Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
World record holder and Olympic gold medallist in athletics.
On the island
Eight records
it was the very first piece of jazz that I ever heard, and apparently, or so my family told me, that I was tapping my foot to this at the age of three.
for a number of reasons the main one, I think, being recollections of many Sunday afternoons spent as a student in university.
Katia Ricciarelli and José Carreras
having spent three or four months of the winter of nineteen eighty in Rome, for the Olympic build up, I decided to choose a piece from Tosca.
I make no apologies for my over-reliance on jazz. And I've I've chosen one of the the greatest jazz vocalists, I think.
between the eight hundred and the fifteen hundred meters in Moscow. This comes back to the reliance on music. I played this quite a few times.
The Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus
I've chosen simply because I don't think any of the British athletes had ever heard the Olympic anthem before, yet I think we could have all have hummed it at the end of the week or so in Moscow, because of course we didn't have the national anthem and the medal ceremony.
Back to Jazz Again, Sidney Beche, Love for Sale, a jazz standard, but I think Beche almost brings a classical presence to this recording.
A Foggy DayFavourite
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
I've chosen this because for me it's really four records in one. It features Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, who need no introduction, Oscar Peterson on piano and Louis Armstrong singing and playing trumpet.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:34What would you be happiest to have got away from?
Certainly last year it would have been the Olympic Games build up. Yes. Which starts relentlessly from November the previous year and just reaches a crescendo in August.
Presenter asks
4:01How old were you when you began to show that you could run rather fast?
I suppose it's … racing in school sports days and things like that … I suppose it's just being a little bit faster than other people at your age group.
Presenter asks
6:17Was it the long distances that attracted you [from the beginning]?
Oh, I was. I started out particularly started out as a sprinter. … But after joining the local club in Sheffield, the Hallamshire Harriers, and particularly being in a very cross country orientated area, which is Yorkshire, they thought that I was a bit too small and slight to be a top class sprinter, so they channelled me towards the longer distance stuff.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The luxury
I've thought long and hard about this, and I think the only thing I can come up with is a very, very comfortable bed.
Did you feel somehow cheated [by the 1980 Olympics] because it wasn't a full-scale Olympics?
I felt saddened that many of the athletes and many of them … especially the Americans, good friends of mine, I felt very sorry for them that the ultimate I think the ultimate athletic ambition is to run in the Olympic Games, and I felt sorry for them that I felt they were cheated of of a place at the Olympics and all that it meant.
Presenter asks
21:49How did you feel as you came to the [1500 meters final after your freeze in the 800 meters]?
The heats went reasonably for me and I was I was just very pleased to be back into the Olympic Arena again, doing something, um racing. … physically there was there was nothing really that was the that was the problem. It was just trying to forget what had happened on the Saturday, treating it as history and buckling back down to it again.
“I don't play an instrument, but I I think it's probably fair to say that I have a very heavy reliance on music.”
“if you can't succeed at Loughborough athletically you won't succeed anywhere. They've got everything.”
“I think my problems on the day were a mixture of Olympic nerves, Olympic pressures, and not having been in that situation before. It was nerves.”
“we didn't come into the sport originally to make money. … we really did come into the sport to enjoy it.”