Jazmin Sawyers is back!
Jazmin Sawyers jumped 6.53 in her first competition since 2023 following her Achilles injury. It was at the Loughborough International and she said afterwards:
“It felt so good but I was more nervous than I can ever remember before a competition. My heart rate’s been high all day. I haven’t been able to be calm. But to be back, and to feel like myself and to jump the kind of distance that I have opened with in any other normal season, I’m so pleased. A 6.53 opener is fine any year but I want to build on that. The UKA standard for the World Championship is 6.75. I’ve got to build that back up and hopefully get back to my best but it was generally encouraging for me”.
2023 had started so well with her joining the 7 meter club with that amazing leap at the European Indoors in Istanbul. She was ready to kick on and then the injury came.
What does 7m feel like? I asked her a week or two after it: “It’s hard, genuinely hard to put into words because it’s only one centimetre more than 6:99. But it means so much more. It’s such a specific benchmark that you know that everybody talks about. When we talk about winning global medals, you say, ‘well, if you get over 7m, you can win a global medal’. You get over 7m and you can win an Olympic medal that. It is genuinely that sort of super real elite world class long jump mark that I’ve been striving for it for so long that it started to feel mythical. It started to feel like this thing that was always going to be just out of reach”. It’s like you keep trying for it and you know you’re capable of it. But when you’ve tried for so long and haven’t done it, it almost…even though I believed I was capable, it still shocked me.
Typically she gave a lot of credit to her coach, Aston Moore: “Aston’s training programme is structured, there’s still work to do. There will be no crazy changes. We’re still working on things. There’s things that I went into this indoor championships knowing I didn’t have right. And so we just keep going. I don’t want to treat it like some crazy thing. And that’s what’s nice? It didn’t feel like crazy, it didn’t feel different as a jump. It just felt like a good jump”.
And you can’t talk long-jump without having a bit of “technical”. She told me: “I think like technically I’m running better, which is which is making me run faster. I think the way that I’m striking the ground is better and that is just producing speed. Annoyingly we don’t get speed data from European Championships that aren’t in in Britain. So I don’t know for a fact that that is what it is, but it looked faster. It felt faster and I jumped further. So those three things. But like I said, I’ve just written down everything that I thought about how I felt so that I can continue to replicate it. And you know, I did my first kind of proper running session back today and went through those cues again and still felt the same. So that’s kind of what I think. has made the major difference”. Since you asked, the length of her 2023 run-up was “My first check mark is at about 37 metres and then I do 19 of my feet, so it ends up about 42”.
Jazmin will not have been bored during her lay-off. She is a girl of many talents. She won a bobsleigh medal at the Junior Olympics. Last summer she hosted the World Athletics Awards. She has hosted similar events for European Athletics. She is an accomplished dress-maker, singer/song-writer. She once agreed to an interview with me in Oslo but had to re-schedule when she was asked to sing at a function. And still a lovely person.
Watch interviews Loughborough interviews with Jazmin at:
https://x.com/i/status/1924185392900620319
https://x.com/i/status/1924142692436492547
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