Sebastian Coe has hailed Jake Wightman’s stunning 1500m world championship gold in Eugene and says it shows Britain has its greatest generation of middle-distance runners since the glory days of the 70s and 80s.
The World Athletics president also urged Wightman to take advantage of his “purple patch” by winning an unprecedented treble of world, Commonwealth and European gold in the next month.
“This is massive for British athletics,” said Coe, who presented Wightman with his gold medal in Eugene. “It’s the best pool of athletes we’ve had for a long time. And Jake could soon end up with three of the four slams, because there’s no reason why he shouldn’t win the Commonwealth and Europeans. He will know that. And you have to say, putting the kiss of death on it, he has done the hardest one first.”
Coe also pointed out that, owing to the nature of the athletics calendar, Wightman had a shot of winning two world titles and the Olympics in the next two years. “This is potentially a real purple patch for him,” he said. “He is defending that next year and then, hopefully, in great shape for the Olympics a year later. If he can log all that, he could technically end up as the most successful British middle distance runner we have ever had.”
Coe also stressed that the pool of talented British runners was deeper than it had been for generations, with Laura Muir claiming Olympic and world medals, Keely Hodgkinson taking 800m silver in Tokyo and Josh Kerr winning bronze. Max Burgin, who pulled out of the 800m heats in Eugene owing to injury, is also the fastest over the distance this year.
Asked if this was the greatest generation since the era of Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram and Peter Elliott, Coe nodded. “Yes, but it needed Jake to win that,” he said. “It will open the door for others now. Others will look at it and know he’s not superhuman. He’s come through with proper training, speed-endurance training. He’s running both 800 and 1500. That’s a great template that he’s shown works.”
Coe was also generous in his assessment of Wightman’s strike for gold with 200m to go, saying it echoed the way he had won the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. “It did remind me of it a lot,” he said.
“There was a moment on the last lap where I sat there and he started to move forward and my instinct was: ‘Not yet!’ But then I thought: ‘Well, actually, the fact he’s prepared to do that tells me that he thinks he can win this race.’ I thought [Jakob] Ingebrigtsen looked a bit flat from about the second lap. But Jake didn’t put a foot wrong.”
Coe has revealed that he regularly gives advice to Jake and his coach and father, Geoff, who made global headlines by commentating on his son’s gold medal in the stadium. “I’m not going to portray myself as his coach, or anything like that, but we chat and have for a long time. For four or five years. Remember he is a Loughborough boy too.”
And the ties run deeper than that given that Jake’s mother, Susan, was once Coe’s oldest daughter’s PE teacher. “I got a text from my daughter who’s in New York when she saw it, saying my first PE teacher had a pretty good night last night, didn’t she! She still refers to her as Mrs Wightman – and she’s 30 now. She taught her at a primary school in Surrey.”
Meanwhile Susan Wightman has insisted that her son will not change despite his sudden success at the age of 28 – and said that having his brother Sam as a twin might have helped him succeed.
“Jake is an identical twin, same as I am,” she said. “And my identical twin went to the Seoul Olympics. Jake was always so determined that the one person who couldn’t beat him was his twin brother. At school level, even though he was little for his age, he was always winning.
“He was always one of those athletes you had to hold back, rein in. Geoff and I being athletes ourselves, we could see his potential. So in a way we were always expecting him to fulfil his career.
“But he’s always been very modest. I like to think we’ve brought him up to be like that.”
Susan also said that victory would mean a lot to her husband, Geoff, who will commentate again on Jake when he runs for Scotland in the Commonwealth Games – although not in the Europeans in Munich.
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“Geoff keeps his thoughts close to his heart,” she said. “Sometimes the combination of father and son, and coach and athlete, is quite a strange one. Geoff can be slightly black and white at times. He doesn’t discuss emotions that easily with Jake as an athlete.
“Jake was saying that he almost treats him like a robot. He doesn’t, but I know with Geoff as an athlete himself there were so many things he’d have liked to have done himself.”
