Rob Blackhurst

It is not quite as painful as the sub-zero Peak District training runs of his youth, but tonight Sebastian Coe is learning about a new kind of physical discomfort.

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We are three and a half hours into a planning meeting at Woolwich Town Hall to decide whether the London borough's councillors will allow Greenwich Park – a world heritage site – to have its turf trampled and ancient oaks disturbed as host venue for the equestrian events for the 2012 Olympics. So far, through either municipal tradition or as a misguided tactic to keep contributions short, there have been no comfort breaks. Coe, two-time Olympic Gold medallist and chair of the organising committee for the London games, sits ramrod straight with his advisors as dozens of opponents take the microphone to air their complaints. It's already ten o clock.

The occasion may feel like a slice of sleepy Englishness – with 12 councillors from the planning committee sitting poker-faced around a table in a draughty Victorian hall - but it is serious business for Coe and his organising committee. A powerful residents group has been established, NOGOE (No to Greenwich Olympic Equestrian Events), to oppose the plans to create a cross-country park and a 23,000-seat temporary stadium on what historian David Starkey describes in a letter to The Times as "the finest assemblage of baroque buildings in northern Europe". And Coe – and his games - has been cast as the villain

The objectors, some in NOGOE T-shirts, queue to complain: one elderly man claims that closing the park to the public for the four-week duration of the games breaks ancient by-laws. Cyclists worry about access. Tree-preservation activists with slides of ancient sweet-chestnut trees worry about whether the pruning will be too severe. Surreally, there are questions about the shortcomings of a bat survey carried out during the previous autumn. Each objection is greeted by wild pantomime applause from the floor.

As we near midnight, Coe moves to the microphone to make a practical case couched in the boilerplate language of "partnership" and "consultation". He struggles through questions about bat habitats and ambulance response times, but it's on occasions like these that the mystique of being a former Olympic champion is useful in overriding logistical concerns. In his racing days, he recalls, he would use the park to compose himself "physically and mentally" before big events. He ends with a stirring call for the councillors to "lend the park to the world ". After a long, drawn-out denouement and some fierce questioning from the councillors ("What has 'lending the park to the world' got to do with planning law?"), they vote by 10-2 to grant Coe his permission. By 1am, another small step on the road to London 2012 has been taken.

When I meet him in his office on the 23rd floor of a Canary Wharf tower, Coe says he is very aware that the buck for ensuring that London's four weeks of sport are remembered as a Sydney-style triumph, and not an Atlanta-style flop, stops with him. From his office window he can see the Millennium Dome, which in two years will be the venue for the games' artistic gymnastics, trampoline and basketball but also doubles as a constant reminder of the perils of large infrastructure projects in Britain.

Though he doesn't have to manage the infrastructure projects (building the venues is the responsibility of the government funded Olympic Delivery Authority) he knows that he is publicly answerable for the fate of the games. He has to make concrete the stirring dreams about "increased participation" and a "sporting legacy" that he sold to the International Olympic Committee in Singapore five years ago when London won its bid. And he has to do it in the face of a public debt crisis, a country that has good reason to be sceptical of grand projets – after the cost over-runs that have afflicted everything from Wembley Stadium to the Scottish Parliament.

So far London 2012 has avoided a full-scale media backlash – but there is an underlying scepticism about how much the Olympics will deliver, and whether they will be able to keep to their vast budget. On the morning I begin to shadow Coe, the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Edward Leigh, describes the Olympic contingency fund as "worryingly tight". And over the weekend an article on the "Olympic Curse" by Dominic Lawson crystallizes the case for the prosecution. Tourism will suffer as usual visitors are put off by the thought of Olympic crowds; travelling around an already crowded city will be made impossible by the special lanes cordoned off for the limousines carrying IOC dignitaries and the finances of the project are based on over-estimations of the value of property (made during the boom) which will leave a hole in the Olympic's finances when they finally come to sell off the park.

