Lives; Running reviewed

(Hazel Potter, in London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter, Autumn 2012)

In a summer where Sebastian Coe’s face has rarely been more than a few minutes from a TV screen, David Renton’s Lives; Running  is a timely reminder that the media’s love affair with the LOCOG Chairman has been a long one. Renton takes us back to the golden era of British middle distance running, interspersing childhood memories and reflections on the Coe v Ovett rivalry with a memoir of his own running career, while exploring the relationships in and around both.

Anyone who is old enough to remember the Moscow Olympics will recall the build-up to the games, not just the US (and potential UK) boycott but the media hype around Britain’s two middle distance runners: Seb Coe and Steve Ovett. Renton tracks this, exploring not only the press depiction of “toff v monster” to characterise Coe and Ovett respectively, but also the differences between the athletes in terms of style, emotion and attitude. Coe’s all-encompassing need to win, driven by his ultra-competitive father, versus the more magnanimous Ovett, for whom running is an important part of life, but not its whole, is a theme largely ignored at the time. In 1980 the press was far keener to demonise Ovett as arrogant and even unpatriotic, whereas Coe was always – and remains –the golden boy, meaning fans of the older athlete were often at odds with family and friends. Renton is one such fan but this is only one of a string of differences, social and political, that will emerge between the author and his peers and parents during the course of the book.

Coe’s upbringing – and in particular his father – helped to shape him as an athlete and the resultant craving to compete and win will undoubtedly have played a role in the development of his Thatcherite politics. His constant need to compete with Ovett and to take credit for his teammate’s performances portray a fear of failure but also a lack of compassion and understanding of the realities outside of the track. One quote from Coe reads: “I always had the feeling that when the gap began to disappear … the rivalry would become greater, and with it his need to prove himself,” and you wonder whether it was, in fact, Coe who needed to prove something not Ovett.

‘Lives; Running” is about more than Coe and Ovett though; while the themes of competition and relationships continue throughout the book it is Renton’s own development within and outside of sport that we learn about. Juxtaposed with this are portrayals of his father at an comparable age, viewed via diary extracts and memories, an Oxford Rowing Blue struggling to reconcile conflicting desires for flesh and faith. Ultimately, neither father nor son will continue competitively in his chosen sport beyond his academic years but both will eventually learn to participate at a recreational level.

Competitive sport is a bond, albeit it a fragile one, between parent and child: something that both can understand, even if it is from a different perspective. In time, sport as a bond begins to extend through to the next generation too, together with a new perception of the pride and pleasure it can bring – but it is not hard to imagine the short leap that is required to become a competitive, Peter Coe-like, parent either.

The highs and lows of winning and defeat are explored throughout “Lives; Running”, for the schoolboy, the recreational runner and the elite athletes but even this is not a simple analysis: how to compare the grimace of Coe against the clenched fist of Ovett? Or the schoolboy’s joy at destroying a field against a middle-aged runner overtaking contemporaries in a half marathon? Does it hurt more to lose the Boat Race or an Olympic Final? And would that pain be worse for, say, Coe whose father’s love was seemingly conditional on success than for Ovett, who would merely be angry at himself for defeat?

The conflicting emotions that the author has with running take years to reconcile and, even then, when the pain of defeat is no longer a concern, injuries will still hurt. The sudden, indiscriminate attack on an athlete of an injury is shown to affect both the elite, including Renton’s hero Ovett, and school runners and it is not just the discomfort that is suffered but the fact that running has been taken away. We learn about attempts at prevention but, in reality, this is often nothing more than a delay until the inevitable. Given that, the perspective that Ovett maintained will surely have helped: if running is part of life then an injury can be demoralising, if it is all that an athlete has then it will be utterly devastating.

The camaraderie – or lack of it – between Ovett and Coe is no secret but Renton shows that sport has the ability not only to provide credibility amongst peers but also to forge long-term friendships through his memoir. We find the author running in his thirties with friends he made in his teens and while other interests, such as music and politics, were key in the relationships, the role of sport is critical. But just as it helps develop friendships, running – and rowing for his father – “a life of movement” as Renton puts it offers an escape too: from school, parents, work, family and perhaps reality itself. The lone athlete will spend hours on his own, doing something he loves and, for that time, the world as he knows it does not exist.

