Running My Life: The Autobiography by Seb Coe, review He found his vital athletic counterpoint in Steve Ovett, who upset the odds by winning 800m gold in Moscow: a defeat Coe avenged in the 1500m. "The truth is that for one of the very few occasions in my life, I was afraid," Coe writes of the Moscow 800m. The win that followed was his great catharsis. Early political awareness was expressed in a boyhood scrapbook of newspaper cuttings. He was radicalised by the three-day week of the Seventies and what he calls the "drudgery of municipal socialism" in Sheffield, yet sympathised with the striking miners, on whose union tracks he had run: "I remember being at a party once, full of just the kind of braying Sloanes I loathed. The conversation turned to how great it was watching the miners getting hammered every night on the news. You have no idea what life in these communities is like, have you? No idea. And I left. These egalitarian instincts underpinned his Olympic mission. They also lent him common cause with Hague, who made him his chief of staff and judo partner. "We were hewn from the same South Yorkshire landscape," Coe explains. He is a good anecdotalist. The best of his political yarns is his long war against a red-top "Krusty the Clown" (from The Simpsons) who had been stalking Hague at photo-ops. The pair finished up wrestling on the ground at a seaside resort. Krusty finally gasped: "OK, That's it. I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not paid enough. An extra-marital affair is confessed to and Coe is unbeatable on the dark politics of bidding. Much chortling has accompanied the revelation that Cherie Blair rounded on Jacques Chirac for his dismissive comment about British cooking. "She was at him like a banshee and he couldn't get out of that building fast enough," Coe writes. Her husband tells him: "The thing about my wife is that when she says something, she really means it." In the doomed 2018 World Cup bidding race, Fifa's president Sepp Blatter instructs our author: "Your game is run by idiots." Without Coe there would have been no London 2012. His marshalling of the bid was decisive and his political nous cleared a path through the thickets of media negativity. In his closing speech he cited a consultant anaesthetist at St Mary's Paddington who had worked on the night of the 7/7 bombings as well as at the Games. He told Coe: "For me this is closure. I have seen the worst of mankind and now I've seen the best of mankind. The teller of this tale had climbed his political Olympus. Running My Life: The Autobiography by Seb Coe 496pp, Hodder & Stoughton, t £18 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £20, ebook £20)