Steve Cram is a busy man but not as overworked as friend Seb Coe

ATALL, angular jogger traces the River Clyde in the early evening gloom, with scarcely a second glance being cast in his direction. But this is no ordinary Glaswegian amateur preparing for a 10k, or thirtysomething trying to run off the excesses of the weekend.

This is Steve Cram CBE, aka the Jarrow Arrow, the man who collected six middle-distance gold medals at the Worlds, Europeans and Commonwealths during the 1980s, as well as being the former world record holder in both the 1500m and the mile.

To say that running runs in the Cram family is a bit like saying the Murray boys play a bit of tennis. In addition to his own exploits, and those of his longterm partner, the former Scottish 400m runner, Alison Curbishley, his son Marcus, from his marriage to ex-wife Karen, is a talented middle-distance runner who studied at Edinburgh private school Fettes.

And back in 2001, this sport also tragically cost Cram’s brother Kevin his life. He was only 39 when he was found by a passing motorist, lying in a gutter with a cracked skull at the side of a quiet residential road, having apparently slipped whilst running. Without any identification on his person, he lay unrecognised in a Cardiff hospital mortuary for 36 hours.

“I’m like anyone else now,” said Cram, some 15 years down the line from it all. “I’m just trying to keep fit and fit it in to a busy lifestyle. If I can I try to get out every other day. So it was just a little waddle along the river. People don’t notice me in the dark. I do a little bit of bike riding too – although I have had real problems with a hamstring in the last year-and-a-half. I have injured it twice dancing at weddings.”

While the 55-year-old still appears in a BBC studio and coaches British middle-distance runner Laura Weightman – a 1500m rival of Laura Muir – his profile is significantly lower than that of his old 1980s GB rival Seb Coe, now proud occupier of one of the hottest seats in world sport, the poisonous throne of the president of the IAAF. While the two men do not speak so regularly, they did meet up for a chinwag recently in London.

“If he didn’t know he had a job on his hands he knows now,” said Cram. “But I don’t think it’s a job he is going to shy away from. I still believe he is the best man to deliver the changes that have

It is very easy for someone to say we need to clean up sport – we do – but we also have to accept the limitations of what is possible . . .