Perhaps the whole of these sometimes conflicting attributes is that, as the author – and his father – conclude, the “life of movement…is a life fulfilled,” with the flip that “A sedentary life is a life voluntarily diminished.” And in a year when Coe’s LOCOG has drummed “inspire a generation” into the nation ad infinitum maybe this message, and the fact that a sport like running costs the participant virtually nothing in monetary terms, is one which should be heard just as much?

All You Need Is a Pair of Running Shoes

David Renton, Lives; Running

Zero Books, 124pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781780992358

reviewed by Steve Platt

One of the defining images of the 2012 Olympics is of Mo Farah crossing the finishing line in the 10,000 metres final for his second gold medal. Arms spread wide, head pushed high and eyes popping in a mix of effort, excitement and sheer astonishment at the nature of his achievement, his face is stretched with a grin broad enough to swallow the whole stadium.

It calls to mind an earlier iconic moment for British athletics at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. Sebastian, now Lord Coe and chairman of Locog, the London Games organising committee, struck a similar pose then in taking gold in the 1500 metres. Except that where Farah seems to radiate pure joy in his success, Coe’s face in the old clippings is contorted in a grimace that appears to communicate only pain. Where Farah goes on consciously to prostrate himself momentarily in gratitude on the track, Coe’s legs buckle beneath him as if he’s been cut down from a crucifixion.

David Renton doesn’t have a lot of time for Seb Coe. Within minutes of Farah’s victory, he has written on his blog and Facebook page: ‘If we are going to have a greatest British runner ever – wouldn’t you want it to be a Muslim who came here as a refugee, who was educated at a comprehensive and then an FE college, who lived with his partner for years before marrying her, and who worked in pizza restaurants before he was a professional athlete – rather than lifelong Tory Seb Coe?’

He puts Coe’s ‘death mask’ grimace at Moscow down to fear. Fear of failure; and fear, deep down, of somehow forfeiting the love of his father, ‘who made a point of chastising him publicly on his defeat’ by his great middle distance rival Steve Ovett in the 800 metres a few days earlier. ‘“You ran like an idiot,” Peter Coe told him. Peter then kept up a commentary of insults which continued until the press conference afterwards.’ Where Steve Ovett ‘saw sport as a pleasure, as a second priority in his life’, according to Renton, Coe ran as if his life was solely determined by it.

Recalling the Coe-Ovett showdown in the run up to the London Games, the BBC broadcaster Barry Davies wrote that while ‘the British media had painted Coe as the good guy and Ovett as, shall we say, the not-so-good guy … the characters that were painted were not absolutely right. Coe was the more driven, in my view; Ovett did his own thing to a great extent.’ Davies put the media bias in favour of Coe down to Ovett’s reluctance to give interviews. David Renton ascribes it to the fact that Coe was the establishment figure, Ovett the rebel. It was the rebel who attracted Renton’s sympathies when, aged just seven, his early interest in athletics was fired by and focused upon the contest between the two British runners.

Renton went on to be a good schoolboy middle distance runner himself. He broke the two-minute barrier for 800 metres, setting a new school record, at the age of 15, and beat almost everyone he raced against at distances between 400 and 1500 metres until a combination of injuries, inadequate coaching and, although he doesn’t admit it explicitly, a lack of the necessary single-mindedness led him out of the sport for eight years. By the time he returned to running in his late twenties, he was no quicker than your average fun runner; today he describes himself as running ‘slowly and without style, just like a dad dancing’.

Lives; Running intertwines an account of Renton’s running and personal history with one of the great Coe-Ovett rivalry and another drawing upon his father’s school papers and diary, written during his time at Oxford. Public school educated, like his son, Renton senior was an Oxford rowing blue. In the single sculls he beat the future Olympian Tony Fox, whose fourth-place performance at Helsinki in 1952 was the best by a British sculler from 1924 until 2012, when Northern Ireland’s Alan Campbell won bronze.

