1. Here’s a thread I’m going to call ‘The Strange True Story of the Stolen Steve Ovett Statue’:

2. When I moved to Brighton 25 years ago I noticed a statue of the great man in Preston Park. Ovett was a Brighton boy and in 1987 the local council honoured him with a statue, near the Rotunda Café that his folks used to run.

3. This pleased me very much. Ovett was one of my teenage heroes. If you were even vaguely interested in athletics in the late 70s / early 80s you were pretty much obliged to be either a Steve-guy or Seb Coe-guy.

4. I was instinctively an Ovett man. Seb Coe was well-groomed, well-spoken and media-friendly. Steve was more self-conscious, sometimes a tad abrasive and didn’t always talk to the press. Rightly or wrongly, I got the impression Steve was a regular guy …

5. … a sort of real-life Alf Tupper (the working class runner from the Victor comic who won races through sheer guts + gumption and who had a habit of stopping off to buy fish and chips on the way home from training).

6. I've run most of my adult life. I find it good for the head + heart and a strangely effective way of fixing problems in my work. My fave shoes are Nike Pegasus Zoom, which are no longer manufactured, so I now have to track them down on the blackmarket …

7. So in the late 90s I'd often run through Preston Park and whenever I passed Statue Steve I’d give him a little nod and imagine the Real Steve somewhere giving me his own sweet benediction.

8. Until one day I ran through the park and Steve was gone! I thought maybe they’d taken him away to be cleaned. But no! Some ne’er-do-wells had stolen Steve. Cut him off at the ankle and dragged him away to melt him down for cash-money.

9. Well, I was horrified. The local paper reported that ‘police retrieved the statue's left leg from a bonfire’ (!)… and that ‘they stumbled across further pieces scattered around the area’ (!). Oh man. Steve had been butchered!

10. Local wags claimed that someone answering Seb Coe’s description had been seen in the vicinity on the night of the incident, etc. But the whole nasty business remained unresolved.

11. Anyway, time passed. Then, quite a few years later, I heard that the original sculptor, Peter Webster, had been commissioned to create a Second Steve which was to go on a podium on the seafront where the Brighton Marathon finishes.

12. It turned out Peter and I had a mutual friend. We met and I briefly convinced myself I'd write something about Brighton’s lost + stolen monuments. There used to be a ‘sputnik’ on the seafront and I know the man who bought it when it was on its way to the scrapyard.

13. In 2012 I did a writing residency at the Science Museum – one of the most enjoyable experiences of my so-called career + largely due to me working with @loobilou and @hannah_redler who commissioned me to write something to coincide with the London Olympics.

14. The booklet was basically just an essay about running from a strictly non-elite p.o.v. and went into the rather odd friendship I have with my running mate who is, politically, socially, professionally, pretty much the opposite to me. I also wrote a bit about Statue Steve.

15. Then I heard that not only was Steve Mark II due to be unveiled, but – get this! – Actual Steve was going to be over from Australia to cover the Olympics and would be in attendance!!

16. I got myself invited. I chatted to Steve’s wife. She offered to introduce me to Actual Steve. I declined. Felt it would be Too Much. I have a hunch Steve wld later turn to his wife + say, ‘Who was that guy you were talking to? He was staring at me like Travis f*cking Bickle.’

17. So the new statue is up. No-one has stolen Steve II. I recently visited to take a pic and had to wait because there was another guy taking snaps ahead of me. He said he’d cycled over from Worthing and that he and his wife were big Steve fans. (We are legion!)

18. All this has been rattling round my head because when lockdown came, Preston Park - and every other park - was suddenly very important. Lots of us were running + walking + scooting + cycling (which reminds me of this Shirley Hughes pic from 'We Went To The Park')

19. I was really enjoying my running. Then about a month ago this happened. I’d love to tell you I did it haring across the south downs. The truth is I tripped on the stairs, running to answer my phone.

20. So, no running. Instead I’ve been using Preston Park's velodrome! Again, people of all ages cycling, jogging, scooting, working out + giving each other plenty of room. I’d assumed the velodrome was put up quite recently but it turns out it’s the oldest in the country.

21. So, a couple of things. First, thank-you, Preston Park. If the pandemic has taught us anything it’s surely that every one of us needs access to green space.

22. Btw, it occurs to me that one of the projects I was researching during my residency at the @sciencemuseum in 2012 is the novel I hope to complete later this year … which gives you some idea how long it takes me to get an idea up onto its feet.

23. Finally, I was in Preston Park a few days ago and took this pic. The foot of the original Steve Statue is still there, 23 years after the statue was stolen. Is that not a teeny bit weird?

24. But it occurs to me that the foot is itself a monument – to the theft of the Original Steve. A Foot of Defiance. And, in my mind at least, a monument to all the joggers + cyclists + walkers + scooters who’ve been using the parks for their daily exercise since mid-March …