In fact, the Olympic project has already has gone massively over its original budget – but unlike the Millennium Dome, the cost over-run was deftly announced in one go rather than through a corrosive trickle of steadily increasing costs. In 2007, the budget almost quadrupled overnight from £2.4 billion to £9.35 billion – blamed at the time on an increase in the estimated costs of cleaning up the Lea Valley.

Coe is painfully aware that the press could turn at any moment: "I know that if there is a delay in part of the infrastructure in somebody else's bailiwick - it is unlikely to be the chairman of the ODA (Olympic Development Agency) who has to explain to the IOC," he says. "When you've had a great games people don't say it was the Sydney Organising Committee or the Olympic Delivery Agency. They just say it was "Sydney".

The night after his appearance at Woolwich Town Hall, Coe seems temporarily demob happy. He concedes could have been "tricky" and adopts a philosophical attitude towards the planning process: "I concede it through gritted teeth but it does make you a better organization – the fact that we came up at a pretty serious moment against twelve people on the planning committee and had to make the case for Greenwich Park. It's a national treasure – so we'd better have some pretty good answers".

At 53 he still looks incredibly fit, like an older brother of the stringy athlete who with Steve Ovett, Steve Cram and Peter Elliott saw Britain lead the world in middle distance running in the early to mid 1980s. He tries to run every other day, despite his schedule, though these days he pounds country roads rather than professional running tracks, "If I don't run for two days everyone else starts to notice," he says – perhaps referring to a temper that these days seems equable – but was famous among journalists when he was William Hague's Chief of Staff.

The famed "Coe kick" –most famously deployed at the 1980 Moscow Olympics when he unexpectedly drew ahead of Ovett in the final bend to win the 1500 metres - still has practical applications. On a trip a few years ago to watch the football team he supports, Chelsea, play in Barcelona, he got out of his taxi and ran down gridlocked roads back to the airport to make his flight home.

Coe has agreed that I can shadow him for a week in spring to get a sense of what his work involves –an odd combination of circus ringmaster, branding consultant, motivational speaker, event promoter and CEO. The mundane experience of his day-to-day work is a country mile away from the glamour of an Olympic opening ceremony. In my week with him, I see him waiting for twenty minutes to answer three questions on the Midlands Today regional news bulletin about why the people of Stoke-on-Trent should care about the Olympics.

Even then, he's knocked off the top of the running order by an item on flood warnings. I've seen him struggle to turn a pot at Wedgewood in Staffordshire as a photo-op for the Evening Sentinel, and make the same stump speech again and again about the importance of grass-roots sport. I've seen him appear on the One Show to argue against Olympic sceptics; and sit in a school class-room in Haringey judging a competition on who is the greatest hero – out of a potentially hazardous short list that includes Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama and God.

This part of the job feels like the kind of schedule that might fill the days of a minor member of the Royal Family. But it fulfils a purpose: keeping the Olympic flame alive in the regions of the UK that are paying for the games–but who are often sceptical that they will see any direct benefits.

Coe's schedule, and the casual dress code of the staff, feels like they could belong to a Creative Director in a Clerkenwell Ad Agency. I join in him as a rare fly-on-the-wall his office as he discuss the "Adcepts" (Concepts for adverts) that launch the volunteering programme later this year; I see him meet his Ticking Director to see how interest in the events is shaping up; and watch some of the behind-the-scenes sponsorship meetings.

The first meeting is with senior staff at University College London, who are in to discuss whether they could get sponsorship for a popular science event they want to hold on the eve of the Olympics, entitled "What Makes a Champion?" The president of University College, NAME, enquires what the commercial partner would want in return. "Hospitality, some of their eminent partners at the event–and a money-can't-buy-opportunity" says Chris Townsend, the LOCOG Commercial Director: "We would go through our list of sponsors and work out who we'd recommend."

