Dwain Chambers: why BOA lost

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Geneva has now published the reasons for its decision in the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)’s complaint against the British Olympic Association (BOA). The case was WADA’s complaint against BOA rules that ban an athlete caught taking drugs for life. WADA said these rules are unhelpful, and it was inappropiate for different national associations to divert from the global rules set out in the World Anti-Doping Code which precribe a two-year ban. The case, as will be clear from the above summary (and contrary to the impression given by the UK press in particular), was not brought by Dwain Chambers, who did judicially review the BOA prior to the 2008 Olympics, but lost at an interim hearing (the litigation is described in detail in Chamber’s memoirs, about which I’ve posted before; the decision itself is on bailii here). 

But Dwain Chambers is the best-know athlete whose current Olympic ban will be determined by the CAS proceedings, and for that reason it’s worth recalling the context to his current ban. Chambers is 34. His best distance is the 100 metres and his fastest time was recorded in 1999, at 9.97 seconds. He came fourth at the Sydney 2000 summer Olympics. In August 2003, Chambers tested positive for Tetrahydrogestrinone (“THG”) a banned substance. Chambers admitted to using THG, indeed went further and admitted to having used it for 18 months before it was detected, with a cocktail of six other banned drugs: testosterone/epitestosterone cream; erythropoietin; insulin; human growth hormone; modafinil; and liothyronine.

The drugs were administered to him as a salve (“the clear” – THG) and a cream (“the cream” – testosterone). Chambers was advised by other athletes not to take drugs, but ignored their advice. He lied about drugs use to his friends, even his physiotherapist. And the drugs had a relatively modest effect. They did not directly increase his body mass, but they enabled him to recover faster from heavy work and thus train dramatically harder. After 18 months of drugs use and an intensified fitness regime, Chambers was able to reduce his best time over 100  metres from 9.97 to 9.87 seconds. As a result of his positive test, Chambers was stripped of all the medals he won during the period when he ran on drugs. He reimbursed over £100,000 in prize money he won during the period of his drugs use.

After his ban ended he returned to athletics in the 2006 season and won gold with the 4 x 100 relay team at the European Championships. After an unhappy spell during which he experimented with becoming a professional athlete in other sports, in 2008 he returned to track athletics and he won the silver medal in the World Indoor Games. He won a gold over 60 metres at the 2010 World Indoor Championships and silver in the European event in 201o. Chambers is fast; no so fast that he will win the Olympics if selected, but fast enough so that he has a realistic expectation of making the final.

I’ve written before previously – here and here – that I hoped WADA would win its case and Chambers woudl be selected. My reasoning was essentially this: that Chambers has admitted his guilt and apologised for it. It is clear from his memoirs that he is honest about the reasons he took drugs and he has insight into the selfishness and stupidity of that original decision. Where a person is contrite, I believe their punishment shoudl be less. And I find his case morally no worse, but if anything rather more sympathetic than the myriad British athletes, in many different sports, who have found ways to avoid drugs tests.

Chambers, in his memoirs, makes much of the hypocrisy of certain former athletes who have campaigned against him – he names in particular Lord Moynihan, the (other) 2nd-rate Conservative politican at the head of UK sport, whose record within British rowing, Chambers argues, is very different from the simple anti-drugs stance Moynihan takes when asked about Chambers. He gives other examples, some of which I have also used in my previous piece.

The decision

Reading the judgment, the following considerations struck me:

Although the BOA ban is officially, an immediate life-time ban, without exception (para 8.24), for all UK athletes caught taking drugs, in practice the rule is applied leniently in the extreme against athletes who say that they failed a drug test accidentally: 24 of the last 25 athletes who have sought to challenge the ban have been successful. (para 2.7)

The effect of appealing to the BOA is to generate relatively minor sanctions – Christine Ohurougu who failed to attend 3 drugs tests was punished with just a one year ban (para 2.8).

CAS’s position is that in order to get all national bodies to implement the anti-doping codes, it is better to have a single consistent sanction rather than a multitude of different rules, “the international anti-doping movement has recognized the crucial importance of aworldwide harmonized and consistent fight against doping in sport” (para 8.41). Under the present system, it followed, BOA had to lose.

Finally, my own view: I have already stated my opposition to the present ban. The one real relevation for me, on reading the judgment, was the generosity of the BOA to other UK athletes who have appealed. This does reinforce the sense I had already that Chambers was being treated differently – not because he was a drug cheat, but because he admitted that he did something wrong.

