YouSaid · the spoken record

Sebastian Coe

lines on the record: 78
first: 2024-01-01
most recent: 2024-01-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“People started to recognize in the north of England that he was a great athlete. So we both came from very different sides and elements of the sport. We came from very different parts of the country as well. And that landscape and geography, I think, has a massive impact on who you are and how you think. And so our paths first crossed in an English schools cross-country championship. I think he finished second. I finished ninth. He was running for Sussex and Yorkshire schools. Our pars then didn't cross again until 1978 when he stuffed me in the 800 meters in Prague, my first European championship. And then our PAS crossed again massively in the Moscow Games.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. He was a year or two older than me and precocious talent. I mean, when I was trundling around Yorkshire Cross Country courses, this guy was silver medal in the European Championships in 1974. I mean, he was an outstanding, probably the most naturally talented athlete I ever competed against. And I didn't really know him. And we came from not only different parts of the country. We came from very different elements. Steve was based in Brighton. He was a sort of 200 meter, 400 meter runner, but he could run half marathons. I came from what was the old Harrier tradition, which was cross-country and track was something that happened between the end of the cross-country season. I mean, our great mutual mate, Brendan Foster, said it didn't really matter what he'd won on the track when he won the National Cross Country title then.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your long walks in the lake district for me were replicated in my runs in another part of God's country, the peak district. The ability to actually be comfortable in your own space and, you know, there are some people that just don't like that. They want to be involved in a team of it. My kids all love team sports. Really, want to be in solitary confinement in a sport, which relay teams come together and you travel as a team, but it's a very individual”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, halfway down the back straight clear of the field and coasting, I suddenly felt, well, it was the contents of about half a pint of beer thrown at me with the immortal words, get a fucking move on. So the 5,000 meters in the Yorkshire Championships was my one and only. So to come back to your question, it's a good one. I don't think, I mean, we often talk about you picking a sport. I think your sport picks you. I think your sport makes a judgment about your mentality, you know, whether you want to be in a team, whether you want to be individual. I was fascinated by your autobiography because I absolutely share with you the adoration of landscape.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question, and I think it's as much about mentality as anything. I tried a 5,000 meters once. I ran it in the Yorkshire Championships in Barnsley. And I knew that this wasn't really my event because I really wasn't enjoying it. Two laps of the track 800 meters hard as it is. It's done and you're out. Three and three quarter laps for the 1,500 meters for the mile, obviously. And I got into this and I'm thinking, why am I doing it? And I think my boredom and disinterest permeated the mining community that had bothered to turn out and probably pay good money. And halfway down the back straight.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because you need that endurance background and that's effectively what you do. So, I mean, the theory really is you build the base, which is your distance work, which builds your, sorry, we're going to get technical here, but it builds your VO2 max your ability to shift oxygen. And then there's the speed endurance component that is really aimed at replicating the fact that in an 800 meters at world record pace, you're effectively running at 20, 21 miles an hour the whole way. You can only probably absorb physiologically about 20% of the oxygen that you need. When you're actually at the most critical point in the race and you're trying to think straight and the physiology is collapsing all around you, that's where you need the speed endurance.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult to quantify ours because you could do a training session that might take you 30 minutes and would render you absolutely speechless and physically inactive for the rest of the day. There are training sessions I've done, particularly in the weights room. There were training sessions I would do there where I would have to sit in the car for probably three quarters of an hour before I could even unclench my hands to be able to hold the steering wheel or even feel comfortable about controlling Clutch or whatever it was, you worked really hard. Mileage was tough”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are you actually doing to get into the peak position of schoolwork? Well, how would I put it? I joined an athletics club when I was 11. So from that point on, I was training probably Tuesday nights, Thursday nights, Sunday. By the time I was 14, I was training every day. And by the time I was 16, I was probably training twice a day.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He hated the thought that I'm not saying he was a class warrior. But he really did dislike being told what to do by people he thought didn't merit their position and weren't that smart.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but he was never more brutal with me than I was on myself. And actually, the great thing he brought, which is actually overlooked in the quality of a coach, is that his view was always less, was more in Los Angeles a few days before I went out to defend my title. He came in. He came from London. He didn't actually stay with me the whole time. Watch me running on a track. at a training session was something like six by 400 meters with a couple of minutes recovery and after about three he went I've seen enough you know off you go and some nights he would sense that he would sense that I was you know when I was coming through the sport I was a little bit nervous he'd take me to the pub and say have a pint you'll you'll be fine so he was much more much more relaxed but he didn't suffer fools And he really grated against.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know whether this is fair, but a lot of the time it's fair, some of it's unfair. But actually, the great thing he brought to it was balance. And my mother was a massive influence in that because she was absolutely insistent that my life was not simply. About running, so you know, which you'd take me to the Hallet Orchestra in Sheffield. My father was also actually far more balanced and an incredibly good artist. I mean, he could self-taught.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes and no. He was never tougher on me than I was on myself In fact, interestingly, some of the tabloid stuff was a sort of Svengali portrayal. And it was much more nuanced than that.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he did. Six months later, about after about six months, a pretty unpleasant time. He was then brought home. But my grandmother threw out all that. I think there was some memorial at the port of London for those that had gone down on the, it was the A.D. Huff was the boat. And she refused to go. She said, I'm not going. No, he's alive. They all went and they sort of said, look, you know, it's been eight, ten, twelve weeks and we've got the letter. She said, no, he'll turn up. And a year later, he walked in.