Muscle Fitness Muscle & Fitness UK - April 2018 | Page 132

S P O RT S
PERFORMANCE
BORN TO WIN
T town of Bletchley was home
HE QUIET BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
to the secret code breakers who
stealthily worked away behind the
scenes during WW2 and many
years later this same small town on
the outskirts of Milton Keynes was
home to another secretive being.
Greg Rutherford managed to
anonomously arrive at his home
Olympics without hardly anybody
knowing his name and walk away with
a gold medal. Now Bletchley’s most
famous son has an 8m high statue in
the middle of a roundabout on the
A421 so he is certainly no longer a
secret…but he did have one last piece
of undisclosed news to share with
M&F’s Mark Laws from his sun
soaked balcony in Dubai.
As a youngster Greg played multiple
sports, something that seems to be
a common denominator with all
Olympians. Rugby, Football and
Badminton were among his favourites
but in his early teens he started to
notice that Long Jump was something
he was much better than average at.
“I recognised at around 13-14 years
old that I was pretty good at Long
Jump, but I didn’t begin to take it
seriously until I had been through
a mid-late teen naughty phase. At
around 18 years old I decided to buck
my ideas up”.
From an early age Rutherford
decided that he wanted to be a
professional sportsman so it was just
a case of trying as many sports as
possible until something stood out.
“I actually started out in Athletics as
a sprinter. I was pretty good as a local
level sprinter and was the fastest in
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MUSCLE & FITNESS / APRIL 2018
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BY MARK L AWS /// PHOTOGR APHS BY BRITISH ATHLETICS
Milton Keynes until some kid called
Craig Pickering came along. Then
I found the jumps, switched to Long
Jump and all of a sudden I was ranked
in the top 10-15 nationally within my
age group”.
The rebellious phase was over, he
was ready to knuckle down and the
plan to be able to perform a sport
as his job had been reduced from
‘pipe-dream’ status to a ‘slight
possibility if you work really hard’.
Work hard is exactly what he did,
and the tipping point was soon to
come in 2005 as the future Olympian
became the youngest ev