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Chapter 1.2
Jason Bradbury and Lord Seb Coe
The stars were aligning when Jason Bradbury ended up introducing me to my childhood hero, Seb Coe.
Jason left me with the biggest opportunity that I may ever get in my working life. If Jason hadn’t introduced me to Seb Coe in June 2016, whilst jointly doing an event that was compared by Jake Humphrey for BMW at the Roundhouse, then we wouldn’t have been able to help Seb achieve in some small way his vision to introduce change and innovation in athletics.
The reputation of the IAAF and Athletics had been tarnished by events that came to light a year before I met him. As the president he wanted to restore the reputation, credibility and trust within his sport and the wider world of sport. He was about to change and rebuild his organisation for the next generation of athletes that had lost trust in the IAAF.
By Harvey Thorneycroft
Chapter 1: Professor Iain Hennessey, Jason Bradbury and Lord Seb Coe
Professor Iain Hennessey
A few days before we ran our Brilliant Minds Showcase at Lords, I made a call to speak to Professor Iain Hennessey, a truly remarkable man. He was the only person I trusted with the answer to my question: should we go ahead?
The date was 5th March 2020. The night before, I had attended an event at the Hurlingham Club, a testimonial for Tom Smith, the Northampton Saint, who was part of the British and Irish Lions squad that beat South Africa in 1997. Many of his teammates attended that night, including many of mine, as, like me, he had played for years at Northampton. In November 2019, he had revealed that he had been given a diagnosis of stage four cancer. That night in March, over 500 people had come together for Tom in a fundraising dinner. People were nervous. There were rumours that this would probably be the last of its kind for some time, but the spirit of rugby shone through for Tom: the rugby world was looking after its own.
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