Murray lifts the lid on her London 2012 kit snub
Judy Murray has spoken about how she was made to feel “like she didn’t matter” at the London 2012 Olympics after team bosses forgot to provide her with kit.
Murray was captain of Britain’s female tennis team at the Games, being held in the UK for the first time in 64 years.
The Scot said she didn’t make a fuss at the time because she didn’t want to damage team spirit and ended up borrowing kit from the players.
Murray, who described captaining the GB team at the Olympic as “a massive moment in her life”, felt she was overlooked because she was a woman.
Speaking on the Sky Sports programme Rise With Us, she said it was an example of male blindness where females in sport were concerned.
“I was the captain of the Fed Cup team, so therefore I was the captain of the tennis team at the Olympics and we had four girls playing in it,” Murray said.
“I remember going to the team house which was very close to Wimbledon so we could just walk across. I remember going there with the team to pick up the kit a couple of days before the event started and everything was laid out in piles with players’ names upon them. So there was [kit for] all the coaches, the players,
the fitness trainers. And I walked round the whole thing and thought, ‘there isn’t one for me, there isn’t one with my name on it’.
“So I took my time and then I said to the guy who was the team manager: ‘Where’s my kit?’
“And the look on his face! ‘I forgot about you… I forgot…i haven’t got any for you.’
“At first I thought he was joking and then I realised he wasn’t. So I said, ‘OK, so what do we do here, who do we contact?’
“Every sport had its own kit so there wasn’t spare tennis kit. I managed to get a vest top from one of the girls and I managed to get a small men’s tracksuit top which was like a golf jacket and I wore my own tracksuit trousers. But what that made me feel like, again, was like I didn’t matter, I wasn’t important.
“It wasn’t in their psyche to have a female coach and I really sucked it up because of the team spirit thing - I didn’t want the girls to see a row or anything like that going on, but, internally, that was an incredibly tough thing for me and just another example of men seeing things with men’s eyes and not being used to having women in ‘their’ workforce.
“It was such a massive moment in my life to be the captain and I wanted to look the part along with the girls and I couldn’t.”
Murray’s two sons, Jamie and Andy, were in the men’s team at the Olympics, Andy winning a gold medal in the singles and silver in the mixed doubles with Laura Robson.