Steve Ovett

Stephen Michael James "Steve" Ovett, OBE (born 9 October 1955), is a former middle distance runner from England. He was gold medalist in the 800 metres at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, U.S.S.R., and set world records for 1500 metres and the mile run. To this day, he holds the UK record for 2 miles (3,219 m), which he set in 1978.

Born in Brighton, Sussex, and educated at Varndean School, Ovett was a talented teenage athlete. As a youngster, he showed great promise as a footballer, but gave it up for athletics, because he did not want to do a sport where he would have to rely on teammates.

The 1978 season for Ovett was notable for the superb times recorded at disparate distances. He ran an 800 m in 1:44.09 (world record at the time was Alberto Juantorena's 1:43.44 ) and set a 2-mile world's best with an 8:13.51 clocking, (an event the IAAF no longer recognised for record purposes), handing Track & Field News Athlete of the Year Henry Rono one of his few losses in his remarkable record breaking season. It's been speculated that if he'd spent that season preparing specifically & repeatedly attempting to run fast times in pacemaker led Grand Prix races, he was capable of breaking the 1000 m, 1500 m, 1 mile & 2000 m world records that year, based on his 800 m & 2 mile times.

During 1981, both Ovett and Coe were at their peak. They didn't meet in a race that year but exchanged world records in the mile three times during a 10-day period. Ovett suffered a famous upset in a 1500m race in Oslo that year. With Ovett and Coe so dominant and Coe not involved in the race, Ovett was hot favourite. During the race Tom Byers, who had been asked to act as a pacemaker set off quickly and the pack, mishearing the split times being announced and believing that they were going faster than they were, declined to follow his pace. As a result, by the start of the last lap Byers was leading by almost ten seconds and decided to finish the race. Ovett ran the last lap almost nine seconds quicker than Byers but finished second by 0.53s

He has been a Track & Field television commentator for the CBC since 1992. He now lives in Australia and was a part of the BBC's on-location commentary team for the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. In 1987 a bronze statue of Steve Ovett was erected in Preston Park, Brighton. However, it was stolen in 2007, and has not yet been replaced