In this respect, Coe reflected the temper of the times. As The Times put it, he was not merely the ‘nice, friendly, modern successor to the Brylcreem boys’; he was an innovator, who trained relentlessly and used the latest scientific techniques to better himself. His young rival Steve Cram, who thought the public had got Coe and Ovett completely wrong, found him ‘cool and calculating’. No doubt Chariots of Fire’s Cambridge dons would have thought his methods distressingly professional, not to say plebeian. And if they were suspicious of Harold Abrahams’s Italian coach, what would they have made of Peter Coe’s stage whisper at his son’s press conference in Moscow, after Sebastian had lost the 800 metres final to Ovett? ‘You ran like a cunt,’ Peter said. Even the reporters were shocked by that.12
Coe had the last word, though. Six days later, with millions riveted to their televisions, he stormed to gold in Ovett’s favoured 1,500 metres. Yet even though the two men are remembered as deadly rivals, they only faced each other six times. By and large, they insisted on being kept apart, either by choosing different meetings or running in different events. As a result, this was a duel fought out at second hand, with personal bests and world records as the weapons. In just forty-one days in 1979, for example, Coe demolished the records in the 800 metres, the mile and the 1,500 metres, a feat previously thought impossible. A year later, the two men broke world records on the same night in Oslo. And a few weeks after that, just before they went to Moscow, Ovett equalled Coe’s record in the 1,500 metres.
The climax came in nine astonishing days in August 1981. On the 19th, Coe set a new world 1,500 metres record in Zurich. Seven days later, in Koblenz, Ovett beat it. In Sheffield, where reporters besieged the Coe family home, his mother snapped that he had ‘gone to bed. He is not concerned about what Steve Ovett does.’ Just two days later, however, Coe went to Brussels and took the record back. The next day’s papers gave him front-page treatment. ‘COE THE HERO!’ roared the Mirror, and no wonder. Never had British athletes scaled such peaks. Certainly none had ever commanded such publicity or become such ambassadors for patriotic renewal. ‘Throughout this red-hot summer of athletics,’ exulted the Express’s David Miller, ‘they have blazed their separate yet interlocked record-breaking trails across Europe, while a global sporting audience has watched enthralled – these two so different, so exceptional Englishmen.’ And after so many years of feeble performances, it was the two men’s Englishness that seemed the most surprising thing of all. For years, said The Times, people had been expecting a ‘Super Runner’ to obliterate the records of the past. But everybody had assumed that he would ‘come from the other side of the Andes or out of Africa’s darkest and densest jungle. Not from Sheffield.’13
The remarkable thing was that, at a time when Coe and Ovett were two of the best-known young men in the country, both were still technically amateurs. Under the antediluvian rules of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), athletes were banned from accepting prizes and endorsements. Even at the height of his career, Coe was still living in digs with a university friend. Legend has it that when they were preparing for the 800 metres in Moscow, Ovett muttered to his rival: ‘It’s odd to think that we could fill a stadium on our own and yet here we are running for nothing.’
A few days after Coe’s miraculous performance in Brussels, the IAAF agreed that athletes could accept advertising and endorsement deals, which meant they could aspire to the financial status of their fellow sportsmen. Yet the new financial opportunities of the 1980s brought anxieties of their own. Ovett had already weathered fierce criticism in Moscow, where his exclusive deal with the Sunday People infuriated its Fleet Street rivals. And although Coe’s golden-boy image gave him a degree of protection, he was not immune from the pressures that came with professionalism. In August 1982 the Observer accused him of snubbing his home crowds for the well-heeled European promoters, who waved fat rewards for world-record attempts in Oslo and Zurich. ‘What it boils down to’, said the paper sternly, ‘is that athletics is going through a period of rapid change. Coe and Ovett are now, to all intents and purposes, professional athletes. As professionals, they owe much to those who support the sport in this country.’14
Like Chariots of Fire’s Liddell and Abrahams, then, Coe and Ovett faced two ways. As pale, serious, impeccably patriotic young men, raising the Union Jack over the stadiums of the world, they looked like throwbacks to a lost age of sporting empire. ‘Their personality, their style, their will to win are typical,’ enthused the Express, ‘and show that in sport, at least, Britain can still take on the world, and win.’ Yet they were also representatives of change, not just as professionals in a hitherto amateur sport, but as individualistic heroes in a society where collective loyalties had frayed. Their triumphs were built on ‘character’, boasted the Express, not ‘massive State or private financial backing’. The obvious implication was that if they could beat the world without Whitehall’s assistance, then so could Britain’s businessmen.
