samples.’ Mike Farrell, the 1956 Olympian who retired as AAA general secretary in the early nineties, confirmed that, as a result of Cowan’s concerns, Norman was relieved of his dope-testing duties.
But that wasn’t the only issue of suspect ethics involving Norman. US hurdler James King has admitted to myself and several other journalists that Norman paid him to lose to Alan Pascoe in the Briton’s farewell race at Crystal Palace in 1978. Pascoe, now head of Fast Track, the company which markets UK Athletics, was unaware of the arrangement at the time, and displayed huge satisfaction when he pipped King on the finish line. King subsequently told a British television interviewer, ‘Andy wanted to make sure that I would at least give Alan a great race – you know, make it close. He wanted Alan to go out on a really good note, and make it look good for the public.’
In contrast, anyone deemed to have crossed Norman, like the ever-popular Kriss Akabusi, got no such favours. Akabusi took over from David Hemery as British 400 metres hurdles record-holder. But he had several spats with Norman over appearance money in meetings that the latter organised. Following one argument, Akabusi reported that Norman told him, ‘You’ll never race in Europe again.’ Fortunately, although Norman’s power was widespread at that point (in the early nineties), Akabusi was good enough to command respect both at home and abroad for his achievements. But, in his retirement race, also at Crystal Palace, Norman lined up th
e Olympic champion and world record-holder, Kevin Young, who duly despatched Akabusi to a long and losing goodbye.
In his autobiography, Steve Ovett describes Norman fulsomely: ‘advisor, coach, financial assistant, bag carrier, minder, airline ticket supplier, best man (at his wedding), counsellor. But above all he has been one of my very best friends.’ That friendship began to wilt less than a year after the publication of Ovett in late 1984. Initially, Ovett felt that Norman’s interest in him waned along with the athlete’s career. Then Norman took up with Fatima Whitbread, the javelin world record-holder, now his wife. The relationship made Ovett uncomfortable, since he knew Norman’s first wife, Gerd, and their children very well. Their paths diverged.
Ultimately, in the middle of the 1989 season, not having communicated for several years, Norman phoned Ovett out of the blue and offered him £20,000 to compete in the AAA Championships against Coe, their first meeting in Britain since their schoolboy race in 1972. It was unauthorised to pay money for a championship event back then, and the story leaked out. Ovett performed poorly, while Coe won the race. There was another inquiry instituted by the AAA. The report came to the intriguing conclusion that, although Ovett had obviously been telephoned and offered money to compete, it could not be proven that the caller was Norman. Ovett put the seal on their fifteen-year relationship with, ‘I think Andy’s lost touch with reality.’ Espousing a conclusion like that, the AAA wasn’t far behind. Ovett and Norman have not spoken since.
The following year, Norman was involved in another dispute over money. He said that a plastic bag containing $40,000 in athletes’ appearance fees had been stolen from his Crystal Palace hotel room. Norman admitted ‘gross negligence’, but again the federation did nothing. Later, he would tell a journalist, ‘They just didn’t have the balls.’
Since Norman’s fall from grace, Coe insists, ‘I’m not ashamed to say it, I have maintained a close friendship with Andy. I wouldn’t say anything to you that I wouldn’t say to him, and I have in the past to his face been critical about some of the things that he’s said and done, and his attitudes. But I think the one reason that I stayed friendly with him is that I never had a commercial relationship with him. He brought an air of professionalism to it. He was street-smart. Some of his pre-race instructions to the field when I was racing used to be very funny. They’d be all lined up and he’d wait until I was at the very end of the warm-up room just before we went down to the track, and he’d grab them all together and say, “You’ve only got one instruction tonight. For fuck’s sake, keep out of his way, and don’t hit him. The public don’t like it!”’
There are still those who think that Norman’s dismissal from the British federation for his hounding of Cliff Temple was harsh, and, has been mentioned, Norman still has many friends on the international athletics circuit. It is probable that his previous record was taken into account when he was sacked in 1994. The head of the British federation at the time was Peter Radford, an arch anti-drugs campaigner who is also a conservative and moral man.
Cliff Temple was one of the best athletics journalists that Britain has ever had, but he was never a confident man. His marriage had broken down, and he felt that he was in financial difficulties. Everyone in the athletics world knew that he was suffering from grave psychological problems. When Neil Wilson told Norman that Temple was ‘on the edge’, Norman’s response was, ‘Anything I can do to push him over, I will.’ Peter Radford might have had more support for his draconian stance towards Norman had others been privy to another remark that Norman made to a colleague of his. During the inquiry that led to his dismissal, Norman confided, ‘It only needs some other arsehole to commit suicide, and I’ll really be in the shit.’
12
Monster
New Year 1977 began in a sober fashion for the world-wide athletics community, with the news of Ivo van Damme’s death in a car crash on 29 December 1976. The Belgian, who had finished fourth behind Ovett in the European Junior 800 metres three years earlier, had gone on to do what Ovett had signally failed to do – star in the Montreal Olympics. Van Damme had won silver medals behind two of the greatest athletes in history, Alberto Juantorena of Cuba in the 800 metres, and John Walker of New Zealand in the 1500 metres. Ovett, now aged twenty-one, wrote to Athletics Weekly with a mature judgement about the nature of fame and perceived destiny.
