Running My Life By Seb Coe
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Some people, blessed with an abundance of natural sporting talent, train as hard as possible to become great sportsmen or women. Others, mindful that there are too many social injustices, aspire to rectify matters by becoming politicians, while an even rarer group of people recognise that they can apply their expertise to become sporting leaders.
It’s astonishing to think that Lord Sebastian Coe has achieved all of the above and he’s still only in his mid-fifties.
Now he has produced perhaps the best-written sports autobiography of the past decade, a fantastic story of a serial over-achiever which manages to engage the reader on every page.
We all know Seb Coe’s tale, or rather we think we know, but with the glorious London Olympics now lovingly consigned to the history books, he at last has the opportunity to provide a wonderful, engrossing account of his life.
The area of Coe’s life many of us are familiar with revolves around the late seventies and early eighties when he twice became an Olympic champion at 1,500m. This was a time when he broke a dozen world records, three of them in the space of 41 days, and enjoyed a rivalry with Steve Ovett which captivated the nation.
Between 1992-97, he served as a Conservative MP and junior whip, eventually becoming William Hague’s chief of staff.
“If the Blair revolution hadn’t happened,” he writes, “I probably would have survived in Falmouth and Camborne [his Cornwall constituency] and would certainly have committed the rest of my working life to a political career.”
How lucky we are that this didn’t happen.
More recently, we watched Seb Coe slowly emerge as a sporting leader. First, he pulled off the seemingly impossible by bringing the Olympic Games to these shores for the first time in 64 years. Then, magically, he quietly pulled the necessary strings to ensure that against the odds, London staged a remarkable show, the after-effects of which will inspire a generation.
The only surprise is that this book’s title is not My Life So Far, for as Lord Coe declares in this brilliant book’s final sentence, “I’m not ready to slow down yet.” Every British sports fan should be thankful for that.
Quiz question:
We’ve teamed up with Sports Book of the Month & have two copies of Running My Life to give away.
To win this week’s sports book, go to their website (www.sportsbookofthemonth.com) and answer the following question:
In which city did Seb Coe win his second Olympic gold medal?