After Oxford’s defeat in consecutive boat races, though, he gave up the sport. He tells the teenage David later, ‘You do know that you are better at schoolwork than you are at running?’ and declares that he was happy to have quit rowing when he did. ‘If I hadn’t, I would never have passed my degree.’ It’s not what David wanted to hear, given that he ran in part ‘to maintain a bond with my father. I knew that he had wanted a son who would follow him [in business and in conducting the family affairs] … He complained to his friends that I wanted to level down people … By running, and at a high standard, I hoped to gain at least a temporary forgiveness from my father for my many other failings.’

Those ‘failings’ included an ever-increasing disenchantment with the separation and privilege of public school: ‘Endlessly expressing the narrowness of our existence and our isolation from what 99 per cent of people considered life, I bored my contemporaries by pointing out their isolation until they had no more desire to speak to me than I had to them. My hero was another boy, Gobber, who took to a tall building and spat on his fellow pupils repeatedly.’

Where David Renton’s father converted to Catholicism as a student to provide meaning to his life, David turns to radical politics, particularly anti-racism. He sees a continuity between the two, writing that: ‘My father in his youth raged against the “bowler hat”, by which he meant a life predictable from day to day, a life structured always around the same few relationships, a life overwhelmed by the routine of work. He saw that possibility and he rebelled equivocally against it. I share with him that restlessness.’

Renton regards his running as both an expression of that restlessness and a remedy for it. ‘I run because life is short,’ he writes, ‘and there are no moral imperatives save only these: to the weak you owe solidarity, to yourself you owe change.’ Although he wanted – desperately, defiantly – to win in his youth, ultimately he had no time for what he sees as the neoliberal vision of permanent competition. So you win one race, what then? Are you expected to go on to win the next, and the next, and the next, until eventually even the best, like Mo Farah or Steve Ovett or Sebastian Coe, must finally face up to the inevitability of defeat?

There is no doubt in Renton’s mind who got the most from their athletic achievements out of Coe and Ovett and who dealt best with their failures. He even suggests that Ovett was content with defeat in the 1500 metres in 1980, having already won the 800. At any rate, Ovett was the more magnanimous, both in victory and defeat. His response to getting a bronze medal in the 1500 metres behind Coe and the second-placed Jürgen Straub of East Germany was that he ‘ran the best race I could but was beaten by two better guys’, while Coe subsequently wrote of Ovett’s success in the 800 metres that his physical manner had ‘contributed to the tattiness of the race. It lowered the standing of athletics.’

Renton saw in Ovett – and now in Mo Farah – a ‘capacity for warmth, sympathy and human solidarity’ that he has never seen in Coe. It’s an instinctive judgement that others have shared but one that we should be wary of nonetheless. Coe’s relationship with his father, like David Renton’s with his, was complex but not cold. Of Peter Coe’s remarks after his 800 metres defeat, Seb said that he was less annoyed with his father than with press criticism of their relationship: ‘I found that insulting. People were entitled to criticise my running or Peter’s coaching, but not our relationship.’

In an obituary of Peter Coe, following his death in 2008 (when Seb was at the Olympics in Beijing), Seb Coe’s biographer David Miller recalls leaving the Moscow stadium after the 800 metres debacle in the same taxi as the Coes: ‘In the Russian driver’s misadjusted mirror, I could see Peter in the back seat with his arm around Sebastian, the same way you comfort your infant child when it comes to your bed in the middle of the night, troubled by a bad dream. There was only shared grief and love.’

David Renton concludes with some reflections on his own experiences as a father – of two young children – and why he has taken up running again after a further enforced layoff due to injury. ‘When I run I escape the commodification of life,’ he writes. ‘I dislike the way our social existence is organised, so that merely to live requires you to constantly purchase and consume … I am fed up with sports that I watch as a spectator but in which I am not allowed to participate.’

This will be one of the real tests of the London 2012 Olympic ‘legacy’: the extent to which the huge increase in interest in all kinds of athletics and sport is turned into active participation. Here, running is already off to a flying start with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets and parks, towpaths and trails, every weekend. As David Renton rightly notes, ‘To run all you need is a pair of running shoes … The activity itself comes satisfyingly free.’

This review was first published on the Review 31 website.