They were not alone, though. One of the pleasures of following British sport in the early 1980s was that it was full of self-made men and women who were no longer content to play the gallant loser, from Tessa Sanderson and Fatima Whitbread to Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean. Among them was a young man from Notting Hill who has a good claim to be the most ferociously competitive athlete Britain has ever produced. ‘Winning’, Daley Thompson once said, ‘is the only prize anybody cares about in this world.’ That would not have gone down well with the Master of Trinity.15
Like Harold Abrahams, Daley Thompson defied the stereotype of the blue-blooded Anglo-Saxon athlete. His father had moved to London from Nigeria; his mother came from Dundee. He was born in Notting Hill in October 1958, just weeks after the riots that brought the scruffy west London neighbourhood to national attention, and grew up alongside children from a bewildering variety of ethnic backgrounds. But he had little sense of belonging to a minority, and always described himself as a British athlete, not a black athlete. ‘People don’t regard themselves as black or white in Notting Hill,’ his brother Frank told his biographer. ‘You’re just from the area.’ As for Thompson’s mother, she thought that while Notting Hill was a ‘dump’, it was a ‘happy dump’. ‘We’re not actually a black family,’ she added. ‘We’re a mixed family. I think, being mixed, we’re accepted more than if we were completely black.’16
Young Daley was not an easy child. A ‘terror from the minute he was born’, in his mother’s words, he was a hyperactive little boy, always getting into fights. His parents worked long hours, and in 1965 his mother sent him to a state-approved boarding school in Sussex. Farney Close specialized in coping with ‘troubled’ children, with fees paid by their local authority. So at the age of just 7, writes his biographer Skip Rozin, Daley Thompson ‘found himself there, alone, younger than most of the other students, the only black child, and without any sense of who he was or where he was going’.fn3 He settled well: his teachers remembered a ‘normal, active, naughty child, always very popular, always very able’. But after five years there came an almighty shock. When Thompson was 12, his mother rang with the dreadful news that his father had been shot dead in Streatham. And all this left its mark. As an interviewer wrote decades later, Thompson was defined by two apparently contradictory things: ‘a desperate need to be noticed, and an even more powerful desire to be left alone’.17
It was at Farney Close that Thompson discovered sport. Competition provided a channel for his restless energy; victory gave him a sense of meaning. By the time he left, at the age of 16, his path was set. Initially he dreamed of becoming a footballer, but a coach at the Essex Beagles athletics club suggested he try the decathlon. His mother was horrified: she wanted him to stay at college and get a part-time job. When he said no, she threw him out. At first Thompson moved in with his coach, but eventually his mother’s best friend, whom he knew as ‘Auntie Doreen’, agreed to take him in. And all the time, relentlessly, unceasingly, he trained. Other young athletes f
ell by the wayside, but he never gave up, even when the skies were black and the wind whipped around his ankles. ‘I refuse even to contemplate defeat,’ he said a few years later. ‘I was talking to Steve Ovett one day about what drove us on and I told him that really I was the kind of guy who felt he should have been born Sir Somebody and now I was out to show that I deserved recognition through sheer ability.’ Ovett nodded: ‘Yes, that’s your working-class syndrome showing through.’
