In the build-up to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, all the talk among the boys at my primary school was of Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe. Clued-up children - in other words, those whose parents were more interested in athletics than mine - knew all about the rivalry between 'the Tough and the Toff', as Pat Butcher calls them in his new double-subtitled book, The Perfect Distance: Ovett and Coe: The Record-Breaking Rivalry (Weidenfeld, £14.99); and because this was a posh primary school, the consensus was in support of Coe. Interest in him soon faded into the middle distance, however, as a new hero of the playground emerged: Daley Thompson the decathlete. Not just some 800-metre runner, here was a man who could apparently do almost anything: a true star of track and field (Steve Ovett dismissed the decathlon as 'nine Mickey Mouse events followed by a slow 1500 metres', but we were young and impressionable). What's more, Thompson got to do things that looked like they were a lot of fun: in particular, the pole-vault.

LRB 2 September 2004 | PDF Download