In the tabloid-generated ethical universe that is British sport, it is better to deny cheating and to give a shallow and unconvincing excuse than to face your fault directly. Chambers’ route is a different one. Personally, I would rather live in a moral universe that allowed for both fault and contrition.

What would Annie Besant say?

My boys have been playing recently with the Marvel Trading Card game (inc, TM), in which cards are won or lost by comparing their attack and defence strenths. Magneto for example is “attack 60”, “defence 60”, a weaker attack than the Hulk, but a pretty similar defence. This begs the obvious question: what attack and defence strengths would you give to an East London private housing block?

Residents of Lexington House in Bow Quarter, which was once part of the Bryant and May site where the 1888 matchgirls strike took place, woke up this morning to the news that a High Velocity Missile System is to be housed on the estate’s water tower.

This is useful, indeed necessary military technology in the event that London is bombed during the Olympic Games by military aircraft belonging to a hostile state.

But seeing as it is 65 years since London was last actually bombed; what real threat is this designed to protect us from?

Various local residents have been quoted to the effect that they feel scared by this development; I can’t help but agree with them. The idea of large quantities of military explosive being housed in the proximity of my home would distrurb me, too. In fact it’s no to feel that this is precisely the point. Neo-conservative politics seems to be premised on the insight that a public that is nervous of security concerns will tolerate a greater militarisation of their lives. Even when the only credible security concern is on your own “side”. It’s what the Italians, in a previous generation, used to call the strategy of tension.

It is another way in which the Olympics are making London a worse place.

Jeremy Hunt’s Olympics

It is a late summer evening, and the Leader settles into the back seat of the Olympic BMW which the Games Organisers have kindly provided. He or she is Kabila perhaps, or Mugabe, or Myanmar’s Thein Sein. Beside the Leader sits a senior official, whose task is to protect the Leader from any unwelcome publicity. “We will be meeting the British in half an hour”. “The Queen?”, the Leader asks with a smile. “No, the Minister in charge of the Olympics, a Mr” (the official searches through his papers, “Hunt”. “I have read about him”, the Leader responds sourly, before asking, “now … should I let myself be photographed shaking his hand?”

Most British politicians in the past decade have been willing assistants to the Murdoch empire; it takes a special character to be caught so flagrantly in the act.

2012 wasn’t supposed to be like this. For the Right Honourable Jeremy Hunt MP it was meant rather to be a glittering step on the way to high political office. At the start of March, the Telegraph was still tipping Hunt to be a future Leader of the Conservatives, and the minister would not have blushed when the paper described him as enjoying the “best job in government”.

Hunt’s main priority, in that interview, was to stake a personal claim to credit for the Olympic Games, in which his department of course has barely any role whatsoever, save for oversight and scrutiny of the London 2012 Organising Committee (LOCOG), that fantastic quango, which has been able to turn £2 billion of public money (its original budget) into £11 billion of public money (its present spend) and counting.

Hunt’s Department, far from restraining Coe, Moynihan and their chums, has done everything in its power to shield LOCOG from criticism – playing the same “old pals” game, that he was previously playing with Murdoch’s BSkyB bid.

This is how Hunt described his Department’s role in preparing the Games, “We have put a huge amount of thinking into what we call, in the organisation of the Games, ‘the last mile’. It’s basically the distance between whatever public transport you arrive on and actual entry to an Olympic event, and we want to make sure that it’s as clearly sign-posted and as pleasant an experience as possible.”

And this Hunt speaking about his own role in the Games: “I am obsessed not by what people say about me now, but what people will say about what I’ve done in office when they look in 10 years’ time. The curse of modern politics is that too few politicians get to leave a real legacy. If I could deliver a fantastic Games for the country, along with people like Seb Coe, who are doing such a fantastic job; if I could deliver super-fast broadband to most of the country by the end of this Parliament; if I’m able to help bring in a new era of local TV companies; and if we can weather the most incredible financial storm since the Second World War, then I’ll be able to look back on this period and feel incredibly proud of what I’ve done.”

Local TV companies: whatever Hunt does, this is not going to happen. (The plan will break on the centralising tendencies of the British economy, which for the past 30 years have been dragging resources and talent, repeatedly, to London).

End of recession: it will happen. All recessions in history have ended. Parts of the country (the richest 1%) have never even been in recession. If you look at the balance sheets of the FTSE 100, the companies are cash rich. The only distinctive thing about this recession is that the very rich have used it to take more money out of the majority’s pockets than any previous recession since 1914.

