Late-night magic in Florence: remembering Seb Coe's 1:41.73
When it comes to breaking 800m records, much of the talk in 2026 has centred on the women's world record of 1:53.28 held by Jarmila Kratochvilova. Yet Seb Coe's 800m best of 1:41.73 has survived as the British record since 1981 and it has eluded everybody from Steve Cram and Peter Elliott to Ben Pattison and Max Burgin over the past 45 years.
Coe recalls what he describes as a “slightly comedic night”. The meeting at Firenze’s Stadio Comunale had been designed as little more than an early season benchmarking exercise and, when the timetable began to run incredibly late, the then 24-year-old was left with a race build-up which fell some way short of being ideal.
“I gave up warming up and just lay on the grass, with some of the other athletes, waiting,” he remembers.
During that wait, Carl Lewis had won the 100m and the crowd went berserk when a time of 9.92 – which would have been a world record – flashed up on the stadium scoreboard. As it turned out, however, the American had clocked 10.13 and that the electronic display was operating less than perfectly.
With that controversy still hanging thick in the air, the 800m starting gun was not fired until after 11pm. Coe had sought help from the sidelines.
“Having experienced races of that nature, trying to get a split time in a decipherable language was never easy,” he says. “Maeve Kyle was my team manager that night and I wanted to go hard so I handed her my Casio training watch and I said: ‘Would you time me over the first lap and then shout the time out?’
“I did actually hear her shout 49 something as I went through, so I thought: ‘I’m on schedule’. She came up to me after the race with the watch and she said: ‘I've got 1:41 on there’.
“I thought: ‘Well, it's quite hard getting it that accurate’ so I went on my lap [of honour] thinking it was probably around 1:42, but [that] it may or may not be near the world record.
"I had the watch with the time on it until the battery ran out.”
It took some time to confirm that Coe had in fact taken 0.6 of a second off his then world record of 1:42.33. Given the Lewis debacle earlier, however, the crowd took a little convincing.
“When I came across the line in 1:41 you could see them all going: ‘Yeah, right. Okay. We’ve been here before tonight’,” says Coe. “There was a little bit of disbelief and then, of course, it came through.
“Billy Konchellah, who went on to win a world title, was my pacemaker that night. He took me through [the first lap] in 49 and bits and then I just remember going on my own for one lap. It was a beautiful evening. It was late, but it was absolutely stunning.”
There was to be no hero’s welcome for Coe upon his return home, however. “I took a really early flight home the following day and I was back in Loughborough for breakfast at the halls of residence where I was staying,” he adds. “It was early, I walked in and of course nobody even realised what I'd done. A couple of guys came up to me and said: ‘Where were you last night?’
“One of my training partners even said: ‘Yeah, he always skives off when it really matters’. There had been some social night that I'd missed and I had to explain to them I'd actually broken the world record the night before.
“They thought that was quite amusing, but I still wasn't forgiven for missing the social!”
Coe laughs at the memory, and the smile lingers when he looks back on the achievements of 1981 which also included the 1000m world record, run in Oslo one month after the Firenze fireworks.
“It was my best season,” says Coe. “The 1:41 was good, but if you ask me what I think, athletically, was my best ever performance it was the 2:12.18 in Oslo for 1000m.
“It’s a purple patch in a career and you're lucky if you get one. You just take it when it comes and it's extraordinary, because you just step out onto the line and you just know you're going to win. That sounds really arrogant, but there's no other way of saying it.
“It's not an exact science, but there’s just this point where, for whatever reason, everything comes together.”
Putting Coe's run into context
At the time, Coe’s run sent shockwaves around the global sporting community, in so much as it was set very early on in the season, (it was only his third two-lap outing and first run outside the UK that summer) and occurred in a low-key meeting in which he won by almost six seconds! However, even at a time when athletics in the UK was one of the most popular sports, with Coe and Ovett regularly appearing on the back and front page of the daily newspapers, this performance of Coe’s was rightly considered ‘Beamonesque’ in both its quality and impact.
Coe’s first international outing of 1981 was at Crystal Palace on June 3, a week prior to the run in Florence. In a four-way match between England, USA, Belgium and Ethiopia, Coe looked supreme when front running an 800m victory in 1:44.06 (12.3 last 100m), kicking 15m clear of compatriot Garry Cook at the start of the home straight with effortless ease. Less than two hours later he ran the last leg in the 4x400m relay, in which he took over (from Steve Scutt) marginally in front of US 400m hurdler Barton Williams but proceeded to turn a 1m lead into a 4m deficit by messing up the change-over, tripping himself as he began his run and starting the stopwatch from practically a standing start.
