Once more around the track with Seb

 
books FILE - This is a Friday, Aug. 1, 1980 file photo of Britain's Sebastian Coe, center, as hecrosses the finish line to win the Summer Olympic men's 1,500-meter race at Moscow's Lenin Stadium Friday, Aug. 1, 1980. No one is more closely associated with the London 2012 Games than Coe, the former two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 1,500 meters. He led the city's winning bid for the Olympics and has spent seven years chairing the local organizing committee for the biggest peacetime project in British history.
AP
Dan Jones15 November 2012

Running My Life
by Seb Coe
(Hodder, £20)

Sebastian Coe may be the closest thing modern Britain has to the classical statesman: an Olympic hero, a sharp-elbowed politician, a wealthy businessman and — as ringmaster to the London 2012 Olympics — a disinterested public servant.

Although he professes no interest in political leadership, the 56-year-old Coe is a member of what we might call the Branson-Sugar League: the roll-call of men whom most ordinary punters would identify as a good candidate for Mayor of London.

Nothing in his new autobiography is likely to alter any of that, as all it tells us is pretty much what we already knew: Coe is an exceptionally driven man of the best kind of conservative instinct, with an analytical mind and a strong heart. He is a virtuoso performer but not a maverick. The sort of man you want in charge.

Coe was moulded by his father, Peter, an industrial manager who ran his son’s athletic career like a well-drilled peanut factory. By adopting training techniques from the communist bloc during the Seventies, Team Coe reinvented middle-distance running. Their glory years began in 1979 when Seb broke three world records in 41 days, at 800m, 1500m and the mile, and they were crowned in 1984 when he won his second Olympic gold medal at 1500m, in Los Angeles.

Along the way there were rivalries with Steve Ovett and, later, Steve Cram, as well as spats with most of athletics’ governing bodies and the press. All of these helped thicken Coe’s already thick skin, developed during his upbringing in Sheffield, which in turn aided his subsequent careers as politician, businessman and Gamesmaster.

Coe has approached everything he has done with the mentality of a miler. His book is called Running My Life, but since the race is his founding metaphor, a more accurate title would have been Running: My Life. (When I interviewed him three years ago he agreed to this point: “The race is the end product,” he said. “Everything else is what you do to get there — the bite-sized chunks, the manageable training, the hourly focus, the big picture.”)

Some uncharitable writers have called Coe boring, and it is true that his book is tantalisingly light in what might have been the juiciest places. Of his personal rivalry with Ovett there is little. Of his marital history (in 2002 Coe was divorced from first wife Nicky following a long affair) there is virtually nothing.

So a few punches are pulled. Likewise, readers of previous Coe works will recognise plenty of what is written here. Many of the greatest hits from Coe’s pre-2012 life story were bundled up in his 2009 book, The Winning Mind, a short business text that fused memoir with management consultancy.

Nevertheless, athletics fans will enjoy the first half of this, and London 2012 junkies will be satisfied by the second half. The only thing that really grates is Coe’s tendency to sporting platitudes and managementese. “The tectonic plates of our sport were shifting and, in large part, the genie was already out of the bottle,” he writes, at one point.

But this is nitpickery. Coe may not be a modern Caesar but he presents himself well enough as a sort of Cincinnatus — a man called to his duty, if not from his plough then certainly from his running club. He says he has not the faintest interest in becoming London Mayor, but I doubt that will stop the clamour for his candidacy next time around.

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