Thompson’s breakthrough came in 1978, when he turned 20, won silver at the European Championships in Prague and won gold at the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. Almost unbelievably, it was only three years since he had taken up the decathlon, and he was still living on a pittance from the athletics authorities. Afterwards, he had scholarship offers from dozens of American universities, but he preferred life with Auntie Doreen. That was good news for Britain’s sportswriters, who found themselves with an extraordinarily engaging new subject. Thompson was a born showman. When he won Commonwealth gold, he celebrated by persuading his beaten rivals to join him in a lap of honour. Then he went out on the town, accompanied by the ubiquitous Doreen, and enjoyed a lavish meal with bottle after bottle of champagne. The bill came to several hundred Canadian dollars, a colossal amount of money in 1978, but the manager refused to accept his money. Thompson was thrilled. ‘This was my first taste,’ he said, ‘of what stardom is all about.’18
For a young man who had lost his father and spent much of his childhood at boarding school, and whose skin colour marked him out as an outsider, all this was naturally intoxicating. If nothing else, Thompson’s newfound fame was a perfect example of the way television could transform a nobody into a somebody almost overnight. Liddell and Abrahams might have been well known, but very few people had ever seen them compete. But Thompson was a celebrity. Newspapers promoted his ‘exercise plan’; the BBC invited him to present a weekly sports show; eventually there was even a bestselling computer game, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. At first Thompson loved it. ‘This kind of adulation and fame was what I had been working for all my life,’ he told Rozin. ‘The recognition, the autograph hunters – it’s great.’ But the novelty soon wore off, and by 1984 he was complaining that he could not visit his local McDonald’s without being pestered. ‘There is a feeling that anyone who performs in public becomes public property,’ he lamented. ‘I do not believe that.’ Evidently adulation and fame were not such fun after all.19
Why did millions of people, who had never shown the slightest interest in the decathlon, embrace Thompson with such enthusiasm? The answer is not just that he won, but that he did so with such irreverent ebullience. In the early years, the flow of jokes made for a stark contrast with the grim seriousness of Ovett and Coe. At the Olympic village in Moscow, reporters found him ‘at his ease and toasting the crumpet with his smile’. And even in the heat of competition, he rarely lost his sense of fun. When he walked out in Moscow for the decathlon’s concluding 1,500 metres, he was so far ahead of his rivals he was already guaranteed gold. So he treated the race as four laps of honour, slowing down at the end to wave to friends in the crowd. To many viewers, this was barely believable. British athletes did not coast insouciantly to victory; they battled grimly against overwhelming odds. If by some miracle they won, they had the decency to look embarrassed about it. Yet here was an Englishman who not only treated success as his birthright but positively gloried in his superiority.
Among the press corps, some lamented Thompson’s ‘brashness’ and ‘arrogance’. But the public loved it. A cheeky patriotic champion: what could be better? Thompson was that rare beast, said The Times, a supreme athlete with a ‘disarming twinkle in his eye … People are taken not only with his winning but with the way he wins. They are excited by his display of emotion, the fist pumped into the air in victory, the despair at a poor performance.’ But there were virtually no poor performances. In the first half of the decade, Thompson did not lose a single decathlon. When he literally strolled to victory in the 1982 Commonwealth Games, so far ahead that he again jogged around the track during the final event, one rival remarked that it was ‘a pity’ they had been born in his era. And by now he had already joined the pantheon of national sporting heroes. For Rozin, ‘he seemed to embody a fighting spirit that reminded his countrymen of a time when the influence of England was unparalleled around the world’.20
The twentieth century had, of course, thrown up a host of sporting idols. But there was something different about Daley Thompson. Technically, he was mixed-race, but to the public he was black. The first time his name appeared in a newspaper, he was described as a ‘dusky youngster’. He came of age at a time when racial tensions were rarely far from the headlines, and was all too aware of the impact of prejudice. His old friend David Baptiste remembered that black faces were very rare on the athletics circuit in the 1970s. ‘It did get nasty a few times,’ he recalled. ‘Some meetings you could tell you weren’t at home, in the north, and on the coast. In the north it was plain nobody wanted to speak to you, but in some places it was a real hassle.’21
