Mark Mason

Classic Coe

• From magazine issue: 01 December 2012

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  Classic Coe

  

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

Chief among these is the second-most important person in Coe’s life, his late father Peter, the athlete’s trainer for much of his career. Not that the relationship was saccharine. After the Moscow Olympics 800m final, his father told Seb: ‘You ran like an absolute cunt.’

In the end, though, you buy Seb’s own assertion that his perceived arrogance is merely self-belief. This allows you to enjoy the tale: from a religious instruction teacher who lets him bunk off to train (‘which, given he was an atheist, was hardly surprising’), through cash smuggled in underpants during the ‘amateur’ days (‘we’d find ourselves going through customs giving a passable imitation of Errol Flynn’), to protecting William Hague from opponents in fancy dress (‘I was on the ground, in the dust, wrestling with this f***ing clown’) And, of course, the People’s Olympics. Delivered by a Tory peer called Sebastian. Strange times.