Willis could take gold - Coe

BY TONY SMITH

Last updated 05:00 02/04/2009

Relevant offers

Two-time Olympic Games middle distance champion Lord Sebastian Coe believes Nick Willis can continue a "very fine" New Zealand tradition by winning gold at the London Olympics.

Coe in Queenstown yesterday to brief the Oceania National Olympic Committees general assembly on the London 2012 Games preparations said he had watched "with great pleasure" Willis take the 1500m bronze medal at Beijing last year.

"It's great that he's been competitive amongst the strength of Africa. But he follows in a very fine tradition," Coe said, referring to his "great friend" John Walker and fellow 1970s Kiwi track stars Rod Dixon and Dick Quax.

Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) followed Walker, the 1976 Montreal 1500m champion, to the top of the dais at Moscow in 1980 and again at Los Angeles in 1984. The African continent has dominated since, winning five of the last six 1500m titles.

Asked if Willis could win gold in London, Coe said there was "absolutely no reason" why not. "If you believe it, then it's possible. Nobody else can set your dreams, they're yours. And if he believes he can do that, then he can."

Coe told the Oceania delegates yesterday that he could not come back to New Zealand without recalling the race which changed the face of middle-distance running the 1974 Commonwealth Games 1500m duel between Walker and Tanzania's Filbert Bayi.

Until 1974, 1500m races were run to a "three and three-quarter lap" formula whereby someone made a break in the third lap "if they were brave".

The Walker-Bayi clash was the first where two men "went out from gun to tape". Bayi set a sizzling pace, Coe said, but Walker followed and "both broke the world record".

A young Coe was sitting in an English living room, at some ungodly hour of the morning, watching the race telecast "in complete silence".

"At the end of the race my coached turned to me and said, `you do realise that middle distance running, particularly the 1500m, will never be the same again'."

Coe said he could not visit New Zealand without paying tribute to Walker, who "took me under his wing during the early, formative stages of my international athletics career", or to the great Australasian middle distance coaches, Australian Percy Cerutty and New Zealanders Arthur Lydiard and Arch Jelley.

Later Coe, said he roomed with Walker, Dixon and Quax in his first season on the international circuit.

Ad Feedback

"It was an interesting experience," he chuckled. "But you certainly understood how good you needed to be to maintain the performances that they were performing."

Coe recalled sharing a room with the Kiwi trio on the eve of his first 800m world record at Oslo in 1979. He said Walker was "absolutely delighted" about the young Englishman's record-breaking 1min 42.33 feat, but was "less happy when I came back a week and a half later to run the world mile record, which of course was his".

Coe set a new mark of 3min 48.95sec.

But the English peer said there was no question that Walker the first man to run 100 sub-four minute miles was one of the middle-distance world's all-time greats who would have won the 1976 gold medal regardless of the African bloc boycott of the Montreal Games in protest at the All Blacks rugby tour of South Africa.

Only "an elephant gun" would have stopped Walker in the form he was in, said Coe, who also noted that the first sub-4min miler, Sir Roger Bannister, had told him recently that more people had climbed Mount Everest than had run a mile in under four minutes.

The 52-year-old Coe, a former English Conservative government MP who now has a life peerage, said there were some "analogies" between his LOCOG role and his life as a runner, despite the "slightly different pace and symmetry".

Athletes and organisers both worked in "four year cycles" and came out of one Games looking ahead to the next.

The Olympic Games, he said, was "deep in my DNA". "Sport is my life."

- © Fairfax NZ News