Faster broadband will happen (Moore’s law) whatever Hunt does or doesn’t do.

The only interest in all this guff is Hunt’s reflection on the Olympics which he modestly describes himself as leading “along with people like Seb Coe”.

I have many criticism of Coe, some of which I’ve written about previously, others of which I’ll post about over future weeks. But Coe is working on the Olympics full-time, which is likely to mean 60-70 hours a week. As for Hunt … I’ll be surprised if the Olympics have taken up as much as an eighth of his workload. He is not the Games’ organiser nor their planner. He is supposed to be the gatekeeper, a role he has singularly failed to play. He is not the organ-grinder, he is barely even the monkey.

Meanwhile, David Cameron (whose constitutional role includes upholding the Ministerial code, and ordering investigations when it is breached) has proposed that a decision as to whether or not to investigate Jeremy Hunt should be taken only after he has been before Leveson at the end of May. But Leveson is making an inquiry into the future of the media, and has no role at all to consider breaches of the ministerial code. Hunt is a barely a sideshow to the inquiry (this is one reason why Murdoch was asked so little about him).

So Cameron’s initial decision is that Hunt – arguably one of the worst of all the wretched ministers this country has suffered in the last thirty years – may be investigated, but not before the summer at the earliest, by when (Cameron no doubt hopes) press coverage will have turned elsewhere.

Assuming Hunt survives, we will return to the spectacle of the Olympics: the Murderers meeting Rupert’s Apprentice. If I was Kabila or Mugabe I would shake Hunt’s hand and smile in admiration.

The Security Games; Brent’s problem with leafleters

Campaigners in Brent are incensed by news that the local authority is planning to introduce a bye-law which would penalise those handing out free leaflets in the Borough. The report to the council which justified the measure stated that it was “being sought now to assist with the effective control of literature distributors anticipated during the Olympic period.”

Under the proposals, an organisation who wanted to hand out free literature would have to apply for a licence costing £175. There would be a minimum notice requirement of two weeks. A re-submission fee would cost a further £75. Each individual person who handed out leaflets would also have to pay a fee depending on how which days of the week they proposed to do this: £75 per person if during office hours on weekdays, rising to £165 per person on Sundays or Bank Holidays. The new restrictions would not materials promoting charities, religious organisations or “for political purposes”.

At a meeting of the Brent Trades Council on Wednesday, which voted to oppose the proposals, delegates gave examples of the sorts of activities which would be subject to this charge. BNP canvassers would not be punished by the rules; anti-fascist protesters would have to show that their purposes were “political”, otherwise they might be required to pay the fee.

Campaigners against library closures (a key group in Brent in the last year) would probably have to pay the charge, as presumably would trade unionists, and as (certainly) would trade unionists trying to leaflet quickly (i.e. without waiting for 2 weeks’ notice) in support of a dispute that arose suddenly.

Typical of the present period is Brent’s insistence that the new scheme, which will last indefinitely, has to be rushed through in order to be in place by the Olympics. Brent is an Olympic borough. It renegotiated its street cleaning contract last year, reducing the frequency of collections, and no doubt the council is wary of critics dubbing Brent the dirtiest Olympic borough.

But all over London there are other petty, authoritarian measures of this sort which are being introduced simply because they are convenient for various local authorities (councillors, the police, businesses etc). The Olympics is being used as an excuse to generalise the worst of London.

Simon Moore: notes towards a defence

On 3 May, Simon Moore will face a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court to determine whether (according to the Inside Left blog, which has published a statement from him) he should be pre-emptively banned from

1. Entering or remaining within 100 yards of any existing or proposed Olympic competition or practice venue or route or participant’s residence withinEnglandandWales.
2. Entering or remaining within 100 yards of any road being used on that day for the passage of the Olympic torch, or on which any Olympic competition or practice venue is taking place – e.g. the marathon – within England and Wales;
3. Not to trespass on, or without the permission of the owner to interfere with, any building or land;
4. Taking part in any activity that disrupts the intended or anticipated official activities of the Olympic games or Diamond Jubilee celebrations;
5.  Obstructing the movement or passage of any Olympic participant between their residence, practice venue or place of work and venues being used for Olympic competition or cultural purposes and vice versa

The ostensible justification for these measures is that Moore has been successfully prosecuted for obstructing police officers at the Occupy Leyton Marsh site, and received a custodial term of 4 days. Having been prosecutes once, he is now being portrayed as a serial protester who must be prohibited from taking part in any further actions.

