The glasses are rose-tinted but Steve Ovett was the one who, when he crossed the finish line at the Olympic Games, wrote "I love you" to his girlfriend in the air with his finger and made the workingmen's clubs of England wince.
Sebastian Coe was the self-contained, glossy-maned track prince, who lost the Moscow Olympic 800 metres to Ovett when he should have won, then went on to win the 1,500 metres which he should have lost. The unexpected 1,500 metres win in 1980 was repeated in Los Angeles 1984 and Coe, becoming the first athlete to grasp consecutive metric-mile gold medals, strode into the history books.
In those days it was inevitably Coe leading with Ovett, his face grimacing in pain, on his shoulder or the rangy, ravaged-looking Ovett furtively glancing behind to see when his unloved rival was going to attack. A generation watched the two duel and could feel the prickly relationship.
Coe remains track thin and the black hair has still not shown any sign of grey. A former private secretary to the former Conservative Party leader William Hague and recently installed as a life member of the English aristocracy in the House of Lords, the ratty Ovett has slipped quietly out of sight, reputedly to quite a pad in Scotland. Their paths seem so appropriate.
No longer a member of parliament for Falmouth and Camborne, the double Olympic champion continues to be one of the biggest influences in athletics.
A column in the Daily Telegraph, president of the Amateur Athletics Association and a regular member of various International Olympic committee commissions, Coe arrives in Ireland this weekend to pass on his views at the Sports Development Conference 2001 in Dublin's Citywest Hotel.
The career Tory will hardly miss the irony of discussing, "Investing in High Performance Sport: the UK experience and the Irish vision", in the key-note address.
Britain's battered reputation as an investor in sport was recently brought into sharp and embarrassing focus in Monaco at an international meeting to discuss television sport. It came the day after the British Government announced that they would not fund the Picketts Lock stadium in north London, which resulted in the president of the International Association of Athletic's Federations (IAAF) Lamine Diack withdrawing the invitation to host the 2005 World Athletics Championships.
Jaques Rogge, the IOC president, suggested at the television meeting that he should introduce Coe as the representative of a country "that cannot build stadiums".
Thin-lipped Coe managed a smile. The last 12 months had been one of IOC scandals, spectacular drug use and a more rigorous questioning of athletics' credibility. Had the innocence of 20 years ago become jaundiced?
"We look back to the 70s and say yes, it was a period of innocence but we say that simply because we were unaware of what was going on," says Coe.
"I think we are in a much more enlightened environment now. The very fact that you and I are having this conversation (about drugs and corruption) . . . we wouldn't be having it 20 years ago because I wouldn't have answered the questions and you wouldn't have asked them.
"Now you've got the IOC bringing together everyone from kit manufacturers to the athletes themselves to have frank discussions on 'whither sport and drugs'.
"We have a global problem. The days of pointing fingers East and West with one party saying 'well it was going on in the Eastern bloc' and them responding 'we were only doing what was going on unabated in the West' are over.
"We all have to deal with it. We have very much further to go but we've protocols which are more internationally based than they used to be," he says.
On the back of increasing drug abuse the money in sport has also multiplied. At next year's London marathon 28-year-old Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie stands to make £324,000 sterling in appearance fees and bonuses. The double Olympic 10,000 metre champion and four-times World Champion has set 15 world records so far in his career.
"I'm happy with the money Gebrselassie might earn," says Coe. "He is a unique talent. I think that he is probably the athlete of the last 100 years. I would make a very strong case for him. Others would talk of Jessie Owens and Carl Lewis but I would put Gebrselassie right up there
"If you've a marketable skill like running two laps of the track quickly or being one of the top 10 100 metres runners in the world, it is, in pure economic terms, no different from being a much sought after surgeon or a highly employable finance director. There is no such thing as people being paid too much
"The market by and large rewards at its own level. Careers are short. Most athletes are only a fall, a sickness or one serious injury away from oblivion. What there has been of late is too much racing and I think that racing has been sometimes not of a high enough quality."
A supporter of Paula Radcliffe, who took a lone stand against drug users at the World Championships in Canada this year, a critic of drug-suspended Olympic champion Linford Christie, who accused British athletics of being corrupt and despite Rogge's comments, Coe holds a positive view of the IOC, the monolith and the individuals who inhabit its upper chambers.
"I'm more committed to Olympism now than then," he says. "The IOC is in touch much more than they were. The Salt Lake City affair was a big wake-up call for them. Samaranch was brave in the way he handled it and showed 13 or 14 members the door. Rogge, a younger man who is insightful and tough, will drive home reforms with greater rapidity."
Coe's frailties as a runner rarely showed. The public didn't warm to him as much as the more imperfect, emotional Ovett. But respect for him as an athlete was never less than overwhelming. That doesn't appear to have dimmed.
