In 1984, she became the only Briton ever to win gold in an Olympic throwing event – then went back to work as a typist. She describes her rivalry with Fatima Whitbread, struggles to find funding and life after athletics
It was almost four decades ago, but Tessa Sanderson can still recall the moment she won her javelin gold medal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in vivid detail. “It was the most amazing feeling and the most amazing thing to have happened to me,” she tells me in a restaurant in Stratford, east London, just a stone’s throw away from the 2012 Olympic park. “There were 69,500 people in the stadium and I will never forget it. There were cameras flashing everywhere. I could hear the British people in the crowd cheering me on, saying: ‘Come on, Tessa!’”
The moment she realised she had won was surreal. “I couldn’t believe it; I was in seventh heaven. Everyone started clapping and I knelt down on my knees and put both hands in the air,” Sanderson says. “I thought: ‘This is for my mum and dad. It’s for all my family out there. It’s for the Black people in the community, for my friends and for Great Britain.’”