ASBOs have long been criticised because they give a barely fettered power to individual police officers (and because they are heard in the Magistrates Courts, the police do almost always get the orders the seek) to creatively invent new criminal offences, meaning that people are then prosecuted for “offences” which Parliament never designated criminal. 

Breaches of ASBOs are prosecuted and result in jail terms. The ordinary practice of the Magistrates Court, when faced with the breach of an ASBO is to order a custodial sentence, which in Moore’s case (because it would be a repeat conviction) would be likely to be lengthy.

In this way, by doing mundane acts, which on no rational basis could actually be characterised as anti-social behaviour (eg standing 98 yards away from a road that in two months time will be part of the marathon route) Moore potentially faces severe penalties.

Even the Coalition government accepts that ASBOs are an unhealthy development of our law and should be removed. (Although the government has taken no practical steps though to act on this promise).

My own approach would be as follows:

Agree nothing in advance and if need be appeal. If you can get the case away from the Magistrates Courts and into the High Court you will find that the atmosphere changes, there is a different approach altogether.

The courts have repeatedly said that an order can only be justified if it is completely comprehensible and no person could unwittingly breach it.

But consider the terms

1. Entering or remaining within 100 yards of any existing or proposed Olympic competition or practice venue or route or participant’s residence withinEnglandandWales.

Has Moore been given maps showing where every “existing or proposed” competition, venue, route and residence is situated? If not, how is he expected to know whether he is unwittingly breaching that order or not?

Clauses 2 and 5 duplicates the “route” provision in clause 1 and are unnecessary.

Clause 3 bears no rational relationship to what he is accused of doing. Moore is not a serial occupier, he does trespass on flats or houses. He has protested once at an Olympic site. Clause 3, as currently drafted, would potentially make it a criminal offence for him to enter a shop without the owners’ permission.

You just have to fight every dot and comma of the proposed order.

The branded Games

Three campaigns, the London Mining Network, Bhopal Medical Appeal and UK Tar Sands Network have been working together to produce a website Greenwash Gold exposing some of the worst Olympic sponsors: BP (responsible, via the mining of the Canadian tar sands, for aboutas many carbon emissions as any other company in the world), Rio Tinto and Dow. It’s a nice site, with some good short films (including the above).

But what strikes me about the full list of Olympic sponsors (set out at page 107 of this), is that they are not only polluters.

There are also producers of junkfood (Cadbury’s, Trebor, Holiday Inn), union busters (BA, UPS, Coca-Cola), faddists for nuclear power (EDF), vivisectors (GlaxoSmithKline), a sweatshop manufacturer (Adidas), as well as companies that have no economic function other than to cannibalise the welfare state (Atos, G4S). What a diverse list of rogues they are.

(Inside Left skewers them all brilliantly).

That Olympic legacy: class and ethnic cleansing

Housing minister Grant Shapps has been seeking to defend his government, and the Coalition, from responsibility for Newham Council’s attempts to rehouse residents, no longer eligible for housing benefit, over 100 miles oustide the borough, in Stoke.

To most people this looks like blatant social engineering. Poor people are having to leave the areas in which they live, because the price of private-sector rents has gone up so sharply that the council can no longer afford to house them. Not so, says Shapps, who blames Newham. According to the BBC, “Grant Shapps said there were nearly 1,000 rental homes in Newham which fell within the cap and suggested Newham council were “playing politics” ahead of the elections.”

While the primary definition of the people who are being moved is that they are poor, it doesn’t take too much genius to grasp that the demographics of those being moved will be in many ways different from those who stay behind. In London, the working poor are predominantly white. That no longer remains true as you look lower down the ladder: the poorer Londoners get, the more likely they are to be black, Muslim, etc.

A bit of context is needed: until the 1980s, housing benefit was a relatively modest part of the total welfare bill. The cost of housing benefit, to local authorities, and to the state generally, has since risen enormously, essentially because in the mid-1980s, the previous Conservative government brought an end to 60 years of legislation limiting private sector recents.

 The “cap” referred to by Shapps is the government’s attempt to limit housing benefit by saying that no family may receive housing benefit in excess of certain limits (including an overall limit of £500 per week per family, for all benefits). Now, when these caps were introduced, they were applauded by the tabloids, because it just does seem obscene that anyone should be able to receive more in benefits than the average wage. The problem is London rents, which for a 2-bedroom house very often are in excess of £1500 per month.

