Steve Cram (© Getty Images)
With two laps remaining of the men’s 1500m final at the 1980 Olympic Games, Jurgen Straub of East Germany held pole position, followed by a trio of British runners: Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram.
While Coe proceeded to emerge victorious from the gripping second leg of his double-headed Moscow showdown with his great rival Ovett (the winner of their 800m clash taking bronze behind Straub at the longer distance), the still-callow youth playing the Third Man role in the British team faded out of contention.
The exhausted Cram may have wound up eighth, winning his home straight battle to avoid last place with Balkan champion Dragan Zdravkovic of Yugoslavia, but ‘merely’ making it into the big race in Moscow played a huge role in the development of the teenage prodigy.
In time, the gangly 19-year-old with the distinctive mop of blond hair would eclipse Coe and Ovett as world record-holder for 1500m and the mile, and earn a lasting place in track and field history as the first man to win the world 1500m title.
The generous donation of Cram’s bright red Great Britain tracksuit from those Moscow Olympics has been such a welcome addition to the ever-expanding collection of the Museum of World Athletics (MOWA) because it represents a pivotal moment in the development of one of the all-time greats of the sport.
Mental resolve
Just 12 months previously, Cram had been running in the palatinate purple and yellow colours of the County Durham school athletics team in front of the proverbial one man and his dog at the unprepossessing Lightfoot track in the east end of Newcastle. He won the 1500m, in an inter-county schools match against Northumberland and Cumbria, in 3:57.5.
By then, however, the coltish Cram had already made his major championship debut, having made the English team for the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton as a 17-year-old, bowing out in the 1500m heats.
It said a lot for the mental resolve that was to ultimately take him into the same hallowed track and field territory as Coe and Ovett that the 19-year-old Cram managed to claw his way on to the British team for the Moscow Olympics, and into his first global final.
He started 1980 as Britain’s sixth-ranked 1500m man – behind Coe, Ovett, Dave Moorcroft, John Robson and Graham Williamson – and thought his chances of selection had disappeared when he tripped and fell in the designated trial race at the AAA Championships.
But then Moorcroft, who won the 1500m trial in the absence of the pre-selected Coe and Ovett, chose to accept selection for the 5000m instead. With Robson out injured, Cram won a run-off with Williamson for the third team spot – finishing 2.6 seconds ahead of his Scottish rival with a 3:53.8 clocking as runner-up in Ovett’s 3:48.8 world mile record run in Oslo.
‘I’d gone over my psychological peak’
Out in the Russian capital, he might not have made it past the opening heat had the former 1500m world record-holder Filbert Bayi not been a late withdrawal. Cram sneaked the fourth and final qualifying spot by 0.1.
It was an even closer call in his semifinal. As Ovett waved to the Brits in the crowd en route to a comfortable victory, Cram dug deep all the way down the home straight to snatch fourth place on the line, ousting Vladmir Maiozermlin of the Soviet Union, who clocked the same time.
Come crunch time in the final, when Straub upped the gas with 650m remaining, it was no surprise that the young Briton had nothing left in his tank.
“I was shattered physically and definitely overawed,” Cram reflected in an interview in Athletics Monthly magazine. “I think I’d gone over my psychological peak by reaching the final.”
Nonetheless, the Moscow 1500m final gave Cram an insight into the psychological workings of a high-pressure showpiece race that was to prove invaluable.
First man to break 3:30
Two years later, in 1982, he won the European and Commonwealth 1500m titles. The year after that he won the 1500m at the inaugural World Athletics Championships in Helsinki, and also beat Ovett – who had finished fourth in the Finnish capital and subsequently broken his own world 1500m record – in a thriller of a head-to-head mile race in the end-of-season meeting at London’s Crystal Palace.
Then came an Olympic 1500m rematch against Coe and Ovett in Los Angeles in 1984. His preparation seriously hampered by a calf injury, Cram worked wonders to take the silver medal as the revitalised Coe himself emerged from two years of illness and injury to become the first man in history to successfully defend the Olympic 1500m crown; the asthmatic Ovett failed to finish, suffering from chest pains in the LA smog.
Frustrated at having not been in 100% shape for his second Olympic appearance, Cram set about attacking the world record book in 1985.
In a classic 1500m race in Nice, he beat Said Aouita, the Olympic 5000m champion, and became the first man to break 3:30, eclipsing Ovett’s world record with 3:29.67. Then, in the Dream Mile in Oslo, he beat Coe and the double Olympic champion’s world record, clocking 3:46.32. Running 4:51.39 for 2000m in Budapest made it three world records in 19 days.
The golden streak continued in 1986 as Cram completed a majestic Commonwealth double at 800m and 1500m in Edinburgh before retaining his European 1500m title and taking bronze at 800m in Stuttgart.
His form dipped in 1987, when he finished eighth in the world 1500m final in Rome, but in 1988 he was getting back to his best before injury in a 1000m race in Rieti scuppered his hopes of Olympic gold in Seoul.
The wounded colt-turned-thoroughbred finished fourth in the 1500m final in the South Korean capital but finished his career with six major golds – as many as Coe and Ovett put together.
MOWA Olympic Athletics Collection
Cram’s Olympic tracksuit, which was recently on public display as part of the MOWA Olympic Athletics Collection in the Westin Paris-Vendome hotel, will permanently enter the museum’s 3D platform in December as part of the MOWA’s annual induction of new artefacts: Enter the 3D MOWA platform
Simon Turnbull for World Athletics Heritage
