Big four-o for Daley’s gold mark
DALEY THOMPSON calls it his Sliding Doors moment, the decision that enabled him to become Olympic champion... 40 years ago today.
Thompson (below) would go on to be Britain’s greatest all-round male athlete, winning gold at successive Games as well as one World, two European and three Commonwealth titles.
But none of that might have happened but for an act of defiance by Sir Denis Follows, then chairman of the British Olympic Association.
That is Thompson’s belief, recalling a glittering career and fame he attributes to him being around in the same era as Seb Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram.
“I know for sure that had it not been for Coe, Ovett and Cram I wouldn’t be anywhere near as famous as I am,” he said. “My sport didn’t even make the newspapers at the end of the Seventies.
“But more than anything I owe half of my life to the BOA.”
Without Follows, the veteran administrator who steadfastly defied the Thatcher government’s instruction to boycott the Moscow Games over Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, the launchpad for a golden generation of British athletics would have been lost.
“Sir Denis said he was in a position to take a team and because of that typical old-fashioned, British stiff upper lip, he did,” said Thompson. “That was the start of making my life. Had I not gone, who knows. It was one of those Sliding Doors moments.” Sixty-five nations would stay away from Moscow and it was an uneasy time for the Brits that went.
In the midst of the debate Coe had a swastika daubed on his garage door.
But Follows, who died aged 75 in 1983, held firm, despite a letter from the Prime Minister warning that, “without the Americans and West Germans and the other sporting countries who have decided to stay away, the Games will not be worthy of the name Olympic, and medals won will be of inferior worth”.
To this day Thompson, now a Laureus Academy member, has not watched back the decathlon that brought victory by
164 points ahead of two Soviet rivals.
He was only 21 yet already the world record holder and would remain unbeaten for the next seven years. “Moscow changed my life because 40 years on I can go out on the street and people of a certain age will say: ‘Hey, I know you’.
“It’s amazing to me that people still remember, but I’m grateful that they do.”
Since 2000, Laureus has used the power of sport to help change the lives of almost six million children and young people