I have described the process elsewhere:

“The Tory-Lib Dem coalition is cutting housing benefit, for example by placing (from April 2011 for new tenants, and for existing tenants from January 2012) an absolute cap on the amount of housing benefit that can be paid depending on the size of the property: £250 per week for a one-bedroom property, £290 per week for a two-bedroom property and so on. This is intended to be accompanied by a new measure that no family may receive a total of more than £500 per week in welfare benefits. The measures are supposed to reduce the growing housing benefit budget, but the costs of housing benefit have risen in circumstances where landlords are able to charge what they like. They will do nothing to reduce landlords’ power to charge ludicrously inflated rents to the state, but will leave many thousands of tenants with a shortfall. In due course, they will be in arrears with their rent. Inevitably, a large number will be evicted. Civil servants have estimated that the £500 cap alone will result in 20,000 families being made homeless.”

ie Government policy, faced with a spike in private-sector rents, is not to reduce rents, but to compel people to leave their properties and (inevitably) to move to cheaper (i.e. poorer) areas.

Shapps is lying, in short, when he disclaims responsibility for Newham: they are doing exactly what government policy asks of them.

Now, probing a little deeper, what really interests me is the part played in all this by the Olympics. One Newham resident interviewed on Radio 5 explained the matter as follows: many private-sector landlords have been pushing up their rents in 2012 in particular. Their motives are that they see the Olympics as a potential windfall. There will be many people moving to be near the Olympics for just a few weeks, and ladlords hope to rent out their flats at hotel-type prices – i.e. not £40 per night, but £100 or £200 per night. Clearly, no housing benefit system could “compete” with rents of this level.

At one point, the Olympic organisers were promising the residents of Newham, Stratford, etc better jobs and housing. By spring 2012, their primary promise is that at least the area will be left a giant shopping mall, the Westfield. But once you look at the units, presently in that shopping centre, you see a very similar problem. A significant proportion are going to companies like Jimmy Choo, Gucci, Tiffany, etc. As a boutique, you really don’t have to sell too many pairs of shoes at £10,000 each  before you’ve paid off a year’s rent.

The flats in which the friends of LOCOG will be staying are homes being taken out of the reach of working people. What the story shows, most clearly, is that you can’t create a playground for the rich in a bubble of its own.

The physiology of middle- and long-distance runnning

The press coverage of the London Marathon focuses on two familiar stories: one is the triumph of Kenyan athletes, not just Wilson Kipsang in the men’s marathon, but Mary Keitany in the woman’s event. Behind their victory is a familiar story of Kenyan success: conventionally explained in terms of the pervasiveness of role models and of non-competitive running, and of the knowledge of running as a route out of poverty. The contrast is with Britain, where the avarage age of marathon runners is increasing, and the times of elite marathon runners are worsening and not improving.

The second story is the partial success of the Brits: including top-finishing British woman Claire Hallissey, who took 2 minutes off her personal best in running an Olympic qualifying time of 2 hrs 27 (9 minutes behind Keitany), and will almost certainly be picked as the third choice for the Olympic marathon squad. Compare Lee Merrien, who ran 2:13 in the men’s race (again, 9 minutes behind Kipsang), outside the 2:12 required to join Scott Overall in the men’s London 2012 team. It seems almost inevitable therefore that Team GP will have just 1 runner in the Olympic men’s marathon.

A number of friends have criticised a piece I posted here a month ago, arguing that middle- and long-distance runners have different builds and a different psychology.

With that in mind, it’s interesting to look at the records of Hallissey and Merrien.

I haven’t been able to find a record of Hallissey’s weight or height, but looking at a database of Hallissey’s top times, I see that she runs shorter distances often (she had her annual bests recorded for 800 metres over 5 of the last 9 years), but also relatively poorly. Her all-time best over 800 metres is 2 minutes 18 seconds. (This was the 307th best time run by a British woman that year, in other years Hallissey’s times would put her around 600-700th in the UK rankings).

In other words, she is a light runner with a very high proportion of slow-stretch muscle, and a relatively low-proportion of fast-stretch muscle. This shouldn’t be surprising, it explains why she is good at the marathon. (Presumably, she would be even better still at ultra-marathons). But it’s a very different physiology from a middle-distance runner, who needs a much more explosive finish, and who necessarily has a much higher proportion of fast-stretch muscle.

Lee Merrien is a more complex runner. Aged 32 (33 in a matter of days), for a long time he was ranked only as a middle-distance runner. Indeed his early times over 800 metres were dramatically faster than Hallissey’s: including a 1 minute 49 in the 800 metres. (There’s a 10% gap between their best times over the marathon but a 25% gap between their best times over 800 metres). But he’s been gradually shifting to longer distances: his best times over 800m and 1500m were reached when he was 27, he got his 10k pb at 29, and he’s just had his best time for a marathon.

