If you didn’t live through it, you couldn’t know how their rivalry gripped those who did. Seb Coe and Steve Ovett. Twenty million British viewers watched the 800m final at the 1980 Moscow Olympics and there may not have been a neutral among them. This was more important than Conservative or Labour; more divisive than United or Liverpool. It was said that you could tell a man’s character by his preference in the Coe or Ovett debate.

Their first great rendezvous was in that 800m final. Coe was the world record-holder and the favourite - the 800m was his race. He didn’t sleep well the night before. Because that was a first, it unnerved him. The next morning he felt strangely out of synch and dropped a jug of milk in the athletes’ cafeteria.

Peter Coe, father and coach, picked up that something was amiss but thought he might make things worse by making an issue of it. He would later regret not saying the things that on any other day he would have said three times over.

The finalists were told to report to a warm-up room 45 minutes before their race. Seven of them took their places in a stuffy, dungeon-like room in the bowels of the Olympic Stadium. All except Ovett. He refused to go when asked and only made a move when the ultimate ultimatum was issued (“You will be disqualified if you don’t go now”) so he breezed in 10 minutes after the others. Inside the room, he sensed the nervousness, especially in Coe, and in a moment that was so natural as to be Ovettesque, he shook the hand of each rival. He walked to each in turn, stretching out his hand, almost as if he was thanking them for the race before the race. For Coe, the message was personal. “Look, no matter what happens out there, the sun’s gonna rise tomorrow.” For one of them it would. Although it remains one of the most recalled races in Olympic history, that 800m final was anticlimactic. Ovett won easily. Coe ran like a frightened deer, not sure where and when to go and only making a decision when it was too late. The silver medal hung around his neck like a noose. “If you want to show a young athlete how not to run a race, show him the video of my performance in that 800m final,” he has said many times since.

In winning that race, Ovett was supreme. “Ovett, those blue eyes, like chips of ice,” the BBC’s David Coleman said at a critical point in the race. On the rostrum, they shook hands. “As if he’d just been handed a turd” was how Clive James described Coe’s acceptance of his rival’s hand. His temporary sullenness had nothing to do with Ovett but was born of self-loathing.

When he walked off the track, Peter told him: “You ran like an idiot.” Half an hour later, he turned up at the press conference, where Peter was already seated. By then, the elder Coe had had more time to think about it. “You ran like a c***,” he mouthed to his son.

An extraordinary day that was, July 26, 1980. We meet, almost 28 years to the day, on the 23rd floor of the Barclays building in Canary Wharf, which is headquarters to the organising committee of the London Olympics. From the reception area, with its huge glass panels, you can look out over east London. In the distance, behind two blocks of dark red-brick flats, lie 500 acres of waste-land. From there the earth will be taken, cleaned and returned, and upon it will be built the Olympic Park that will be the sporting hub of the London Olympics. And it is here, in this Canary Wharf building, that the 2012 organising team prepares for the greatest sporting occasion London will ever know. On today’s date, July 27, four years from now, the London Games will open.

Lord Coe is chairman of the organising committee and the man who persuaded the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that London was right for 2012. That was in Singapore in the summer of 2005. Six years on, the work is being done. In the evening Coe will address the 100 or so members of his team who will depart the next day for Beijing, some on secondment to the 2008 Beijing organising committee, others there to observe on London’s behalf.

“I don’t have anything prepared,” he says to one of his assistants.

“Well, you’ve got half an hour and then you’re on.”

He doesn’t need to write anything down: this is a subject he knows, and with only four years left, the scripts begin to write themselves.

He walks past the rows of desks, stopping to glance through newspapers laid out on a big table, most open on sports pages with Olympic-related stories. He is arrested by a story in the London Evening Standard about the closure of the running track at Enfield where he and his Haringey clubmates once trained. Is closing athletics tracks the way to increase participation levels in sport in the run-up to 2012, the story asks.

Coe shrugs, not sure if there is an answer, but again feeling as if he is responsible for everything bad that happens in British sport - or in his words, “to have to apologise for mankind”. Inside his office he leans back and we talk about the Olympics. Each question elicits not an answer but a short speech, engaging rather than didactic, but expressing the certainty that came in the genes. I have a sense of listening to Peter Coe explaining his point of view.

Their relationship was extraordinary: father and son, coach and athlete, two strands of the same interwoven rope. When speaking as coach, Peter would refer to his son only as “my athlete”.

“My father had an extraordinary influence on my life, he still does,” Coe says. “He is now 90, he is very frail, but mentally, he’s absolutely there. Sunday afternoons, I go round and read the political columns in the papers to him. He likes to know what the leader in The Spectator is saying as well. He is very engaged and is one of the cleverest people I know.

