The only British woman to win gold at the 1992 Olympics on the depth of athletics today and learning to cope under pressure
“Thirty years! That’s mad,” says Sally Gunnell, as her mind wanders from the tranquillity of her Sussex home to the once impenetrable mental bubble that surrounded the greatest race of her life.
It would last only 52.74sec – a time that took the 400m hurdles world record away from Eastern Europe for the first time since 1974 – but was the two-year result of then quite ground-breaking visualisation techniques.
World Championship gold in 1993 following Gunnell’s 1992 Olympic title would also guarantee her eternal place among the all-time greats of British athletics as still the only woman to simultaneously hold all four major titles, after she added the European and Commonwealth crowns the next year.
“Even though I get asked to talk more about the Olympics, because that’s the ultimate, to me personally the World Championships was the best race,” she says.