James Lawton: Coe insists cricketers should avoid the trap of empty gesture

Experience of Moscow Olympics enables former athletics champion to understand pressures on Hussain's team to stay out of Zimbabwe

Lord Coe, who defied the high priestess of his Conservative party when he ran for gold in the Moscow Olympics, this morning offers England's morally embattled cricketers a way out of their Zimbabwe dilemma.

"It is crazy," he says, "for anyone to say that by entering Harare stadium Nasser Hussain and his players are becoming agents for Robert Mugabe.

"The World Cup is not a political event and England can fulfill their contractual obligations without shaking hands with Mugabe. When Steve Ovett, Daley Thompson, Tessa Sanderson, Allan Welles and I collected our medals the Olympic anthem was played. We didn't have to shake hands with Brezhnev – we didn't approve the invasion of Afghanistan.

"No sporting organisation is obliged to have its representatives fraternise with politicians. It doesn't have to be part of the deal. That was made very clear by the British Olympic Association before we went to Moscow. We didn't go to any receptions, anything that suggested we were other than athletes competing in a sporting event.

"If the government wants more than that from the cricketers, if they want sport to make gestures which have not been asked of business, they should be prepared to foot the bill, but as we know talk is cheap.

"What is obvious is that events – and the attitude of the government – have placed the cricketers in a terribly difficult situation, and they have my great sympathy, It is a grotesque interpretation to categorise sportsmen in this kind of situation as automatons who have no feelings about issues beyond the playing of their sport.

"Cricketers are also human beings and I'm sure they feel about dictators who preside over hell-holes pretty much as any other decent person would."

In a perfect world, of course, the England and Wales Cricket Board would be gently eased off the hook when its officials go along to the Foreign Office today.

The Government would say that giving aid and comfort to Mugabe's disgusting regime is simply not on, no more than is heaping the kind of moral responsibility – and financial cost – on sports administrators that is utterly unknown in the boardrooms of the land. But this, heaven knows, is not a perfect world and it will not happen. The appalling fudge will continue. Cricketing foot-soldiers will be urged to take up the moral high ground without a moment's thought for the professional and fiscal implications for both the individual sportsmen and a game which is already in financial peril.

Compensation, we can be sure, is simply not on. The civil service brief to Foreign Office ministers will follow a classic pattern: "Don't offer compensation, minister, because you just don't know where it will lead. In a couple of years time the cricket people might just come along with another bill, claiming that the original payments did not begin to cover the overall damage caused to the sport."

Another factor will rank in the briefing. Public opinion is against the idea of an English sports hero like Hussain shaking hands with a man guilty of causing wholesale misery and loss of life to all races and classes.

It leaves Hussain and his boys up that stagnant creek where issues of sport and politics tend to finish up. However, they do have the comfort of at least one high-profile witness to the extent of their problem.

Sebastian Coe was in in his early twenties when he defied Maggie Thatcher. His father and coach, Peter, was called to the Foreign Office to be told why it was so important that the world record-breaking star should stay at home as the Russians waged war in Afghanistan.

The young politician making the case was the future Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd. "I've laughed about it with Douglas since," says Coe, "but it wasn't so funny at the time. I also thought it was curious that as an economics and politics graduate I wasn't considered capable of thinking it through myself. I suppose it might just have said something about how sportsmen are generally regarded in political circles.

"It was a terrible business to go through at that age. I found myself agonising over the issue at three or four in the morning. You feel the weight of the world on you at a time like that.

"Now I'm on the board of a company who were threatened with a fine of $10m by the American government if they co-operated with the Moscow Olympics. I didn't like the Carter administration's boycott of Moscow, but at least they took the issue away from the athletes – and they were consistent."

Coe's own consistency is, he believes, uncompromised by his support of the cricketers. It is true he was voluble in his criticism of players like Mike Gatting, Graham Gooch, and the current chairman of selectors David Graveney, when they toured a South Africa which still enforced apartheid 10 years after his own defiance of the Moscow boycott.

But Coe argues that there were a whole different set of circumstances, including today's fact that Zimbabewan sport is free of all racial prejudice. "Back then," says Coe, "there was so much happening under the surface. Nelson Mandela was very close to being released from prison, and there was a real sense of change. I visited some of the townships, including the one near Cape Town where the practice of 'necklacing' [execution of collaborators with a burning tyre] originated. As a vice-chairman of the Sports Council, I just couldn't support any contact with a South African sports system which didn't show a single black face."

Coe's central point is that the cricketers of England are being asked to carry the entire load of government disapproval of Zimbabwe's tyrannical government, and it is hard to argue against his belief that it is shaping up as one of the supreme examples of empty-gesture politics.

Sport, he concedes, has to be touched by the world to retain both its point and any sense of moral purpose. But that does not mean it has to be a charge-free dumping ground for a nation – and a government's – conscience. Amen.