Steve Cram, Daley Thompson and The Future of Sport
Ahead of the Durham City Run Festival and the Olympic Games in Paris, Living North meet up with two sporting legends
Neither of these two sportsmen need an introduction, however it’s worth reflecting on their sporting successes. Steve Cram (also known as The Jarrow Arrow) was one of the world’s dominant middle-distance runners during the 1980s. He was the first man to run 1,500m in under three minutes and 30 seconds and won the 1,500m gold medal at the World Championships in 1983, and the 1,500m silver medal at the Olympic Games in 1984. In 2000, he co-founded children’s charity COCO (Comrades of Children Overseas) and he’s now a prominent TV presenter, athletics commentator and broadcaster. We’ve caught up with Steve on many occasions over the past 25 years and he remains a true North East hero in our eyes.
Former decathlete Daley Thompson is considered by many to be one of the greatest of all time, having won gold medals at the Olympic Games in 1980 and 1984, and having broken the world record for his event four times. The two have always been supportive of one another’s careers and in Visions of Sport (published by Kensington West Productions in 1993) Daley mentioned Steve (as well as fellow legends Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett) when he said ‘they gave my sport the highest profile of any sport in the country’.
Steve and Daley are joining each other in Durham this summer for a special event. With his partner, former athlete Allison Curbishley, Steve founded Events of the North which organises a series of high-profile running and multisport events, including the Kielder Marathon Weekend, Sunderland City Runs, and Durham City Run Festival. The latter (18th–20th July) is made up of 5K and 10K runs, Run Like a Legend (a fast, flat route along the river), urban orienteering (navigating around the city centre over 90 minutes), and Paula Radcliffe’s Families on Track.
This year it will also begin with a special showing of a new Daley Thompson documentary (at Gala Durham on Wednesday 17th July) which will air on Sky Documentaries later in the month. At Gala Durham, Daley will join Steve to chat about their 1984 Olympic memories some 40 years on. Steve’s looking forward to watching the documentary, as are we, whilst Daley jokes ‘I didn’t realise what a cr** life I’ve had,’ to which Steve bats back ‘It can’t be that bad if I’m in it!’.
‘That’s very true,’ Daley laughs.
Events of the North offers fun and challenging events to engage the local community, and that’s important to Steve. ‘The first “running boom” if you think about it was in the late ‘70s, early ’80s when the Great North Run started (and the London Marathon),’ he says. ‘Then, when I retired, there wasn’t much sport being done in schools, we were doing very poorly at events like the Olympics and although most of my emphasis and my interest was in the high performance bit inevitably, it was very evident that as a population we were getting less active. You start to realise that the performance bit doesn’t work if we haven’t got people having healthier lifestyles and getting involved in sport. The Great North Run is a brilliant event but it was like we needed two or three other events of a smaller nature – but big enough that people would be interested and that they could aim for. The running boom has come back again in the last year or two. More than 840,000 entered the ballot for next year’s London Marathon. I think that’s great!
‘Not everyone who’s interested in running and sport can go for a run but they want to watch it and they want to hear from people like Daley and learn about his life. I’m looking forward to it and it’ll be a great start to the three days of running.’
Looking to the Olympics in Paris (26th July–11th August) we ask Steve and Daley their thoughts. ‘I think it’ll be a great games,’ Steve tells us. ‘It’s great for us because it’s so close and I’m sure it’ll get great viewing figures. I think Team GB will do exceptionally well again. As it’s sport, you never know, but the current predictions would have us in the top three again which is great! There are some new sports, a bit of breakdancing, and the surfing’s in Tahiti. I tried to get that gig but I couldn’t,’ he laughs. ‘I think it’s going to be very different. The opening ceremony is going to be down the River Seine and the triathlon and open-water swimming are going to be in the river. There will be a lot of things that are going to be new for the Olympics this year which is great, and I think they’ll all be things that’ll enhance the interest to the wider public which is also what we need.’
When they were getting into their own careers, Steve says he admired double Olympic champion Lasse Virén, while for Daley it was Caitlyn Jenner. Highlighting Team GB hopefuls and current talent, Steve throws middle-distance runners Keely Hodgkinson’s and Jemma Reekie’s names into the mix, whilst Daley is keen to ask Steve more about 17-year-old Phoebe Gill, who recently broke a 45-year-old 800m record. ‘She is a big name and has every chance of going to the Olympics,’ replies Steve.
While Steve will be working hard in the commentary box, Daley will likely see more of the games. ‘I’m looking forward to a bit of rugby sevens and a little bit of speed climbing,’ Daley says. ‘I saw it last time around and it was really good! I understand that in the modern pentathlon instead of the horse riding they’ve got an obstacle course race, so that should be pretty interesting!’
Steve’s advice for budding athletes is to go for it, but to take a long-term view. ‘Our sport isn’t something where you have an overnight success with it, you’ve got to put quite a lot of hard work into it. One thing I will say is just look at how good-looking Daley still looks,’ Steve laughs, ‘and you get to live longer if nothing else!’ In fact, the 70th anniversary of Sir Roger Bannister’s sub four-minute mile was in May, and recent research looking at the first 200 athletes to run a mile in under four minutes shows that they lived an average of 4.74 years longer than their predicted life expectancy. ‘I thought that was interesting,’ Steve says. ‘The point is it gives you a great, healthy lifestyle, and if you can be successful in sports like ours you get to travel the world and do all sorts of great things.’
Daley agrees. ‘Sport is a great life,’ he says. ‘You get the opportunity to do the thing that hopefully you love, with people you love, and you do it at a time in your life when you’ve got no responsibilities. I would always encourage anyone I know to get involved in sport and get to whatever level they can.’
So what advice were these two sporting legends given? ‘I got a piece of advice once from a guy called Daley Thompson. He said “don’t quit, it’s cr**!” He was right,’ Steve laughs. He says the best bit of advice he was given was from his coach when he was just 14 and he’d missed a day of training. ‘I turned up on the Sunday, having missed Thursday, and he a made a bit of an example of me in front of everyone (he didn’t normally do that), I think he was just making the point,’ Steve says. ‘I took it a bit personally and said “what’s the big deal? So I had the day off”, and he said “it’s not important bonny lad. One day it isn’t but every single day it is”. So when you’re 14 that sort of stuff can go over your head but what he was saying was, I’ll never get that day back again so when you do start training regularly you realise that every single thing you do is an opportunity to get better. That, quite early in my career, was a good bit of advice.’
Daley recalls that the best advice he received was also from his coach. ‘He just said: “you’ve got two ears and one mouth, use them in the same proportion”.’
It’s hard to say what the future will hold for the Olympics, and sport as a whole, but Steve has some interesting thoughts when looking 40 years ahead and highlights the growing popularity of Esports. ‘It’s having a real impact,’ he says. ‘We’re becoming watchers rather than doers as a population. Things like the Olympics have to continue to try to be as relevant as they can be to what’s going on, without completely losing the essence of what they’re supposed to be about. That’s going to be a massive challenge, particularly in the next 10 years. But 40 years is a long time – I have got no idea! I presume we’ll just be sitting watching AI-generated athletes competing against each other or avatars of ourselves,’ he laughs. ‘There’ll be a Steve Cram avatar… “this is a guy from way back in the ‘80s” – and they’ll have him running against Roger Bannister and somebody else. I hate to say that but I suspect that’s where we’ll be.’
‘That’s a bit pessimistic,’ says Daley. ‘I’d like to think the pendulum would’ve swung the other way and people would have been getting out in the sunshine and doing more sport!’