Athletes are a strange breed who tend to have a certain disrespect of fate, believing that it plays little or no part in their lives or those of their fellow athletes. Only when something of this nature happens are we all shaken, and we take it hard. To win two silver medals in any Olympics is a fabulous performance; to win them in only your first Games, and at the age of 22, marks the greatness of the man, who surely must have gone on to greater honours.
Reflecting on British domination of middle-distances between 1978 and 1986, Dave Moorcroft said in 2003, ‘The one person who could have got in the way of that was Ivo van Damme.’ John Walker, who beat the Belgian by less than a stride in Montreal, elaborates: ‘If van Damme had survived, the enigma of Coe and Ovett may not have been there, because he might have been better. He may not have been better, [too,] but he would have been a force to consider. He ran 1 minute 43 seconds for 800, he was tall and strong, and he could only get better. He might have knocked us all off our pedestals.’ The Belgian is remembered every summer in the Memorial Ivo van Damme, the athletics spectacular in Brussels which began in the summer of 1977 and is now a Golden League meeting.
But it was Ovett who would knock Walker off his pedestal later that year, while Coe was making quieter progress in the wings, building on his breakthrough at 800 metres the previous summer.
Ovett amazed the cross-country fraternity by finishing second in the Inter-Counties Championships in mid-January. One week later, Coe had his most impressive senior victory thus far. He won the National Indoor 800 metres title by fifteen metres, in the third-fastest British time. Then, within eight days in mid-February, he made his first substantial moves into world class. In his first international match, an indoor 800 metres in Dortmund, Germany, he ran away from Paul-Heinz Wellmann, the Olympic 1500 metres bronze medallist and reigning European indoor champion. Coe broke the British record by half a second, with 1 minute 47.6 seconds, which was also faster than his best outdoor time. A successful summer beckoned, since the 200-metre indoor tracks militated against really fast times. Coe was making a name for himself in the national press now. He followed up his Dortmund victory a week later with another international win, against France, lowering his best by a tenth of a second. But the best was yet to come.
After the depressing result in Montreal – that single bronze medal for Brendan Foster – the small British team at the European Indoor Championships in San Sebastian, on the Spanish Basque coast, came back with three gold and two silver medals. Given the respective opposition, Coe’s gold was the pick of the bunch. Winning his heat and semi-final on the same day, he ran away again in the following day’s final, setting another UK record by knocking a full second off his recent best. However, his delight was tempered ten days later, when he strained an Achilles tendon, and had to take three months off racing. But this was not necessarily a drawback. He had finished his indoor season with a massive improvement, and had plenty of time to return for the outdoor track season, which would not begin in earnest until June. A short rest never did any athlete any harm, and George Gandy said that one of the most impressive things about Coe was that, unlike obsessive trainers who do themselves more harm than good, ‘If Seb wasn’t well, he’d just disappear for a few days.’
Meanwhile, Ovett made news of a different, but no less important, kind. The sand dunes of Merthyr Mawr on the south Wales coast had long been a training ground for his coach Harry Wilson, a devotee of the celebrated Australian Percy Cerutty, who had guided Herb Elliott to a 1500 metres gold and world record in the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Cerutty had a training camp at Portsea, on the south-east Australian coast near Melbourne, and th
e dunes that Elliott trained on became famous through Cerutty’s books, particularly How to Become a Champion, which was highly influential on the sixties and seventies generation of club runners. At a seminar conducted at Merthyr Mawr, Ovett roundly criticised the lack of back-up for young athletes or newcomers at major games. Ovett described the boredom of Olympic village life, the training tracks overcrowded with poseurs, and the lack of any management guidance. This was an old saw among athletes – the fact that management seemed to think they were more important than the athletes – and was why Andy Norman would find so many allies among the new breed of athlete, like Ovett and Foster, who hated the ‘amateur’ ethic and all who supported it.
Foster retains an indelible memory from the Montreal Olympics. ‘The federation was an obstacle, but the Olympic people were a bigger obstacle. After the 1976 Olympic opening ceremony, we were called together to a meeting, and castigated by the British Olympic people, because they’d had reports back from London saying that this was the most disgraceful marching performance [in the opening ceremony] by a British team ever. Seriously, this is true. I said, “You know why? Because this is the first British team that hasn’t been in the bloody army. The medals aren’t for marching; the medals are for running.”’
Shortly after the Merthyr Mawr training weekend, Ovett flew to Jamaica for a mile race at a festival in Kingston. His principal opponents would be Filbert Bayi and Suleiman Nyambui of Tanzania, and Steve Scott, a young newcomer from the USA who was having his first international race. Scott got to know Ovett quite well over the following years. He is now an assistant university coach in southern California, north of San Diego. In his late forties, he looks in great shape, and instructed me to be sure to tell all his old rivals that he still trains every day with his students, and had recently run a mile in 4 minutes 26 seconds. Runners, eh?