A brainstorm follows of speakers who could talk about sport and medical ethics. Coe draws on his years pressing the flesh in sports politics and competing on the international circuit to suggest – in the same sentence - former Olympic sailors who have degrees in medicine and experts on drug testing as well as household sporting names. He has, in his various incarnations as an "athlete, jobbing journo, broadcaster, and bidder" attended every summer Games since Moscow in 1980 (Apart from 1988 in Seoul when he was unexpectedly not selected for the British Team) and can talk in detail about all kinds of Olympic trivia: the T-shirts worn by volunteers in Sydney; the problems getting volunteers to clock off their shifts when they had finished in LA; and Dutch sports tourists' tendency to bring their camper vans to the Olympics. At the end the meeting Townsend lays down the stern conditions that commercial partners have to accept. "Whatever content you create has got to address Olympic and Paralympic Champions".

Later in the day, I sit on a meeting to discuss the ticketing registration scheme, launched the previous week, to build up a database of sports fan interested in applying for tickets. This is a nervous moment for Coe because it will be the first tangible proof of public interest in the games. The new infrastructure – the stadium, the swimming pool, and the aquatic centre – will be paid for by £9.3bn of almost entirely government money. But the organising committee, which is responsible for staging the games, is a company with a £2bn budget that is almost entirely privately financed through sponsorship, merchandising and ticket sales, and a portion of the international TV rights. Any profits that it makes will be ploughed back into grassroots sport.

Coe hopes that by creating a focused database they will avoid empty seats in the stadia – especially for the more minority-interest events. Chris Townsend, who previously worked at Sky in database marketing, explains how this works: "This is the first games in which the power of the web has been unleashed to target tickets directly to interest groups. We are targeting sports fans and won't spend hundreds of millions of pounds advertising tickets to everyone". Paul Williamson, Head of Tickets, chips in: "In a sport like hockey we have been working out who plays, how many people are in a club and how do we e-mail them."

Coe asks for a read-out of the most popular sports in the ballot. Predictably, events with British medal hopes like athletics and swimming and diving are near the top- along with football. Equestrianism also does well. "The Zara factor?" suggests his press officer. But tickets have also proved popular in sports where there are few traditions of British success like handball and wrestling. "Given that there's never been a commercial handball ticket in the UK, it's very encouraging," says Coe. "Though I did think that beach volleyball would be a lot higher," he says with a half-smile.

I ask Coe whether London is the first games to really use the power of social media. "The lessons for us from Beijing [in 2008] are not many because it's such a different place," he says tactfully avoiding any reference to China's great firewall. "The lessons from Athens [2004] are not very many because it was so much smaller. We've got much more in common with Sydney [in 2000] – but that was pre-internet. Only a very few of the last tickets were sold online".

Later that afternoon we take the Docklands Light Railway to the Olympic Park in Stratford, east of Canary Wharf. Amid a drab cityscape of council blocks, the mounds of earth and a tangle of cranes have given way to something which looks recognisably like a sports venue: the floodlights on the blancmange-bowl shaped stadium have just been hoisted into place, the swimming pools are being to test for leaks, and the futuristic curved roof has been added to the Velodrome where the cycling will take place. We head to the View Tube, a new café on the edge of the Olympic Park, where Coe is joining the then Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell to launch the 25th Hour – a volunteering scheme under the Olympic brand in which people are encouraged to donate an hour each week to their communities. All the discussion of knitting blankets and helping elderly neighbours with their shopping seems a long way from the track and field venues taking shape next door.

As we walk on the Greenway, one of the new permanent walkways that have been created, amid the high clink of hammering and the low drone of trucks, the conveyor belts of the "soil hospital" are sieving and shaking out a century of industrial pollution – mostly tar and oil - from the excavated earth. Coe reminds himself of the daunting task ahead: "The complexity is of a completely different order from the delivery of any major championship," he says: "In my sport we give one city five years to deliver a World Athletics Championship. Now we are giving one city five years to deliver [the equivalent of] 26 simultaneous World Championships – and do the same again with the Paralympics. It's the ability to move 15,000 athletes around the city. It's the ability to use 22,000 technical officials. It's the 22,000 members of the international media that descend on your city. We are really working very hard now".

