Seb Coe

And he was an analytical guy.

He was a mathematician by training.

And then it became an engineer.

He just looked at me.

He said, well, I think we might have found your distance.

And we hadn't really ever thought of it as a specialist distance.

I'd always thought if I settled anywhere, it would be the 1500, the mile, even the 5K.

And that's how 800 meters started for me.

And that was sort of 1976.

1977, I won the European Indoors 800.

In 78, I broke the...

British record for it.

And then in 79, I broke the world record.

So it was, you know, from stumbling across it in a Manchester League event and over the next two or three years, you know, I went from that to being the world record holder.

So it was, you know, to this day, I'm still trying to figure it out.

Yeah, great question.

Look, again, it's inevitably a mixture of a number of those things.

Yeah, I always went into a race with a strategy.

And sometimes that strategy occasionally altered because of the field.

And on occasions, you're suddenly thrown into a completely different race because tactically, a good example is the heat of the 800 meters in Los Angeles.