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Coe and Ovett's Olympic debt to bureaucrat who defied Thatcher | Andy Bull

British Olympic Association chairman Sir Denis Follows was determined not to join the Moscow Games boycott in 1980, to the fury of the prime ministerSir Denis Follows, 71, short and bald, started every day’s work by opening his post. It was a habit he’d had as secretary of the Football Association, and a habit he kept as chairman of the British Olympic Association. In between the two jobs, he’d been knighted. Which was some going, for the son of a stationmaster, but it hadn’t changed him much. He still wore a pair of thick horn rims, still worried about putting on weight, was still the same avuncular, pragmatic man who had kept the Jules Rimet trophy under his bed and...

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