Athletics: Moore's almanac: why Christina is boxing clever over Charlotte's future

The carnival is over. It has been for four days now for the track and field athletes of the Commonwealth. The leading lights of the English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish teams have already moved on to Munich, though not the British athlete who produced the most stunning performance on the red carpet of the City of Manchester Stadium track. Having broken through the two-minute barrier for 800m at the age of 17, and put down a world-class marker for the future, Charlotte Moore will be on holiday in Edinburgh when the spotlight shifts to the European championships in the Bavarian capital.

"Yeah, I will be relaxed," she says, considering the prospect of watching the action from the giant Olympiastadion on television. "It'll be nice to know I've run with some of the girls and that I could be competitive in big races like that, because when you look at races on television you think, 'Oh, I'd love to be there one day,' and now, having been in the Commonwealth final, I've got the experience. It's just nice to know that I would be able to do something like that if I were in the situation again." It is indeed. And, for the time being, it is quite staggering to reflect that the growing teenager has already done it, mixed with the world's best (and in women's 800m running they don't come any better than Maria Mutola, the world and Olympic champion, who retained her Commonwealth crown in Manchester) and crossed the two-minute threshold that separates the world's elite from the rest – all before she enters her A-level year at Bournemouth School for Girls.

As it happens, no one is more staggered than the woman who was the first from Britain to beat the second minute on the clock for running two laps of an outdoor track. Christina Boxer was 22 when she achieved that half-milestone feat at the European Cup final in Turin in August 1979. She was among the 38,000 crowd in the City of Manchester Stadium last Monday night when the scoreboard flashed up Moore's time in sixth place in the final.

"One... 59... 75," she says, pausing between each number. "I still can't believe it." It just so happens that the British woman who broke down the two-minute barrier is the coach behind the girl who followed through it on Monday night.

"I was was with Charlotte's mum and dad," Boxer reflects, sheltering from a Mancunian monsoon in an electric buggy parked outside the stadium. "They're lovely parents, Alison and Bob. They don't push Charlotte. When the result came up and we saw the figure '1' we just looked at each other and gasped. 1min 59.75sec! I knew she could run fast, but for a 17-year-old it's just..." The runner-turned-coach fails to find her conclusion. Even in her state of euphoria, she appreciates that precisely what Moore's performance means has yet to be determined. Yes, her young charge has shown the world-class form of a senior athlete, but whether she will develop into a world-beating senior remains to be seen.

"The hardest job for me now is stopping people from putting too much expectation on her," Boxer says earnestly. "All I want to say to people is, 'Remember Linsey Macdonald. Remember the youngsters we've had that we've raved about. Just please remember that, because if you put too much pressure and too much expectation on them, then they could just become somebody young who you remember and not somebody older who you're watching and enjoying.'

"With young ones, if you can make everyone appreciate it's a long-term plan and that you've got plenty of time, you take away the fear of failure and then sometimes they're able to just do what they are naturally capable of doing. It is just trying not to get carried away with it all, with the hype. That's what's important now." Not that Moore herself would appear to be in any danger of being swept along on a tidal wave of hyperbole. She is as mature and impressive a character off the track as she is on it.

"At least no one has called you 'the next Kelly Holmes'," her coach says to her. "No," Moore responds, "because I'm not the next Kelly Holmes. I'm just... I'm just another athlete. I just love the sport and I'm really enjoying my time at the moment. I'm having a great time.

"The thing is it's all right running 1:59 as a junior but you've got to make the progression to a senior and keep improving, because that's what counts. I've got to take it step by step. Breaking two minutes is just one of those steps." It is a pretty big step, though, for a girl of 17 who started the season with a personal best of 2min 05.68sec and who ran in the Commonwealth Games trials, instead of the south west schools' championships, only when an invitation arrived out of the blue. With her run in the Manchester final, which followed a 2:02.39 clocking in the trials and a British junior record of 2:00.95 in the semi-finals, Moore became the second-youngest teenage girl to break two minutes. Maria Hubner was 16 when she ran 1:59.65 in Chemnitz in 1979. Nothing much was heard of the East German wunderkind again.

One suspects it will be different with Moore, and not just because of the huge potential she showed as one of three Britons to duck under two minutes last Monday (behind Susan Scott and ahead of Jo Fenn, who partners Kelly Holmes in the 800m in Munich). In Boxer, her guiding light for 18 months now, the Bournemouth girl has a coach who is handling her progress with extreme care. Moore's training is high on quality but low on intensity and lower still on mileage. Boxer does not believe in heavy load, let alone overload.

She has a shrewd brain too. In steering her protégée towards the Commonwealth Games rather than the world junior championships, she had in mind the long-term benefits Steve Cram enjoyed after running in the 1500m heats at the 1978 Games in Edmonton as a 17-year-old. Four years later, at the 1982 Games, Cram was a Commonwealth 1500m champion. So was Boxer. She won the women's 1500m in Brisbane.

It is sobering to think that Moore wasn't even born then. On a recent trip to Edinburgh, where Boxer works for the Scottish Athletics Federation as manager of Jog Scotland, a national programme for recreational runners, the 17-year-old runner asked her 45-year-old coach if she could see some videotapes of her in action. "I thought she was really gutsy," Moore says. "I really liked the way she committed herself every time. It did teach me something, definitely." The teacher has already scuttled away in a temporary state of embarrassment. Moore might well have done the same had she been around earlier when Boxer was asked whether watching her pupil break two minutes meant more to her than actually doing it herself as the first British woman. "Oh it does," the Roger Bannister of British women's middle distance running replied, "because Charlotte's going to be a much better runner than I was."