Few men did more to change international and British athletics from an amateur sport, at least at the highest level, to a professional, full-time business than Andy Norman.

A former Metropolitan Police sergeant, he ended his often controversial years in the chief Olympic sport, working as advertising commissioner with the International Athletics Federation.

In a speech at the International Athletics Congress in 1984, Norman called for the setting-up of trust funds for athletes. It carefully avoided going the whole way to direct payment to competitors as that would have been anathema to the countries of the communist bloc which were completely state-aided and amateur only by label.

By the next summer the old flag of amateurism was in tatters, when the payment figures for a women’s 3,000 metres race at Crystal Palace were revealed. The selling point for ITV was a return race between Britain’s South African-born Zola Budd and the American Mary Decker-Slaney, who had been involved in the collision in the Los Angeles Olympic final.

Controversial race agent Norman dies at 64

The promoter who oversaw British athletics’ golden era before his controversial exile has died suddenly

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John Bromley, of ITV, approached Norman to film the race and received a predictable reply: “You want it? You pay for it.”

Budd, whose presence in a British team vest was always a hotly debated issue, received £90,000 even though she was to finish fourth at Crystal Palace; the winner, Decker-Slaney, got £60,000, both cheques eventually going into the women’s trust funds.

Born in 1943, Andrew John Norman had come to London in 1962 from Suffolk to work for the Metropolitan Police, where he was to serve until 1984. He ran for the Met too, as a reasonable quarter and half-miler. Soon he became manager of the Metropolitan Police athletics team and then started to organise successful open meetings for the Southern Counties AAA at Crystal Palace.

It was a major step-up when, in 1974, Norman directed the International Athletes Club meeting at the Palace. Norman’s success as a promoter owed much to his hard-working, no-nonsense attitude, and these qualities helped him when he became coaching secretary of the Southern Counties. Soon, the no-nonsense Sergeant Norman, renowned for his discipline, though nicknamed The Fat Man behind his back, was siging up such internationals as Steve Ovett, Colin Jackson, Steve Backley and Jonathan Edwards, athletes who found that in Norman they had an agent who could work wonders for them across the world.

Nevertheless, Norman could be impatient and sometimes dictatorial with athletes who had the temerity to argue about their races and their fees. Even Linford Christie, not a man to bend easily, recalled an occasion from 1984: “Andy phoned to say he’d given my lane away that day. ‘Don’t bother to turn up,’ he added.”

Norman was involved in a number of publicly aired controversies connected with athletics. In 1987 in The Times, the hammer-thrower Martin Girvan was quoted as saying that Norman had helped him to avoid a compulsory drugs test by arranging for a urine sample from someone else to be left in a spare cubicle. Other athletes made similar allegations, but Norman always stoutly denied them and nothing was ever proved. A subsequent inquiry was inconclusive, but eventually the Sports Council took over drugs testing from British athletics.

Eventually, in 1994, Norman was dismissed from his position as promotions officer to the British Athletics Federation after a coroner said that untrue allegations made against the athletics writer Cliff Temple were a contributing factor to the journalist’s suicide.

He was principal director for the European Athletics Championships in Budapest in 1998, and is credited with being the prime mover in their success. In 2000 he became a competition development consultant to the IAAF. Norman died shortly after flying to Britain from the World Athletics final at Stuttgart.

Norman married in 1997, as his second wife, the British javelin thrower Fatima Whitbread. They had one son.

Andy Norman, sports marketing consultant, was born on was born on September 21, 1943. He died on September 24, 2007, aged 64