Lives; Running now on Zero Books website

Just a short post to report that Lives; Running is now up on the Zero Books website.

Why I wrote Lives; Running

A couple of friends who read this blog have written to me in the past week to ask about the book to which this blog is linked. As you can see from the “book” button, above, Lives; Running will be out at the end of July, and is published by the left-wing/cultural publisher Zero books.

The book covers similar, but different, material from this blog. The book was written in spring and summer 2011, when I was starting to run again after a five year gap, and it explores my ideas about running, and various role models I have had, both positive and negative.

Unlike this blog, Lives; Running is not a book about the Olympics or the follies of their organisers. That said, a considerable part of it is given over to the athletics career of a runner who epitomises my ideas of how not to run, namely Seb Coe. Any readers interested in that part of the book are encouraged to read my posts here about Coe’s rivalry with Ovett.

I’ll post more about Coe – as a runner, and as a politician – as we get closer to the Games.

Two influences on my writing were Alan Sillitoe and Haruki Murakami.

One of the ways in which Lives; Running differs from them, and from most running memoirs (many of which are written by ultra runners), is that the “memoir” is chiefly about my teens when I was a middle- and not a long-distance runner. I dislike running more than 6 miles: my legs hurt, I never reach that “transcendence” that many long-distance runners describe. If I could have 6 months of good training, without injury, I’d most like to run a much shorter distance – possibly 800 metres or 1500 metres -  at speed.

Much of the book is about ageing, about suffering injuries, and about how a body can carry the legacy of (over- or maybe just wrong-) running.

The book is written in a very “rigid” form, which I’d rather not seek to explain until people have the book in hand: save only to say that this is deliberate.

Finally, much of the book is about generations, and about how personality and values can be passed on from one person to another. I write about my father and my sons. There’s a deliberately “feminist” or perhaps “socialist-feminist” message which again I’m looking forward to discuss with readers when the book is out.

Coe and Ovett at the Moscow Olympics

For my parents, the 1966 World Cup was the moment when black and white television was replaced by colour. For me, the 1980 Olympics was the point at which a hand-tuned TV set finally gave way to pre-set channels and a remote control. I was seven years old and fed up of watching Grange Hill on the upstairs set, a black and white set with a 16-inch screen that required retuning at 45 second intervals. I knew from my father that Seb Coe and Steve Ovett would dominate the 800 and 1500 metres and for the first time since I was very young I would be allowed to watch the finals on my parents’ room-sized colour Sony downstairs.

The news had been building up to the Olympics over the previous seven months. Multiple British victories were, as ever, confidently expected. Yet the mood of the coverage was far from upbeat.

In April, dragged into line by President Carter, the US Olympic Committee had voted to boycott the Moscow Olympics. For several weeks afterwards, it seemed possible that the British Olympic Association might follow their lead. Our Prime Minister wrote to all British athletes urging them to boycott the games too.

Others joined the American effort: loyal Israel, Kenya, Morocco, West Germany, Canada and even Red China. Where there is discord, the Prime Minister had said, may we bring harmony. But these were the last days of amateur athletics, our competitors were pressing hard against the limits of the convention that they should not be paid, and success at the Olympics was the way to get invited to the better-remunerated European events. By a large majority, the British Olympic Association voted to leave the choice to individual athletes. The athletes in turn voted to compete, and who would blame them?

The sprinter Alan Wells ran the 100 metres in the white of Great Britain rather than his usual Scottish blue. Would he have won gold had the Americans been there? He would not have won had the Cuban athlete who came second merely better timed his dip for the line.

Even in the press there were voices calling for British participation. Three weeks before the Olympic finals, Ovett was in Oslo where he broke the world record for the mile. The Express dubbed his and Coe’s performances a “tonic” which could not “be bad for a country suffering the economic blues”.

My father allowed me to watch the 800 metre final, the showdown between Coe and Ovett. Coe was the media’s champion and my father’s clear favourite. He was lithe, where Ovett was muscular. He had the veneer of a public school boy. His coach and father Peter was a former amateur cyclist who had dedicated his own life to developing his son’s athletic career.