It seemed a tall order to pull back the one-lap specialist, but Coe dug in and slowly reeled in his opponent, drawing level at the top of the home straight and then easing past as the American, perhaps through being passed by a two-lap specialist, succumbed to pressure and dropped the baton! Coe coasted in and completed a 45.65 split. He had never been faster, and the signs looked good for a fast time later in the season, perhaps July or August, when athletes tend to aim for a peak. Indeed, both Coe and his father/coach, Peter, had already pencilled in their attempt, for July 11 in Oslo. In the meantime, they looked towards a ‘sharpener’ and an expected time of ‘around 1:43’ on a warm evening in Florence, a week after his Crystal Palace run.
It has often been claimed that Coe’s run in Florence was a planned world record attempt. Yet his father, who usually accompanied his athlete to overseas meetings and certainly for world record attempts, did not go to Florence with him. Indeed, Coe himself stated as such to David Miller in his first biography, ‘Running Free’.
David Miller wrote, “Before Seb flew to Italy, he called me and discussed his prospects, having already spoken to Peter. I wanted to know if there was the slightest chance of a RECORD ATTEMPT being ‘on’. If so, I would be on the next plane. Just as he had told Peter, he now said to me that he thought the probability slight enough for me not to bother- and like the rest of Fleet Street I missed what was to be something unique among even his exploits.”
Coe himself added: “I'd wound down my training a bit, I was doing the hard-core endurance stuff, although I’d had a personal best 200m in well under 22.0. I knew I was in good shape from the 1:44.06 the previous week, but that was all.”
Once the day arrived and Coe landed at Pisa, it seemed that the omens were indeed not good, and that even a fast time might not be on the cards after all.
“I arrived at Pisa and made the sticky bus ride to Florence, with the temperature up in the 90s. I don't know if it was the prelude to being ill the following week, but I had a very severe headache before the race. It was so hot that all I could do the day of the race was drink bottled water and try to sleep. Peter and I reckoned that it would be a good warm-up of around 1:43/1:44 and we were looking for a "safe" run in a warm climate.”
Coe was in lane three, with Zivotic, Grippo and Konchellah outside of him. After some delays, the gun went for the 800m, and at the break of lanes, 19-year-old Konchellah, who was at the time a 400m runner (PB of 45.38 from 1979) dabbling with a move up in distance, hit the front, with Seb a stride behind. The Kenyan passed 200m in a reported 24.4, with Coe second in 24.6, and 400m in (reported at the time) 49.7 (Coe – 49.9).
It was only now that thoughts of a record entered Coe’s consciousness. As he entered the bend at the start of the second lap, he drew out from behind the young Konchellah, who was clearly not a designated pacemaker as he showed no signs of slowing down, dropping out or moving aside for his more famous English competitor. This was crucial, because Coe now found himself running wide, almost in lane two, for a good 60m of that bend, which would have resulted in running an unnecessary extra one and a half to two metres, or about two tenths of a second.
As Coe rounded the third bend, he was now clear and moving smoothly away from Konchellah and the field, opening a 30m gap in a flash and looking like a 400m runner. The sight of Seb Coe in full flight along that back straight that night, perfectly balanced, elegant but powerful strides, appearing to maintain almost metronomic speed, is surely one of the great sights in international athletics.
He hit the 600m mark in a reported 1:15.0 – “into the final bend I was having to shout at myself mentally to maintain rhythm.”
There was no discernible slowing down as he entered the final straight, despite the noticeable pot marks in the bleached track he was running on, but the effort was written clearly across his face, the jawline tightening, as he ran through the finish and (in the words of David Coleman) “breaks to miss the photographers.”
At almost the exact moment Coe’s race finished, the revised time for Carl Lewis’s earlier 100m world record flashed up on the stadium display board as 10.13, which understandably frustrated those there who had believed they had witnessed a new world record! Booing ensued, which understandably confused Coe at first. When the situation was explained to him, he had to wait an agonising 10 minutes before his official time was confirmed off the photo-cell finish equipment as 1:41.72 (only later did the IAAF ratify it as 1:41.73).
That historic run in Florence 45 years ago was in some way an exorcism of the ghost that had remained with Coe since the previous summer’s disastrous Moscow 800m. It was also the first of several world records that season for the Englishman, who would go on to break the 1000m and mile (twice) records, win the European and World Cups over 800m and remain undefeated all season at any distance above 200m.
» The above feature has been adapted from material published in AW in 2021 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Coe's record.