I ask what is his greatest worry about the Games. "I run the risk of giving you a MacMillan answer which is "Events, dear boy. Events". It's the things we don't know about. You wouldn't want to start the games as Athens did with two of their poster children going down or missing a random drug test. That's where you look for leadership in the Governing bodies".

And what about the outcome that the public and politicians fear the most – that they will be left with an even bigger bill to pay than they've already prepared for. Is he confident that he won't leave the taxpayer with a gaping black hole? "Yes, I am. Absolutely. The question I often get asked is are you getting sleepless nights? And the answer is "No". I am surrounded by some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. The hallmark of any good business is the ability to raise revenue and we've done that; we've maintained control over costs extraordinarily well. And the third thing is buying smart. I've no doubt that we will get there". The economic downturn has helped – increasing the ODA's bargaining power with suppliers.

Construction, now slightly ahead of schedule, will be ready next summer. Each of the 26 Olympic venues – will be tested with a real event – a full-blown athletics meet or even a Scout jamboree to test whether the toilets and the turnstiles work properly. Despite the London 2012 moniker, several events will be outside the city: the rowing is taking place at Windsor, the mountain bike course will be near Southend, and the waters off Weymouth will host the sailing.

Coe is keeping quiet about the swift progress as a check on any false confidence: "We used to have a joke in the whips' office," he says, referring to his time as an MP. "Somebody would say: 'It looks alright.' Someone else would look at his watch and say: 'it's only lunchtime.'"

As a Tory Whip in the dying embers of the Major administration and William Hague's Chief of Staff when he was Leader of the Opposition against a giddily popular Tony Blair, Coe knows what it feels like to be losing media battles. I remind him that, when Chief of Staff, he had a reputation for putting his hand over photographers' lenses to stop him taking unflattering pictures of Hague. He winces at the memory of having to prevent Krusty the Clown, dispatched by the Daily Mirror on the election trail, from posing for a photo with Hague. "I knew I should give up politics when, having arrived home one Saturday lunchtime, my son said: "Dad, why were you wrestling a clown on TV?"

Nowadays he has been "effectively politically decommissioned" and spends his time maintaining the cross-party alliance in favor of the Olympics – though during the election he found himself missing the logistics of organizing an election campaign – as he did for William Hague: "When I'm out on the road there are parts of the programme that I take quite an interest in – who we are seeing and where we are going, knowing where the media slots are. That interests me more than the cut and thrust. I always wanted to be associated with a well-organized campaign".

Now that the Conservatives have returned to power – and his old boss has been appointed First Secretary in the Cabinet, Coe should prevent the Conservatives from distancing themselves from the spending decisions made on the Olympics before they came to power. As severe cuts in the public sector loom, it may be that Coe's influence is needed in the party to fight the Olympic's corner.

Aside from the critical mauling that the garish Olympic logo received three years ago, 2012 has so far avoided a relentless drip-drip of media criticism. Coe attributes this to methodical planning and an unglamorous focus on everything that could go wrong. He says the athletics calendar has been good psychological preparation for the 2012 deadline: "As an athlete there were great periods of your life that were neither particularly palatable or exciting – just grinding out ninety miles a week. You just had to carry on".

Coe seems more suited than any other sportsman to the well-trodden motivational writing circuit. The Sporting and the Managerial Coe seem entirely blurred – just as in his office the memoirs of the former Next Chairman David Jones sit alongside a book by Roger Bannister. Even his own autobiography isn't the standard sports fare of after-dinner anecdotes but is a pop- business handbook "The Winning Mind: My Inside track on Great Leadership". It might be that this drily corporate image is why Coe has retained slightly aloof reputation. He's much warmer than his reputation allows, but he's still goal-focused, hates lateness, and points out the pitfalls of any suggested strategy with the precision of an athlete plotting a race. He has a Spartan attitude towards his sporting successes, too, that seems to come from a different age. There are no signs of his Olympic achievements in his office; and his medals previously mislaid, have only just turned up at the bottom of a packing case following a house-move.