“There’s rarely a day we don’t speak on the phone. When I was an athlete, there was nobody better to have in your corner. This is a guy who at 19 was torpedoed in the Atlantic, was one of five survivors from a crew of two-hundred-and-some-thing on that merchant navy boat. He was picked up by a German battle-ship, which was the best bit of his war because as a German-speaker he was put to work in the kitchen.

“He was sent to a camp in La Rochelle, then under German control. When he realised he was being sent to a prisoner of war camp, he jumped off a train with a Canadian, walked through the night, slept through the day and eventually got to Spain, where he was put in jail for six months because he didn’t have the right papers. Believed to have been lost at sea, he got back to England in his early 20s, in not very good shape, and began to rebuild his life. He had been born in a couple of rooms on Cambridge Heath Road at Stepney-in-Bow in east London and even though the second half of his life has been comfortably middle-class, he will go to his grave as a working-class man with working-class instincts.”

Without any background in coaching, Peter helped his son to become one of athletics’ great middle-distance runners. “He read voraciously,” says Coe. “East German texts were okay, he could translate them himself. But he went to the Language School at Sheffield University and, out of his own pocket, paid to get Russian texts translated. There was nothing about the science of endurance training that he didn’t understand.

“There was not much that fazed him. He was once having a full-blown argument with a guy in the [British] federation. Even I was blanching at this and had to walk away. Afterwards I said to him, ‘You don’t scare easily’. ‘I don’t scare at all. The past 45 years have been a f****** bonus’, he said in relation to what he had survived in the war. That fearlessness made him a great man to have in your corner.”

With Ovett in the opposite corner, Coe needed what help he could get. He tells the story of his Christmas Day in 1979. It had been a cold winter, lots of icy mornings in Sheffield, but he was feeling good about life because that year he had set world records at 800m, 1500m and the mile. On Christmas morning he went for a 12-mile run; he felt strong, and as well as satisfying his need to train, it gave him an appetite for Christmas lunch.

Then, in the afternoon, his mood changed. Something bothered him. “It was like a niggle. ‘Why am I like this?’ I don’t know, but I suddenly knew what it was. The thought was inside my head, ‘I bet he’s out doing a second session’. I put my kit on, went out and ran for another five miles. Mentally, you just couldn’t get away fromhim, he was so bloody talented. And in the back of my mind, I thought, ‘If you could take away all the rivalry and the competitive stuff, we would actually like each other’.”

WE TALK about 2012. I mention my Olympic-scepticism and offer the view that £9.3 billion on 2½ weeks of elite sport may not be the most effective way of using limited resources, especially in an arena where many of the so-called champions cheat. Ben Johnson, Michelle Smith, Justin Gatlin - the list of gold medallists who have later served doping bans is as long as an Olympic finishing straight.

“Eighty-eight,” he says, referring to the year of Johnson’s positive test for the anabolic steroid stanozolol, “was a big moment for a lot of people. It was the year that Ian Wooldridge’s [the former sports columnist] love for the Olympics died. Ian almost found it impossible to write about the Olympics after that. But forget the Olympics for a minute. The drug problem is our war. We lose this, and we lose our birthright, it’s as simple as that. We have had to confront the uncomfortable reality that a series of negative tests can actually be subterfuge. If I put my IAAF [International Association of Athletics Federations] hat on, we’ve got to get down in the sewers and we’ve got to take the gloves off. Ten years ago we would have said, ‘Ah, another negative test, that’s fine’, but we can’t assume that any more . And that’s not a great place to be.”

The athletes of the former East Germany systematically cheated in his time, and blood doping was practised by athletes in Finland and Italy, but there was never any evidence against Coe’s generation of British middle-distance runners. He has always been forthright in his condemnation of those who cheat and an advocate of more severe penalties for those who get caught.

In 1978 he and Ovett were upstaged in the final of the 800m at the European championships in Prague by the East German Olaf Beyer, whose name would later crop up in the Stasi files of athletes alleged to have doped. Did he not get angry about that? “I get angrier about situations that haven’t related to me. I’m not somebody who is sitting here, surveying my career, knowing that at the biggest moments I was deprived of an Olympic title by someone who doped.

“Sharron Davies, the swimmer, is a good example of those athletes who went through their careers abiding by the rules, with buckets of natural talent, a propensity for hard work, great coaching and an ethical framework, who know the reason they didn’t reach the highest level of achievement was because they were deprived by someone who cheated. Would I be as calm if that was me? No, I wouldn’t.”

Yet he still retains enthusiasm for this imperfect world? Why not accept the limitations and allow some other country to bear the cost of hosting the Games?

“I wouldn’t do that because I believe the Olympics bring people together in a way no other event can. You and I could sit here and discuss how international competition has had a corrosive effect [on sport’s values] but I would still make a strong case for the Olympic movement.

