Unfazed by 2012 task

“People rang me up and said, 'You must be really sorry that they’re there,”' said Coe, the chairman of the organizing committee. “And I said, 'Actually, no. I’m rather pleased they are here, because 24-hour television tends to show the same building burning 10 times every 20 minutes.”'

The point being that the London on the world’s television and computer screens during the riots was not the same London that Coe was seeing and certainly not the London he expects to see from July 27 to Aug 12 next year. “This was not the London I recognized,” Coe said. “It was not the London I was born in, not the London I was brought up in. It’s not the London I live in. I actually genuinely believe that was quite an aberration.”

Coe took a bite of his sandwich and then took his personal view further.“I’m not convinced in any way that was a political demonstration or this was a manifestation of distracted or disaffected urban youth,” he said. “People sitting on pavements trying on different sized trainers and being photographed in front of television sets, it doesn’t immediately strike me that this was the Martin Luther King movement. This was some fairly unstructured late-night shopping.”

If this strikes you as unusually provocative stuff from an Olympic organizer, you would be correct, but then Coe -- once the world’s greatest middle distance runner and still a youthful-looking 54-year-old -- is on something of a roll at the moment, and not just because earlier this summer he managed to get married to the magazine editor Carole Annett without making headlines. It was the second marriage for Coe, who has four children from his previous marriage.

“We did it completely under the radar screen, which was lovely,” Coe said. “Just a small gathering. No media. In fact, nobody had even figured it out for at least a week, which I think was quite an achievement.” But the newlywed Lord Coe, a former Conservative member of parliament, is now in for another very public year, and even in the wake of the riots of this month, there have been surprisingly few concerns about the buildup to London.

Emma John, of the British newspaper The Observer, made her metaphorically rich view clear: “The London organizing committee appears to be masterminding an unnervingly vast operation with the invisible, eerie efficiency of the Sith lords in 'Star Wars.' By next summer I will be surprised if we don’t see Darth Coe patrolling the Olympic Park with a light saber.”

That said, there has been the usual preparation fatigue and grumbling about end-game costs from local residents. There has been an unusual amount of frustration with the ticket allocation system in Britain in the face of heavy demand, along with the ongoing concern about the future of the Olympic stadium and its track.

Still, the big picture has looked much more sunlit than stormy, which is no minor coup considering the rambunctious British news media and the country’s economic travails lately. Those were not part of the landscape when Coe delivered his stirring, generation-bridging speech in 2005 to the International Olympic Committee in Singapore that was critical to catching Paris at the tape and securing the Games.

Coe said this was probably the worst economic climate in which to deliver an Olympics since the time leading up the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, which were plagued by massive deficits and cost overruns.

But legacy is hardly the sole focus. A two-time gold medalist in the 1,500, Coe thinks he knows what an athlete deserves. “I say to my teams every day of the week, 'You have to remember that when you see a competitor walking out into any of your venues, they probably have dedicated over half their young lives to that moment,”' he said. “'You will not want to look at yourself and think that they were in any way a victim of your shortcomings.”'

What is surprising about Coe is that for a former politician and for someone whose sport has been greatly discredited by doping scandals, he seems genuinely unjaded about the power of the Olympics and of sports in general. “It’s been good to me,” he acknowledged. “And in most communities, if I’m being really honest, in most communities, it’s the real social worker. It’s hands-on.”

But Coe said his four children – ages 12 to 19 – are active in everything from field hockey to rugby to horseback riding. And even if the Olympics are a big hit in a country that could use some reassurance about now, Coe said his next goal would not be to plunge back into British politics, even with his Tory party currently in power. “I will not do it; I don’t want to do it; I’ve done it,” he said. “My goal is a renaissance of athletics. I want to go off and write seriously. I want to go and do a number of things, want to spend more time with my kids.”

Prominent sportsmen who became effective administrators are hardly legion. Coe believes too many start too late and refuse to climb back down the ladder and apply the same work ethic that helped them win medals.

But Coe, with all he has done and learned since Singapore in 2005, could certainly have a compelling case to make. Then might come the harder part.

Returning track and field to its salad days in this soccer-centric era sounds like more of a challenge than a transcendent, on-budget Olympics.