World Athletics president looks back on the 40th anniversary of an 800m run which was a world record at the time and still stands as the UK record today

He wasn’t forgiven for missing a university social event, but Seb Coe had a pretty good excuse. He had been in Italy, breaking the 800m world record. 

The 40th anniversary of him clocking 1:41.73 in Florence, a mark which still stands as the British record, falls on June 10 and the World Athletics president will mark the occasion by attending the Diamond League meeting which, as fate would have it, will now take place in the very same city.

Coe can vividly recall what he describes as a “slightly comedic night”. The meeting at Firenze’s Stadio Comunale had been designed as little more than an early season benchmarking exercise and, when the timetable began to run incredibly late, the then 24-year-old was left with a race build-up which fell some way short of being ideal. 

“I gave up warming up and just lay on the grass, with some of the other athletes, waiting,” he remembers.

During that wait, Carl Lewis had won the 100m and the crowd went berserk when a time of 9.92 – which would have been a world record – flashed up on the stadium scoreboard. 

It transpired, however, the American had in fact clocked 10.13 and that the electronic display was operating less than perfectly.

With that controversy still hanging thick in the air, the 800m starting gun was not fired until after 11pm. Coe had sought help from the sidelines. 

“Having experienced races of that nature, trying to get a split time in a decipherable language was never easy,” he says. “Maeve Kyle was my team manager that night and I wanted to go hard so I handed her my Casio training watch and I said: ‘Would you time me over the first lap and then shout the time out?’

“I did actually hear her shout 49 something as I went through, so I thought: ‘I’m on schedule’. She came up to me after the race with the watch and she said: ‘I’ve got 1:41 on there’.

“I thought: ‘Well, it’s quite hard getting it that accurate’ so I went on my lap [of honour] thinking it was probably around 1:42, but [that] it may or may not be near the world record. 

“I had the watch with the time on it until the battery ran out.” 

It took some time to confirm that Coe had in fact taken 0.6 of a second off his then world record of 1:42.33. Given the Lewis debacle earlier, however, the crowd took a little convincing. 

“When I came across the line in 1:41 you could see them all going: ‘Yeah, right. Okay. We’ve been here before tonight’,” says Coe. “There was a little bit of disbelief and then, of course, it came through.

“Billy Konchellah, who went on to win a world title, was my pacemaker that night. He took me through [the first lap] in 49 and bits and then I just remember going on my own for one lap. It was a beautiful evening. It was late, but it was absolutely stunning.”

There was to be no hero’s welcome for Coe upon his return home, however. 

“I took a really early flight home the following day and I was back in Loughborough for breakfast at the halls of residence where I was staying,” he adds. “It was early, I walked in and of course nobody even realised what I’d done. A couple of guys came up to me and said: ‘Where were you last night?’

“One of my training partners even said: ‘Yeah, he always skives off when it really matters’. There had been some social night that I’d missed and I had to explain to them I’d actually broken the world record the night before.

“They thought that was quite amusing, but I still wasn’t forgiven for missing the social!”

Coe chuckles at the memory, and the smile lingers when he looks back on the achievements of 1981 which also included the 1000m world record, run in Oslo one month after the Firenze fireworks. 

“It was my best season,” says Coe. “1:41 was good, but if you ask me what I think, athletically, was my best ever performance it was the 2:12.18 in Oslo for 1000m.

“It’s a purple patch in a career and you’re lucky if you get one. You just take it when it comes and it’s extraordinary, because you just step out onto the line and you just know you’re going to win. That sounds really arrogant, but there’s no other way of saying it. 

“It’s not an exact science, but there’s just this point where, for whatever reason, everything comes together.”