Whether it makes him a better manager or not, his status as an Olympic gold-medallist was probably essential to winning the bid five years ago in Singapore since he was only speaker, of all the bid cities, who had been to an Olympics as a competitor: "Nobody else could talk about life in the village, nobody could talk about what it was like to be twelve or thirteen years old, picking up track and field at a school in Sheffield and getting to the Olympic games" he says "This wasn't a travel show: this wasn't hotel occupancy rates and better shopping opportunities".

He was chosen to lead the Olympic bid because of the imaginative power of that misty age – when Britain led the world in middle distance running. In 1979 Coe toppled the 800, 1500 and mile world records over a period of 41 days; won the 1500 metres at the Olympics in 1980 and 1984; and set eight outdoor and three indoor world records. His rivalry with Steve Ovett, to be revived in a BBC biopic, saw him pigeon-holed as the straight man while Ovett was the loveable rebel. (Some of these prejudices live on. After the verdict was announced at the Greenwich planning meeting, one of the protestors couldn't resist approaching Coe and muttering: "I always preferred Steve Ovett to you anyway")

But the Olympic Golds still impress school-kids in an age of celebrity. A few days before I had visited a school with Coe near to the Haringey Athletics Club where he had trained, kids born in the mid-nineties hadn't known who he was until a few days before were susceptible to the Olympic mythology. They had looked up blurry YouTube footage of his runs – "from the olden days" one said. "Does he know David Beckham?" they asked "And is he rich?"

The next day Coe leaves London to visit Stoke-on-Trent – one of his regular missions to sell the Olympics to the regions. En route Coe reminisces about running here as a boy in the annual Stoke Schools versus Sheffield Schools fixture, a reminder that – despite his Brideshead Revisited-era-inspired name and his Conservative politics – he is a product of Tapton Secondary Modern in Sheffield. "I think in Sheffield they're only getting over the fact that I did actually become a Conservative MP" says Coe.

After a visit to Wedgwood's factory in Staffordshire to see some of the 2012 merchandise - we reach the wind-blasted cold of Trentham Lake, where canoeists from six to undergraduate age are training. Before an audience of shivering wetsuits, proud parents, and Team GB hopefuls, Coe is introduced as a man who "runs like the wind". "Used to," he replies under his breath, before giving his standard stump speech thanking all the volunteers who "cut sandwiches in club houses, rake sandpits, marshal in cross country races and provide lifts".

As we watch the flotilla of canoes from a tourist barge, I ask Coe about the widespread perception that, far from helping clubs like this, a gold-plated Olympics is sucking funding out of grass-roots sport. He agrees that previous games have failed to increase overall participation levels: "It is difficult to say across the piece say that Olympic games have resulted in once and for all shifts in participation. They didn't really increase overall in Australia. They didn't really in Athens. But we've a better than even chance of breaking that trend because we're talking about it now – whereas in the past most "legacy issue" conversations tended to take place post-games".

The London 2012 team stress that more than other Olympics, they are spreading the word in schools, with over 14,000 schools signed up to the "Get Set" Education programme on sport. They have a target to "enrich the lives of 12 million children and young people" in 20 countries – though so far only five per cent of schools in London have signed up, compared to over half of schools in Yorkshire.

But wouldn't all those billions be better spent paying for local sports clubs? "I don't think anyone in the UK has an excuse for saying they haven't got facilities any longer – apart from rural areas. For me the issue is the "well stocked shop window" – it's the role models. You need young girls in Liverpool to know that Beth Tweddle – the first [British] girl to win a world gymnastics gold medal – comes from an ordinary background and went to an ordinary school". Hosting an Olympics might seem an expensive way of encouraging the nation's youth to swap their games console for a sports field.

But John Court, a volunteer at Trentham Canoe Club, agrees that it will have an impact "If you a kid from a local school you can com down and try this on a summer's day and think "what a lovely sport". And then there are cold days, there's nothing new about it, and there's a hump you have to get over. Something as big as the games will get you past that. It will also have a rippling out effect, like Wimbledon where everyone picks up a tennis racket for two weeks," he says. In the tearoom, Philip Jones, a local Conservative Councillor is worried about the budget: "Can we afford it? We've had all this controversy about the national insurance rise - and yet this Olympics is costing 9 billion. Whether it will regenerate East London is a matter of complete indifference to me".

