Peter Coe helped son Sebastian make athletics history

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Peter Coe, whose blunt but inspirational words helped to coach his son Sebastian Coe to gold in the 1500 metres at Moscow in 1980, will be fondly remembered by the athletics world after he died aged 88 on Saturday 9th August.

When Coe junior lost the 800m final of those Games to his rival Steve Ovett, his father knew their joint reputation was on the line. Yet despite his own much-publicised criticism of his son's performance, Coe senior retained absolute confidence in his son's ability to reverse the outcome in the 1500m.

As Coe junior warmed down on the training track after the semi-final, his father said to this reporter: "If only he does what he's capable of, there's no one tomorrow who can touch him."

How right he was. Father and son were as united as Rolls and Royce.

"He had more faith in me than sometimes I had in myself," his son recalled. The revolution in middle-distance running that Coe senior initiated was the conversion from extensive mileage training for endurance, to short-distance speedwork.

His son Seb went on to confound the experts by lowering the Cuban Alberto Juantorena's 800m world record by more than one-and-a-half seconds, to 1min 41.73sec, a time that survived for 16 years.

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