It is just 4 days until the start of the European Athletics Indoor Championships and as part of our extensive coverage we are looking back on some of the great moments from its glorious history.
As the slight 20-year-old figure of Sebastian Coe reached the halfway point of the 800m final at the 1977 European Athletics Indoor Championships in San Sebastian, still holding the lead he had established from the gun, the British commentator asked: “Has he done it all too soon?”
The answer came less than a minute later: No.
A final surge over the last 200m took Coe comfortably away from the field strung out behind him – “he really is taking them on and he’s done it from the front” – before crossing the line with arms outstretched in 1:46.54, just outside the world indoor record and a full second inside his own British record.
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Despite being impressive, the numbers were of secondary importance, for this was the moment when Coe, future Olympic champion and multiple world record holder, announced himself as an international winner to the wider world.
As Coe recalled in his 2012 autobiography, Running My Life: “This was my third trip abroad, and far bigger than anything I had done before.”
Coe had prepared at the start of the year with a week’s warm weather training in Gibraltar alongside the likes of Brendan Foster and Ian Stewart, and his indoor season had begun with an 800m victory in the UK Indoor Championships – his first senior title.
But, as Coe also recalls in his book, his preparations were nearly undone minutes before the race in San Sebastian when Robert Stinson, then chairman of the Amateur Athletic Association and charged with looking after the young runner’s spikes while he warmed up, was nowhere to be seen.
An anxious Coe eventually found him in a nearby corridor, watching skiing highlights on a TV monitor. After handing over the spikes, Stinson said the brief, final words: “Well, bye bye then.”
As it turned out, they could have been Coe’s words to the rest of the field as he set off. “I decided to run from the front,” he recalled. “When I broke the tape, I could barely believe what I had done. I was now the holder of a European title!”
East Germany’s Erwin Gohlke was the man who did best at tracking the Briton throughout the race, but he could never get closer than four or five metres to an athlete bound for greatness. It was a feeling that would soon become familiar to many other middle distance runners…
800m Result:
Sebastian Coe (GBR) 1:46.54
Erwin Gohlke (GDR) 1:47.2
Rolf Gysin (SUI) 1:47.6
Top 3 from Prague 2015:
Marcin Lewandowski (POL) 1:46.67
Mark English (IRL) 1:47.20
Thijmen Kupers (NED) 1:47.25
Championship Record: Pawel Czapiewski (POL) 1:44.78 - Vienna/AUT 03.03.02
European Indoor Record: Wilson Kipketer (DEN) 1:42.67 - Paris/FRA 09.03.1997