When Shara Proctor soared nearly seven metres at London’s Olympic Stadium last month, she served notice that she has a genuine medal chance in Beijing.
The long jumper’s journey to the Bird’s Nest has already been a long and winding one, taking her from the tiny Caribbean territory of Anguilla – where she grew up – to a US college scholarship, to the British Athletics hub at Loughborough, then the Netherlands, where she now trains with her coach, Rana Reider.
She transferred her allegiance from Anguilla to Britain in November 2010 because there is no National Olympic Committee in the country of her birth. Like her compatriot Zharnel Hughes, the sprinting tyro who made the same move more recently, it seems entirely inappropriate to lump them in with any debate over “plastic Brits” given their paucity of options and their homeland’s status as a British overseas territory.
Proctor predicts she will have to pull off the jump of her life if she is to at least match the bronze she won at the world indoor championships in 2012. In Beijing, the Americans Tianna Bartoletta (a decade after she won gold in Helsinki) and Brittney Reese, together with the Canadian Christabel Nettey, will be among her biggest rivals.
“I think I have to jump around a personal best or seven metres to get a medal,” said Proctor. “These girls are jumping very far and I have to compete with them. So I have to be able to pull out a big one.”
Neil Black, British Athletics’ head coach, paid tribute to Proctor’s uncomplaining determination to battle back from an injury that left her on crutches last year, and she said she had worked harder than ever to get back into shape.
The understated Proctor, 26, said her experiences growing up in Anguilla and training on its only grass track and tatty long jump pit had minted her steely determination.
“The track is a grass track and when you have a grass track in the Caribbean it rains a lot, you have a lot of potholes and the grass is this high,” she said, waving her arm around her midriff.
“So when you run the grass stains your feet and you have to watch out for cricket balls.The runway is a sand box but the sand is this high, so you have to jump over a hill. The runway is a piece of rubber strip so you have to run in a curve a little bit.”
“I guess my determination came from having no resources,” said Proctor, who was a talented teenage footballer but chose athletics on her mother’s advice. “I just trained as hard as I could, I got scholarships to US colleges and that was my way out.”
In 2013 she moved from the US to base herself with Reider at the national training centre in Loughborough and then followed him to the Netherlands late last year after he left his post at British Athletics. He continues to train a group of British athletes there, including the 400m runner Martyn Rooney.
It is Reider who has coaxed Proctor into the best form of her career and she is now hopeful of converting that into a medal in Beijing. “That’s where he comes into play. If it was up to me, I think I would have quit the sport by now because of all the injuries and stuff,” she said.