“What could have been a more potent counter to the risible Aryan supremacist views of Adolf Hitler than Jesse Owens running away from the rest of the field in the 1936 Berlin Olympics? What in 1988 brought about a complete change in attitude towards disability in South Korea? It wasn’t politics, it wasn’t social legislation; it was the Paralympic Games held in that country. It wasn’t politics that brought North and South Korea into the same stadium, but the 2000 Games in Sydney. That’s the power of the Olympic movement.”

I mention a football team that I’ve coached, 16 and 17-year-olds who have played 24 games in each of the past two seasons in their Cambridgeshire league. Not once has a boy, either from my team or the opposition, taken a postgame shower. Let us be polite and say the standard of the facilities does not encourage the taking of showers. This, in a country that spends billions on a handful of elite sports-people.

“I would love that situation not to be the case,” Coe responds, “but I also believe that in the past 15 years there has been a transformation in British sport and I have seen a sustained improvement in any number of ways. But I am not going to say we have got facilities out there that are uniform.”

Far from it. School grounds have been sold, many swimming pools have closed, even a track used by Coe is no more. And yet there is £9.3 billion for the Olympics? “This is not a £9.3 billion sporting project. Seventy-five pence in every pound that will be spent is going into the regeneration of London. I don’t need 9,000 new homes, nor rivers widened by eight metres and ecologically managed land, I don’t need all that to stage the Olympic Games, but I happen to think it is the right way to do it and I’m proud that sport has kicked this off.

“I can understand why, on the surface, this is a project that has been portrayed as a £10 billion project, but the Games are not costing that. The organisation in whose offices you are sitting, we get up every morning and wonder how we are going to continue the process of raising the £2 billion to stage the Games. The first third of that comes from the IOC, the second third from our sponsors and the rest will come from selling 9.5m tickets – 7.5m to 8m tickets for the Olympics, 1.5m for the Paralympics.”

We talk about participation levels in sport and the belief among parents in Britain that their children do not get enough physical exercise. Schools, especially state schools, don’t do enough, and sports clubs are not as relevant as they once were. “These are valid points,” he says. It is also an uncomfortable truth that hosting the Olympic Games has traditionally not led to increased numbers playing sport in the host countries. “I don’t have a big argument with that,” he says. “I was in Australia earlier this year and the Melbourne Age was running big campaigns about childhood obesity and lack of sporting participation. This is just eight years after Sydney. If we don’t get the structures in place now to increase participation levels, it isn’t going to happen. This is why we have set up our Nations and Regions organisation to drive the process of participation in sport. If the work is not done now, it won’t happen. If we get to 2012 and say, ‘Okay, let’s start worrying about participation levels’, it is too late.”

Although he tries to conceal it, there is a touch of resentment at what he sees as an attempt to make a connection between underfunding of grassroots sport and staggering amounts of money being spent on the Olympic Games. “We’re coming from a long way back and I feel the globe wobbling slightly. I’m being given lectures about participation programmes and elite level funding. I’m thinking, ‘Great, I’m glad you’re on the page, but where were you 20 years ago when we were selling off playing fields, and the decade before that, when we were busy dismantling competitive sport in the schools?’

“I’m not making a political point here because my lot [the Conservatives] were busy flogging stuff off in the 80s that - no matter what anybody says - was not surplus to requirements.”

If participation levels of sports in Britain are not boosted by the London Games, will he feel 2012 has failed? “I will be very disappointed because that is not what I went to Singapore for. I went to bring back the greatest sporting event any country can have. I knew if our bid was successful, we would be bringing back inspiration and opportunity.

“To get greater numbers involved in sport, we are reliant on other organisations, namely the government, the mayor’s office, the sports bodies and their equivalents in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Technically, it is not something the 2012 committee is responsible for, but the desire to see it happen is deep in our DNA and we have been doing a lot that we’re not technically responsible for.”

AFTER running like an idiot, to use Peter Coe’s more sympathetic description, in the 800m final in Moscow, Seb was temporarily lost. There was the 1500m to come, but that was Ovett’s preferred race and the distance at which he seemed unbeatable. Brendan Foster, bronze medallist in the 10,000m at the Montreal Games, spoke with Coe between the two races in Moscow and sensed a young man on the edge. Foster felt that another defeat would have finished Coe.

In the warm-up room before the 1500m final, there were subtle changes from the scene that had preceded the 800m. Absent was the nervous, almost distracted Coe of the first race, replaced by a deadly focused runner. And Ovett, so seemingly in control in the prelude to the 800m, was too eager to talk to his rivals before the 1500m. Steve Cram, then a young athlete in his first Olympic final, felt it was almost as if Ovett suddenly wanted someone to hold his hand.

