OK Coe

For a man who won two glorious Olympic gold medals for Great Britain, Sebastian Coe doesn’t half get a lot of stick.

He’s posh. He’s a Tory boy. Those two brilliant triumphs in the 1,500m at the 1980 and 1984 games don’t count, it seems. He fluked it. Get talking about track and field in the pub or the office and everyone will be in total agreement. We all hate Sebastian Coe. Even Chris Morris hates Sebastian Coe.

Well, I’m going to say it. I like Seb Coe.

The conventional wisdom is that he was some kind of Brideshead Revisited fop born with a golden spoon in his mouth. Anthony Andrews in vest and spikes, breezing to victory. Sebastian Coe? Sebastian Flyte, more like. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the run-up to the Beijing games, I read an absorbing profile of Coe in Observer Sports Monthly. It concentrated on his role organising London 2012, but it also explained just why he deserves to be exalted as one of the greatest sportsmen this country has ever produced.

In his teens, the feature revealed, Coe developed his breathtaking capacity for middle distance running by doing forty 200m sprints in a row, with 30 seconds recovery in between. Imagine that. Then imagine doing it every day. Or half a dozen 800m runs for a change.

It was all the idea of his late father and coach Peter, who died last week, and wasn’t an athletics coach at all, but an engineer who dismantled conventional athletic thinking and helped his son become one of the all-time legends of the track.

Perhaps Coe made the mistake of making it all look a bit too easy. And then there was the rivalry with Steve Ovett. The contrast was unmistakable. Coe, the school prefect, and Ovett, the gutsy battler. You couldn’t like both, and nobody likes the posh boy, do they?

Except, as a kid, I couldn’t see any of that, all I could see was an amazing athlete who, for much of the early ’80s, spent the summer beating all-comers and shattering records in places like Nice and Zurich.

It might have helped that I never really took to Ovett who, brilliant runner that he plainly was, seemed to me far too much like an irritable PE teacher who’d make you do it in your pants and vest if you forgot your kit. But these days, everyone likes to claim they were a member of Team Ovett.

I’m a bit suspicious, though, and I can’t help thinking there’s a bit of political revisionism going on here. For I can’t have alone in being in thrall to the great man as he flew around the track. Coe was actually once popular enough to be voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

But he became a Conservative MP and, worse, started hanging around with William Hague. Bad move. He tried to redeem himself by trying to bring the Olympics to Britain and succeeding.

And we couldn’t even bring ourselves to be grateful for that.