In the 800 metres, Coe ran greyhound-swift, he was happiest in the very fastest of races. Pulled through the first lap by a pace-setter, the field would thin out, leaving him in the perfect position to sprint for a record. The summer before the Olympics, his world records over 800, 1500 metres and the mile had all been shown live on TV.

Ovett’s home distance was 1500 metres. Biding his time to the last 150 metres, he would remain on the shoulder of the race leader. Poised to strike, he would kick for the line. Whether the race was slow or fast, he seemed able to pull out this finish whenever it was needed.

As we waited for the 800 metre heats and then the final, highlights of past races were replayed including Coe and Ovett’s five world records over the past 12 months, Ovett’s triumph at the World Cup in 1977, and Coe’s victory at the European Cup in 1979. Yet alongside these victories, other footage was also shown.

One clip showed Ovett’s defeat at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Placed in the eighth lane, he had struggled as a result of the authorities’ decision to run the first 300 metres of the race in lanes. He did not want to go out too fast for fear of diminishing his best weapon, his finishing kick. In the fifth lane was Alberto Juantorena, 6’2” and 185lbs of 400 metre sprinter experimenting with a distance at which he had barely previously raced. After 300 metres, Ovett was well down on Juantorena. Out in lane eight, he had no idea of the gap. The sprinter reeled off laps of 51 and 52 seconds, not merely winning but breaking the world record. Ovett finished fifth.

“I dedicate this gold medal to Fidel Castro and the revolution”, Juantorena told the press afterwards, the journalists laughing at his commitment.

Coe’s moment came a year later, when he broke the UK 800 metres record coming second at Crystal Palace to Kenya’s Mike Boit. Coe and Ovett then clashed over 800 metres at the 1978 European championships in Prague. It was the first meeting between the two runners since they had been schoolboys.

The race began with Coe, the younger athlete and still in awe of Ovett, seeking to recreate Juantorena’s dash at Montreal. He ran the first lap of the Prague 800 metres in 49.3 seconds. Had he been capable of running the second lap at the same pace he would have broken the world record by five seconds. But, of course, he tired. With 300 metres to go Ovett eased past Olaf Beyer in third, and made his way to Coe’s shoulder. “Beyer is finished”, the commentator said. Ovett then passed Coe 150 metres from the line. I was astonished at how relaxed Ovett seemed. But he could not pull away, instead Beyer came back into the race and caught Ovett at the line.

Ovett jogged to a halt, looked for his parents in the crowd, smiled, and shrugged. He comforted Coe as they walked together from the track.

My father told me that Coe was the better runner. Loyal, I followed him in rooting for Coe. But through the 800 metre heats I saw something which shook my resolve. It was not that Coe ran badly, his winning time in the first 800 metre heat (1.48.5) was a second faster than Ovett’s. Coe seemed to me to run lightly on the track and with grace. His legs did not tire, he wasted no energy as he ran.

At the end of the race I saw Ovett, his face broken into a smile, looking for the camera as the camera searched for him. He looked deeply into it, and I saw him mouth the words “I love you”. If there was any doubt, he traced the letters “ILY” with the fingers of his left hand as he spoke. The recipient of the message, although I could not know this at the time, since even the commentators were confused and trying to make sense of the words, was his girlfriend left behind in England.

I grasped only this, that Ovett saw sport as pleasure, as a second priority in his life. Ovett overtook Coe as my hero at that moment.

I knew that Ovett was seen as arrogant. To my father’s mind, it was a simple matter of heredity. Ovett meant to break apart the amateur cabal and promised to do so in the name of the self-employed worker. Amateurism my father considered indefensible, it would in time have to be pulled apart (as a businessman he saw the whole issue as a simple restraint of trade). Ovett was however the wrong person to carry out the task. Go, amateurism must, but on Coe’s and not on Ovett’s terms.

Ovett was undoubtedly the villain of the piece. The papers said so, the commentators on television alluded to some vague and unspecified flaws in his character. But what his real crimes were, no-one seemed to be able to say. It was suggested at times that he was unpatriotic, hinted that he had been given opportunities to run for Great Britain and had turned them down. But from the crowd, I seemed to hear an extra enthusiasm when he ran. You could hear the crowd, even in Moscow, shouting “O-vett, O-vett”. I could hear no similar chants for Coe.