Against this background, a different athlete might have seized the opportunity to become a champion of black rights. Impressed by Thompson’s self-confidence, Frank Keating tipped him ‘to be a local leader of the emerging community of young black sportsmen in Britain’, such as the footballers Viv Anderson and John Barnes, the boxer Frank Bruno and the javelin thrower Tessa Sanderson. But that was not Thompson’s way. He consistently rejected invitations to speak up for black, Asian or mixed-race Britons, and when journalists asked him to comment on South Africa, he told them it was ‘a shame on you that you try and intrude politics into something as beautiful as the Olympic concept’. Invitations from civil rights groups invariably ended up in the bin: as Thompson told his biographer, ‘They only want me because I’m famous, and you can’t get famous by attending all that rubbish.’ And when a researcher preparing a book on black sportsmen approached him for an interview, his reply was emphatic: ‘What do you want to talk to me for? I’m not black. I’m just Daley Thompson.’22
‘I’m just Daley Thompson.’ Even in the 1980s few people more unashamedly proclaimed the value of self-interest. He owed the public nothing, he said: no ‘favours, autographs, valuable time, public comment’, other than to be the best he could be. The controversy over the Moscow Olympics passed him by. He ‘didn’t really care’ about the politics of it; he ‘didn’t give a damn who was going’. Even some of the world’s biggest brand names, waving cheques for tens of thousands of pounds, found it hard to penetrate his self-imposed isolation. ‘I’d like to earn a million,’ he told the press after Moscow, ‘but I’m a sportsman first and foremost.’ And although he signed deals to promote Brut, Adidas, Lucozade and Hertz, competition mattered more to him than money. His agents, he complained, were always pestering him about ‘business arrangements’. But ‘my commitment is to sport, not money … I spend all my days just training and travelling for sport. Everything else is secondary.’23
Perhaps even more than his racial background, his cheeky insouciance or his political indifference, it was this single-mindedness, this competitiveness, this obsession with winning, that made Daley Thompson one of the most richly symbolic figures of the age. ‘Winner. That was all he ever wanted to be,’ wrote Rozin. ‘Winner in football. Winner in running. And finally, winner of the decathlon.’ What defined him, agreed the sportswriter Norman Fox, was his ‘driving ambition’, his ‘almost unbearable’ dedication. ‘Every morning,’ explained one profile, ‘Thompson pores over his books and journals on exercise and technique, grabs a breakfast of cereal and milk and is at the track by 10.30 am. He breaks for lunch at about 1.30 pm, returns by 3 pm and works until dark.’ Training, he said, was ‘everything … like being a monk. Not because you abstain or anything, but just because there is nothing else … It’s all directed towards one thing.’24
Yet, if Thompson’s dedication brought him glory, it also m
ade him a strikingly solitary figure. When the crowds had departed, there was something oddly melancholy, almost Ken Livingstone-esque, about his routine: the bedroom lined with several years’ editions of Athletics Weekly, the colossal cupboards stuffed with training gear, the 400 different pairs of athletics shoes. ‘Usually I am alone,’ Thompson said. ‘I leave in the morning alone and come home alone. I eat most of my meals alone. I spend between two and three hours a day driving and that is alone.’ But he never wavered. ‘Competition is my life,’ he told the press before the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984: ‘winning is my goal.’ He was, of course, as good as his word.25
Although Daley Thompson has a good claim to be the greatest athlete Britain has ever produced, not even he could match the popularity of the best-known sportsman of the 1980s. A state-educated working-class Tory, Ian Botham burst into the cricketing world with a swagger and glamour that had been absent for decades. With his sandy moustache and gigantic frame, he was immediately familiar even to people who could not care less about the difference between short leg and silly mid-off. Self-confident, aggressive and never far from the limelight, Botham organized high-profile walks for charity, was embroiled in a string of scandals and gladly embraced the new commercial culture of the game. To his biographer, the cricket writer Simon Wilde, he was the quintessential ‘man of the people’, the incarnation of Thatcherite ambition. To one of his teammates, he was simply ‘a bricklayer who happened to be good at something else’.
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