Ian Herbert: Sebastian Coe’s complex ride with Nike makes him ideally placed to grill them. If only...

COMMENT: Those governing sport should know best but not assume, in that unattractive way of Coe’s

Might we see a shift in the mindset of Sebastian Coe? (EPA)

There are 48 hours to save Sebastian Coe from his own vast superiority complex. The one that threatens to reveal itself again before a parliamentary select committee on Wednesday, which could just be the point of no return where his credibility is concerned.

We want those governing sport to know best but not to assume, in that very unattractive way of Coe’s, that all who question them are idiots – creating the “noise” which has forced him to abandon his perfectly reasonable £100,000-a-year Nike deal as he put it, with breathtaking arrogance. Coe, like many people, likes making money very much indeed and, when you dig around in the details of how he has done so, you find that the ego is never far away.

It was he who became one of the first athletes to employ agents – International Management Group (IMG) – in 1979, having set three world records, and who subsequently had race organisers in Oslo astonished to hear his demands for $17,500 (£11,600). It was he who left the same agency in 1986 because he thought he could handle his affairs better than IMG. He handled the £100,000 offer from Brut in 1981 himself and turned it down flat. “Wrong image.” Eat your heart out, Kevin Keegan. It was Nike, Horlicks, ICI and C&A for Coe.

He has always had a keen sense of other athletes’ commercial value, too. The £90,000 Mary Decker and Zola Budd, contestants in that famous 1984 Olympic final were paid by ITV for a rematch was “disgusting”, he let it be known at the time. So was the notion of tennis player Annabel Croft being paid a six-figure sum, he once said. “The fitness in tennis is laughable.”

But though he has always felt that he, with an economics degree, could “go and get a job whenever it is necessary” as he tells the writer David Miller in the book Born to Run, it is the intelligence and self-awareness to see how the world views his sport which Coe is being asked to display now. He does not seem to have grasped that its credibility is shot to the core.

His peremptory rejection of a Nike conflict of interest was especially dismal, considering we will need an International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) president who will ensure that company is scrutinised in the months ahead. Nike are sponsors of the athletics teams of Russia and Kenya, which are both under suspicion of institutionalised doping. The Nike Oregon Project remains at the centre of a United States Anti-Doping Agency investigation following Panorama and ProPublica’s allegations that Salazar cheated.

Coe’s assumption seems to be that three words in his own House of Lords’ register of interests entry – “Special Adviser – Nike” – tell us all we need to know. But the story of his relationship with Nike is more complex than that – the irony being that the way the company treated him once gives him every reason to know about its undesirable hold over athletes and athletics.

The Nike sales rep whom Coe approached to inquire about kit, when the opportunity presented itself in a hotel lobby in Oslo in 1979, wasn’t interested in the young Englishman wearing his university sweat shirt. It was a different story five hours later, after Coe had run 800m in a world record 1:42. The same rep was then only bothered about “how I could be persuaded to make a trip to their headquarters in Eugene,” he reflected later.

He did more than that. Coe trained for a short period after that at Athletics West – the community set up by Nike to develop track-and-field stars, which was a precursor of the Nike Oregon Project, John Cook, a one-time assistant to Alberto Salazar at Nike Oregon tells me. “Bill Bowerman [Nike’s co-founder] brought Coe over but he twisted his ankle, so that limited things,” Cook says.

Miller estimates that Coe’s subsequent Nike contract was worth around £250,000 over four or five years, but an athlete who competed against Coe tells me that he was dumped by Nike in 1984 after Brendan Foster delivered them the sport’s next big thing – Steve Cram. “Coe was very unhappy,” says the contemporary.

Ever the entrepreneur, Coe went off and became the first UK distributor for Diadora in 1987, becoming managing director for the company with an office of six staff. The white Seb Coe Diadora Shoe is still promoted as a retro range. It was in 2002 that he returned to work for Nike as an ambassador at events, because the marketing director of the time, Dave Scott, was convinced of his pulling power. Only as the 2012 London Olympics approached did he assume the position which earned him £100,000 a year.

Coe thinks all of this is meaningless, ancient history. But the contours of the Nike relationship are vastly more significant than the other House of Lords’ registered interests – which include, incidentally, “Consultant, Chelsea Football Club,” strategic adviser for insurer Vitality and seven speaking engagements, including Deloitte, the accountancy firm he has engaged at the IAAF since being voted president.

With his awareness of the vagaries of working for the Nike monolith, Coe is well placed to subject them to the intense scrutiny that might be required in the months ahead. The relationship and the knowledge could actually be valuable. So might we see a shift in the Coe mindset, to see that this backstory is relevant and needs to be known? Well, time is running out. Please don’t hold your breath.

Van Gaal’s dangerous habit of naming and shaming

Three more unwelcome namechecks on Saturday from Louis van Gaal – Paddy McNair, Wayne Rooney and Antony Martial – as he described the imperfections as his Manchester United side failed to beat Leicester City. His players hear this. They know. Why store the trouble up for himself?

Fury, my son, a cupboard, an angry dog and a happy home

You imagine that any new British heavyweight world champion other than Tyson Fury would have been on the BBC’s excellent Sportsweek programme yesterday. He’s unpredictable. Our village – Styal, in south Manchester – is the one where Fury grew up and even in those early years you always trod with trepidation where that family was concerned. My eldest, Ben, who was at primary school with Tyson, has always remembered a particular cupboard at the Furys’ place. The one on top of which Ben found refuge when the risk factors attached to the family’s dog seemed less than clear, one day. Tyson and the local Traveller community at that time would come and go, and the pupil numbers at the tiny school periodically suffered. But there was love and life in that home and that, when it all comes down to it, helps to make champions.