Ovett’s face was still, his eyes cool. He made winning look so easy.

“The two Britons have all the options”, the commentator David Coleman told his viewers, “so long as they don’t become hypnotised with the obsession of beating each other.” Coe was in a blue sweatshirt to warm up, his jaw was wobbling with the anxiety of it all.

There was no Juantorena this time. Coe too was determined not to repeat his mistake of 1978 and made his way into the race only slowly from the back. Ovett spent the first 300 metres being jostled in sixth and seventh. With 420 metres to go, he ran up to the two East Germans in front of him, and attempted to prise them apart, his arms parting them like a swimmer doing the breast-stroke. Ovett made his way into fourth, the runners in front leaving space on their inside as they failed to overtake on the outside other competitors ahead of them. Coe was still in eighth, running wide into the third lane. Eighty metres from the line, Ovett made his way to the front. Coe’s late sprint took him to within five metres of his rival but no closer.

Ovett looked to his parents and waved both his fists in their direction.

Coe had to make do with the burden of his father and coach, Peter, who made a point of chastising him publicly on his defeat. “You ran like an idiot,” Peter Coe told him. Peter then kept up a commentary of insults which continued until the press conference afterwards. “You ran like a cunt”, Peter told his son, the journalists listening. The British press mourned Ovett’s victory, the common sentiment was that the “Bad Guy” had won. At the awards ceremony, when Ovett turned to him and held out his hand, Coe’s eyes, already focussed far beyond Ovett’s shoulder, did not move. Coe accepted his silver medal gracelessly. There were rumours that he was now considering quitting the sport altogether.

The sole hope for the younger runner was in the heats of the 1500 metres, due to start in just four days’ time. It would be the same format, two heats and a final. “Get your finger our Coe, I’ve got money on you,” read a cable from home.

But Coe had just come second at his favourite distance. Ovett had won 45 consecutive races at 1500 metres or the mile since he had last been beaten, three years before.

The first lap of the 1500 metres was run in 61.6 seconds. If that was slow, the second lap, at 63.3 seconds, was slower still. Six hundred metres from home an East German athlete Jürgen Straub determined to make a race of it. He ran the next 600 metres in bursts of 26 seconds, a speed that would have come close to winning the 800 metres final. At the bell, Coe was three metres behind Straub, and Ovett a further two metres behind. I was certain that Ovett would win. In the final straight, Ovett pulled wide to Coe’s outside, and his stride lengthened, but without making up any ground.

By the time Coe caught up with Straub, 120 metres from the line, Ovett was so close that he could almost touch his rival. It would surely be a moment’s work for him to pass. With 90 metres to go, Coe had increased his lead over Ovett to a further metre, but still Ovett’s victory seemed certain. He was sprinting now, and yet the gap did not narrow. Coe duly won, Ovett finishing eight metres behind in third.

Coe, victorious, contorted in agony.

Learning to row

My father rowed in the 1950 and 1951 boat race crews. I’ll be posting something later this week about the toll taken by the second of these races, in which his Oxford crew sank. Here for the moment is a short extract from my book dealing with his first few weeks learning to row:

No amount of practice could have prepared my father for his first weeks rowing on the river. He would have been surrounded by dozens of other boys, also learning to row. Amongst the beginners will have been boys whose boats twisted first one and then the other, boys who lacked the strength or technique to row against a current, boys rowing without finesse their oars flapping on and against the water. Several no doubt will have capsized as they struggled to cope with the wash of steamers boating over from Windsor. The best of the new intake must surely have done little more than paddle themselves gently away from the worst beginners.

Step by step, my father will have learned to coordinate the kick in his legs and the thrust in his arms, where to place his energy, how to hold his hands around the oars. He must have learned to trust his body to come forward (too far forward, it will once have seemed) at the start of the stroke, and to fall back far (too far?) at its end.

He breathed the fresh summer air. He returned home afterwards, his face red from the sun, content.

Book extract

 I’ve uploaded a pdf of the first chapter of my book here: Lives; running ch1. The book itself is due out in July.