I wonder whether this amorphous legacy of "inspiration" and a target of getting 2 million extra people involved in "health-related fitness" enough on which to hang a £9.3 billion public project? Coe thinks that the prospect of the Games is already having an impact – though it hasn't yet been captured in the statistics: "When you go to Stoke and you see fifty kids canoeing at Trentham lake who weren't doing that two years ago – and some of them are edging towards national standard – I think it's happening far and wide. If you ask young people why they are here – in every three or four conversations you have they will use the word: "Olympics".

He acknowledges though, that it is harder to get young people enthused by Olympic sports than it used to be: "One of my inspirations is still coaching in his late seventies. He will tell you that each year it's getting tougher – though the talent is still there. Things in their world tend just to be a little more instantaneous. There are some reality shows where people of little contribution and little ability suddenly become household names. And it's a very difficult challenge when you are a coach at Haringey Athletics Club and you are saying come to the track or the pool. They may not see results for five or six years. And they are watching stuff on TV where people emerge famous after five or six hours"

There will, of course, be a practical Olympic legacy in the regeneration of 15,000 acres of derelict land in the Lower Lea Valley. The ongoing construction work – and the creation of new office jobs on the site after the Olympics – will be welcome on the neighbouring estates where unemployment is running at 35% and skill levels are low. London will be dragged eastwards – creating an unbroken chain of regeneration that starts in Canary Wharf and ends in Stratford.

Aside from the 12,000 new homes, London will get luxurious new sports facilities - from the 25,000 capacity athletic stadium to a Velopark and swimming pools that will be the best in the UK. In the five Olympic host boroughs, "Adizones" – multisport outdoor venues paid for Adidas – will be created that can be used for basketball, football, tennis and dance.

For the regions, the benefits are less certain. They won't get a large slice of the infrastructure pie, though the billions in construction expenditure have been a valuable stimulus in recession. In Stoke, as Coe reminded the local press, a local firm are supplying ceramic tiles for the Olympic village. And over the next year, everything from sports equipment to beds will have to be bought.

And, in the realm of poetry rather than prose, will the pressure of a London Games make it easier or harder for British athletes to win medals? "I would love to have run in front of a home crowd" says Coe wistfully: "Medals will be won because the good athletes will rise to the occasion. Some will need a little more support around. I've told a lot of athletes about [the pressure of] competing domestically in the biggest moment of your career. On the morning of Cathy Freeman's four hundred metre final in Sydney [where she won Gold], the Sydney Morning Herald had the headline: 'The Race of Our Lives'. There will be challenges".

At the end of my week, I meet up with Coe in the canteen at Television Centre after an appearance on The One Show to sell the Olympics to the regions. It's holiday-time and he arrives with a whirl of teenage daughter plus friend in tow. They crowd around a Blackberry to watch a Man United game shouting out the score and giving regular bulletins on the state of Rooney's foot. I ask him, finally, whether his anxiety levels as we approach 2012 compares to that before taking on Steve Ovett in an Olympic Final? "The stakes here marginally more, if I'm honest"

Whether people think the Olympics are worth the vast expenditure is an entirely subjective judgement since the abstract nouns that 2012 has claimed as its own - "inspiration" and "legacy" –are will o the wisps that can't be easily be tabulated. Success or failure will probably be judged, not on the small print of regeneration successes or balance sheets, but according how sunny the national mood is at the time. That, in turn, will probably depend on the Team GB medal count at the closing ceremony.

Coe knows that golden national memories of his track record will not immunize him against a media onslaught if cracks appear in the Olympic project – especially given that it coincides a period of austerity for the rest of public expenditure. And has several laps to go where anything could happen. "There is a higher level of expectation in delivering something of national importance. Sheffield was pretty disappointed when I buggered up the 800 metres in the Moscow Olympics. But I don't kid myself that making a mess on that occasion would be the equivalent to making a mess here".