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In France, yeah, there were only about five of them made it off the boat, and he jumped off the train that was heading from La Rochelle to a prisoner of war camp in Hamburg. He slept by day, walked through France by night, and he was walking with a Canadian who sort of chronicled this, and they decided they had an argument about which way to go at one point. And the Canadian thought he wanted to try and get to the coast of Marseille. And my father wasn't sure whether it was occupied or not, and decided to walk through the Pyrenees, got through, and then got promptly arrested for not having any papers. And the worst part of his war, he openly would admit to you, was actually being incarcerated in one of the worst camps in Spain, a camp called Miranda, which was famous for being infamous. And my grandmother thought absolutely, resolutely refused because they thought he'd perished at sea.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On East London, he didn't like Westminster, so he ended up as a manual school. And so because he spoke German, they put him in the ship's kitchen. And he was at sea for three months on this battleship. And then he landed in La Rochelle, which was German occupied. And to cut a long story short.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wisdoms. But that was him. And I think that's quintessentially the essence of engineering. You sort of have this fascination about seeing something and then wanting to take it apart and putting it back together again. You can only understand my father from his wartime experience. He was a 19-year-old in the merchant marine. He was sailing for the blue funnel line out of the port of London and gets sunk in the Atlantic in the water for an improbable length of time. gets picked up by a German battleship because kids of his generation learnt German and he got a scholarship to Westminster.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They knew, but they sort of met at a party, and my dad was 13, 14 years older than my mum. He'd been married before, I had a half-sister. And his idea of a first date with my mother, who actually subsequent to the first date didn't speak to him for four months, was to stick her on the back of a motorbike and take her along the old Portsmouth Road at about 100 miles an hour. My mother was an actress, so she was rather trained and did restoration comedy in London theatres and Birmingham and Worcester Rep.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you know something, Roy? That is the question that nobody's really been able to answer. It's a mystery. Well, because nobody really knows.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very different. Her grandfather was a well known portrait painter, member of the Roylica Domitian. His brother, they're Irish. So his brother was a very well-known painter of animals. And their father was the first president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“bits of your father was working class. My father was born in East London in one room on the Cambridge Heath Road. It's actually always interesting that that was the, I mean, I never even thought about it, but of course the world he was born into was the world that 70 years later, 80 years later, I'm sort of trying to put some regeneration. Concepts behind it, so yeah, and your father's”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, my dad was old fashioned. I mean, he was old Lab My mother Old liberal Joe Grimmond, but I have Indian heritage as well. So my grandfather was Indian and the political Side of the family is actually Indian. My uncle was a high commissioner in Bangladesh and actually did a stint over here. And then at the United Nations, I have an elder cousin who was heavily involved in the political scene in India.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew I wanted to be involved in politics before I ever thought that I would be a successful athlete. It's a desperate admission, but that's what I wanted to do. I wasn't actually sure whether I wanted to be party political. I thought for a long time about maybe writing being a political writer. I thought about the civil service at some point. And politics has always fascinated me. And I came from a political household, but not a party political household.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did you know something, Rory? There was a really insightful moment for me. I was in Japan. I was bidding. And I sat down with a very seasoned sports leader in Japan. I had been really around for a long time, very cultivated, very smart. And he was talking to me about the games. And we were about a year and a bit out from the games. I was taking through the complexity of it and all the things that we've just sort of touched upon. He looked at me and he said, why are you nervous? And I said, well, you know, and I started to go through the litany of all the things that, and he went, you are strange people in Britain. He said, you are running large parts of the global economy. He said, most of my colleagues and friends have actually been educated at some stage in Britain. Their children want to be in Britain.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was a deadline attached to it, which actually mercifully draws absolutely critical. But I think if I'd been sitting there and I'd been Tony Blair or whoever was in senior positions in the government at the time, I would have sat there and gone, well, hang on a minute, we don't obviously seem to be doing this very well. And the great thing that I think came out of that was that people did actually see beyond that. And I do also think in a way it rescued. We didn't actually need our reputation rescuing because we were doing that actually far better than people thought. But I do think it gave people comfort and confidence to go out again and think, actually, big projects in the UK are not beyond us. And I think there was an element of nervousness that was just expressed in understandable political motivations.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Olympics would be amazing. I think there was a deeper pathology, if you don't mind me saying. If you think in the lead up to people like me standing up and saying, yes, we're going to build a new city inside an old city in seven years. We're going to regenerate a parcel of land in East London that had bypassed any economic development criminally, actually, for far too long, that we were going to build venues that London and never had. We were going to pull the most complicated piece of project management, frankly known to man under normal circumstances in any city. And then the next question you would get was, what about the Millennium Dome? What about Wembley? What about the cost overruns on the BBC, the Scottish Parliament?”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who was the Secretary of State at DCMS? She was the Secretary of State when she famously persuaded your friend, the Prime Minister at the time, to bid for the games. And this was not a grand proge in the UK at that time was not...”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, in a way, it all came together. And I think in part, the great, well, I like to think that one of the things I think that I did bring some skill to in the Olympic Games, it was an amazing team of people. I will probably never, I've never worked with, and I will probably never work again with a group of such smart, enlightened, driven visionary people headed up, I have to say, by our mutual friend Tessa, who was seismic in that journey.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you know, I'm not sure I can do that because I don't tend to look at it in that way. And I've never been somebody that sat there going, well, this is what my CV should look like. I've been very lucky, I recognize that, that I've tended to do things that have interested me. But if you wanted to meld all those elements onto a CV, and I wouldn't have even seen it until it came together, and that was really, I guess, over the Olympic bid and then the delivery. Being in sport and having competed in the Olympic Games was helpful because I understood the landscape and the language. Then having spent a good time in sports politics and cutting my teeth in an Olympic movement headed up by Samarange and then doing a stint modestly, it has to be said as a member of parliament.”
2024-01-01 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source