Merrien’s height is recorded as 181 cm / 5’11”  and weight: 65 kg / 143 lbs.

While this isn’t as spindly as Kipsang, this is definitely a much lighter physique than say Steve Ovett (2 cm taller and 5 kg heavier at his peak).

Merrien is alos relatively lighter than Alberto Junatorena, Ovett’s nemesis at the 1976 Olympics, who was 9 cm taller and a full 25 kg heavier than him.

Natural middle-distance runners do just have a heavier build even than a reconditioned runner like Merrien who started off in the middle-distances before joining the marathon club relatively late in life.

The year I ran the London marathon

A few years ago, I ran the London marathon, for the first and only time. I am, as I’ve explained elsewhere on this blog, a natural middle-distance runner. My tread is heavy and I pronate; I am not suited to longer distances. I went into the race having run two half-marathons, the second in just over 100 minutes. After the half marathon, my knee was too sore for me to run. There were just six weeks to the marathon, and I doubted I would recover in time. I found a physiotherapist, who set to work on my knee, using the same ultrasound devices with which I was familiar from my achilles injuries years before.

To keep my heart and lungs fit while the treatment took effect, the physio suggested that I practise on one of his exercise bikes. This I did, in one hour slots, with the bike at maximum resistance. The look the physio gave me suggested that he found my injury hard to credit, if I could keep myself going at that rate, what really was wrong? After three or four lots of ultrasound, the injury was cured. Yet my knee and my legs remained weak, and I was nervous of trying to get back into running too fast. Even simple training before the marathon, I thought, would end in further injury.

As the race neared, I practised stretches, experimenting even for a time with yoga. I swam daily. For the last six weeks before the race I did not run once.

My partner and a good friend Leo took me to the start. I had my running things, a spare woollen sweater and my mobile phone which I later found ruined in an inch of water which had drained into my bag from an unsealed bottle.

Greenwich Park was full of people warming up by running in every direction of the compass, save the route you might have expected us all to follow, East from the park and out. I found my allocated starting point. All our possessions were loaded onto a lorry to be delivered to the race’s end. Having bagged up my clothes, I collected a device to record the moment at which I actually crossed the starting line. There were many runners in all sorts of fancy-dress costumes. To get from the assembly point to the start took a further ten-minute run.

My strategy was forced on me by the time I had spent injured. I intended to run the first six miles so slowly that I ought not fall apart later. This was easier than I had anticipated. Caught in the middle of a large crowd, my first two miles passed in a wonderfully slow 25 minutes.

The third mile passed in ten minutes. In Woolwich, I found a house where students had erected a barbecue in their front garden, the rich smell of cooking food floating in front of the crowd. I ran away from the distraction, completing the fourth miles in eight minutes, probably my fastest mile of the whole race.

I passed three Elvises, two red houses for Shelter. Other red houses sped past me. For most of the race I attempted to keep my pace steady at around 10 minutes per mile. To stop my body hurting, I drank water at every stop. Kindly spectators handed out fresh oranges, a short burst of energy, which faded quickly. Processed sugar proved to be the most efficient anaesthetic. I was grateful to the young boy handing out boiled mints. They endured, melting slowly on my tongue.

I had been placed in a group of fellow marathon rookies. Until about the 20-mile point, I seemed to be overtaking the runners immediately in front of me. This did not mean I was fast, the crowds were too thick to push through, and whenever I pushed on I just found myself stuck behind a further slow group ahead.

From four miles in, I passed runners even worse prepared than me. Some were stopping and starting, pushing themselves forwards in 100 metre bursts. I overtook others who had given up altogether on running, and just walked on grimly.

I enjoyed the pavements, which were full of well-meaning onlookers, adults, children of all ages. I despised the roads, they were my enemy. I remember a stretch of cobble-stones, on which my feet could not even land flat. My feet turned to blisters, my knees ached with pain. I loathed Steve Ovett, I swore down vengeance on Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams. I cursed Phidippides. For much of the race I was wondering how practical it would be to just stop, and exit the race with dignity. I looked hopefully on portable toilets, pubs, but none offered an anonymous exit.

I finished the race in the slow time of 4 hours, 24 minutes. Three months before I had been hoping to run the distance around an hour faster. My brain was always harking back to the runner I had been but was no more. It remains the only marathon I have run, I have never since wanted to run a second.

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.