You have to listen very carefully if you want to hear what David Rudisha has to say. This 22-year-old product of Kenya's Rift Valley, who broke the world 800 metres record not once but twice in the space of a week last year, speaks ever so softly; but his words are worth straining for.

At the press conference held in the Croydon Park Hotel yesterday to publicise the two-day Samsung Diamond League meeting at Crystal Palace, Rudisha recalled how the man who held the 800m record for just over 16 years until 1997 had inspired him, both indirectly and directly, to claim it for himself.

We are talking here, naturally, of Sebastian Coe.

In recent years, Rudisha said he had studied a number of Coe's races on YouTube to enhance his career. The two men met for the first time last June at the Samsung Diamond League meeting in Oslo, where the Kenyan beat Coe's 31-year-old stadium - and initially world - record of 1min 42.33sec, recording 1:42.04 to win a monumental race against Sudan's double World Indoor champion Abubaker Kaki, whom he meets for the first time this season today at the Aviva London Grand Prix.

"Sebastian congratulated me and told me, 'You are the future of the 800 metres'," Rudisha recalled. "He told me that if I trained hard and kept focused, I was capable of breaking the world record.

"I was really happy and felt encouraged. I felt that if he thought I was capable of achieving that, I would keep it to myself and take it into my training and work harder."


Looking forward to London 2012, which Coe has played a key part in delivering in his capacity as chairman of the organising committee, Rudisha added: "It's so special that the Olympics will be in London and in the country of such a great athlete as Sebastian Coe. I think it will also boost me. He is now my friend and we have been talking together and he has been encouraging me. Being there is going to be very special."

But if Coe has played an inspirational role as far as Rudisha is concerned, the same turns out to be true for Kaki.

Speaking to Kaki's coach, Jama Aden, before the press conference in which Rudisha was involved, it became clear that the double Olympic 1500m champion had also played a crucial part in shaping the attitude and approach of the Kenyan's greatest rival.

Although he was a bronze medallist over 1500m at the 2005 World Youth Championships, Kaki - who is six months younger than Rudisha - has not run the longer distance for many years.

But at last month's Diamond League meeting in Monaco Kaki produced a startling result as he came third in the 1500m behind two of the event's leading Kenyans, Silas Kiplagat and Nixon Chepseba, in a time of 3:31.76.

It was a lot faster than Kaki had been expecting. It was certainly a lot faster than Aden had expected.

"I thought maybe Kaki would do 3.34, 3.35," Aden said. "I didn't expect him to do 3.31."

It was immediately after this race that Kaki reminded Aden of the time in 2008 where they had shared a car with Coe as they travelled to a press conference before the DN Galan meeting in Stockholm.

"Kaki remembered how Seb had asked about his time for 800," said Aden. "And when he told him he had run 1.42.69, which was the world junior record, Seb had said 'In London you should do the 800 and 1500'."

"Kaki never mentioned that conversation until after Monaco. It must have been in the back of his mind all that time."

And doubling up at London 2012 is exactly what Kaki intends to do. The Coe factor, it seems, goes on and on.


While Kaki will be well aware of how difficult it will be to prevent Rudisha winning the titles he is fixed on at this season's World Championships and at London 2012, he will also be well aware of the difficulties looming ahead for him in the metric mile next year and beyond.

Not least because he trains regularly in the Aden group with the 16-year-old whom their coach described to me this week as "the future of 1500 metres running" - Hamza Driouch, who won the B race at last month's Stockholm Diamond League in a personal best of 3min 35.73sec.

Aden, not a man given to hyperbole, compares his young Qatari athlete to the man who still holds the mile and 1500m world records in retirement, Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj.

If the time comes when young Hamza starts to bear that bold prediction out, what are the odds, I wonder, against him mentioning Seb Coe?

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames. Rowbottom's Twitter feed can be accessed here.