After a slow first 800m, the East German Jurgen Straub accelerated and a tightly packed group was suddenly fragmented. Only Coe and Ovett could live with Straub’s increased tempo. In the race that he dare not lose, Coe got past Straub in the finishing straight to win a memorable race. Perhaps a little complacent, or even a little sated by his gold medal from the 800m, Ovett never got in a blow and finished third.

Pat Butcher, the author of a fine book on Coe and Ovett, The Perfect Distance, offered an apt summary of what had taken place in Moscow: “They were good enough to win both, but too good to lose both.”

Back in England, each set of partisans saved its honour. Peter Elliott, a Yorkshire lad who worked for British Steel in Coe’s home city, Sheffield, and who would represent Britain at the Los Angeles Games four years later, was in Ovett’s camp. He had trained with Ovett on the dunes at Merthyr Mawr in Wales and loved the guy. “On the day of the 1500, I was working outside, on the roof. I listened to it on the radio and Seb beat Steve and all of the lads came out from the factory and they were like arms aloft and I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’. They took the ladder away and left me up there.”

When the running spikes were consigned to the garage, Coe and Ovett became friends. About five years ago, over a coffee or a beer at some grand prix meeting, Coe told his old rival the story about his paranoia on that Christmas afternoon in 1979, when he went for a second training run because he imagined his rival was doing the same. “Can you believe that?” he asked Ovett.

“Did you only run twice that day?” Ovett asked him.

Win a history of the Olympic Games

The Sunday Times has teamed up with Naxos Audiobooks to give readers the opportunity to win 10 copies of A History of the Olympics, a CD about the triumphs and tragedies of the Games. The CD contains the stories of Olympic legends such as Seb Coe, Paavo Nurmi, Carl Lewis and Mark Spitz.

Lord Coe gives an exclusive 40-minute interview about his memories of the Games, including his two Olympic 1500m titles, and looks forward to London staging the event in 2012. The text is written by John Goodbody, who will be covering the Beijing Games for The Sunday Times, and is narrated by Barry Davies, the distinguished BBC commentator. The five-disc recording lasts six hours 20 minutes.

To enter the competition, answer the following question: When did London first host the Olympics? Email your answer to: sportletters@sunday-times.co.uk . The closing date is noon on Wednesday, July 30.

For further information go to the Naxos website: www.naxosaudiobooks.com

At the head of the field in every respect

THE ATHLETE

Sebastian Coe has set more world athletics records than any other Briton, nine outdoors and three indoors. His 800m mark of 1min 41.73sec, set in 1981, has been beaten only once, by Wilson Kipketer of Denmark in 1997. In addition, Coe is the only man to have successfully defended the Olympic 1500m title (if you discount the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens).

Coe’s first major title was the European indoor 800m in 1977. The following year he finished third behind Olaf Beyer of East Germany and his great rival, Steve Ovett, in the European outdoor 800m.

For the next 12 years, his duels with Ovett, Steve Cram and Peter Elliott fascinated the British public. In the 1980 Olympics, Coe was beaten in the 800m, his favoured distance, by Ovett, but got his revenge in the 1500m.

After being ill during 1983, he returned in 1984 to finish second in the 800m and then outsprint Cram in the 1500 metres at the Los Angeles Olympics. He had to pull out of the 1986 Commonwealth Games with illness but at the European Championships a few weeks later he took the 800m title and finished second to Cram in the 1500m.

Controversially, he was left out of the British team for the 1988 Olympics. He retired in 1990.

THE POLITICIAN

Coe has always been interested in politics and kept diaries and notebooks on the subject as a youngster. In 1992, he was elected Tory MP for Falmouth and Camborne, a position he held until he lost his seat in 1997.

However, when William Hague was named leader of the Conservative Party to oppose Tony Blair in his first period in office as prime minister, he appointed Coe as his chief of staff. Coe was Hague’s confidant, and judo partner, and worked energetically in the post. In 2000, Coe became a member of the House of Lords. However, with Blair winning the next election, Hague lost his position as leader of the opposition and Coe decided it was time to move out of frontline politics.

THE SPORTS ADMINISTRATOR

Even when he was competing as an athlete, Coe was active in administration, being vice-chairman of the Sports Council from 1986 to 1989 and producing a funding report into Olympic competitors following the 1984 Games.

He led London’s attempt to stage the 2000 Games, only for the British Olympic Association to prefer Manchester. In 2003, London officially launched its attempt to host the 2012 Olympics and Coe became an ambassador and member of the board. When Barbara Cassani stepped down in May 2004, Coe became chairman and it was his mesmerising speech in Singapore in 2005 that was a major factor in getting crucial votes from the International Olympic Committee to swing the decision London’s way ahead of Paris, which had been favourite. Subsequently he has become chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) and a member of the Olympic Board.

In 2007, he was elected vice-president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and is also chairman of Fifa’s Ethics Commission, dealing with conflicts of interest and breaches of rules in international football.