Jason Gardener: One step at a time

After winning the World Indoor 60m gold medal in Budapest, Great Britain’s Jason Gardener is ready to take on the summer season which he says should be his best ever. By Matthew Brown

It’s midday in south west England on one of those sunny April days that feels like summer come early. Up on a hill, above the elegant Georgian town, the fitness suite at Bath University’s shiny new £23 million Sport Training Village is buzzing with seriously healthy activity. From the concourse you can pick out a few familiar figures among the blur of sweating, straining bodies.

There’s Lorraine Shaw, British record holder in the hammer, and her protégé and training partner Zoe Derham, a Commonwealth Games finalist in 2002. There’s 400m runner Dan Cossins, ranked second indoors in the UK this year. There’s Karin Mayr-Krifka, the Austrian who finished fourth over 200m at the World Indoor Championships in Budapest. And there, at the far end, among the heavy weights, is the IAAF’s latest World sprint champion, Jason Gardener, warming down at the end of a hard morning session.

Watching him is another familiar face, World record hurdler-cum-TV pundit Colin Jackson, smiling and chatting in the relaxed manner of a man no longer burdened by the pressure of competition. Gardener is relaxed too, as well he might be, for 2004 has already brought this often unfulfilled sprinter real cause for celebration, and hope.

On 5 March, the 28 year-old lived up to at least part of his immense potential when he won the 60m at the World Indoor Championships, the culmination of an indoor campaign in which he matched Maurice Greene’s record by five times dipping under 6.50. Six weeks later, on 15 April, he became a father for the first time when his partner gave birth to a daughter, Molly.

Unlike her father, Molly was a little slow, arriving 17 days late. “She wasn’t just slow, she wasn’t even on the blocks,” jokes Gardener as he sits down for a chat in the sports village cafe. “It wasn’t really a worry, it just would have been nice if she’d come when she was supposed to. You’ve got to have one late starter in the family, I suppose.”

Gardener has been renowned for his blistering starts since he won a 100m silver medal at the World Junior Championships ten years ago. His ability to go on the “b” of bang, to use Jackson’s memorable phrase, carried him to two European indoor titles and two World indoor bronze medals before his victory in Budapest. This year, though, his lightening speed seems to be harnessed to a new consistency and a calm confidence that the sprinter immediately puts down to his new training régime under Jackson’s old coach Malcolm Arnold.

“It’s all down to the preparation,” he says. “Before, I used to think I had limitations. But with Malcolm I’ve worked harder than ever before, I’ve worked harder than I thought I could, and the limitations don’t exist any more.”

In the past those “limitations” have come in the form of injuries, long standing back and hamstring problems that have blighted Gardener’s ability to turn his indoor form into outdoor success. It looked like the same might happen this year when, within ten days of taking his first world title, Gardener was on Jerry Gilmore’s operating table being treated for what was widely reported as a double hernia. In fact, Gardener had severely torn his groin three weeks before the World Championships, so severely that he’d pulled a tendon away from his pubis bone.

Continuing to run with such an injury, especially at the beginning of an Olympic year, seems a bit of a risk. But Gardener believes his decision not to let it to become an excuse for failure proves how far he’s come, physically and mentally, under Arnold’s tutelage. “In the past I might have said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a problem,’ and stopped training altogether,” he says. “And then I would have lost all my strength and fluency and come away with nothing. It was because of Malcolm’s experience of dealing with situations like this in the past that I knew it was important to keep going.

“I had worked so hard and performed so well that there was no way I was going to let that go. I went there, basically, to take what was mine. It was a big turning point for me to go there as favourite and still run very fast, to deal with the situation and still come away with success. It’s given me a huge boost.”

Gardener knew he wanted to be a sprinter from the age of six, when he raced across his Catholic school playground and found he was much faster than everyone else. It brought him respect. Sister Mary was so impressed she brought in some medals to show him and said he’d win the Olympics one day. He believed it.

Later, in secondary school, he was spotted by a local coach, and at 16 taken on by David Lease. Two years later he was a World Junior medallist, and in 1999 Gardener clocked 9.98 for 100m, becoming only the third European ever to break ten seconds. He made the World Championships final that year too, and Maurice Greene commented on his apparent “lack of fear”. “Jason is going to be the one we have to look at,” said the then new World record holder. “When you see an athlete that composed you have to take notice.”

Yet, despite performing well indoors, Gardener gradually slipped behind his British 100m rivals, Dwain Chambers, Mark Lewis Francis and Darren Campbell, over the next few years. The so-called “Bath Bullet” was misfiring, so he left Lease and joined Arnold in October 2002 after a summer in which he’d failed to figure among the medals at the Commonwealth Games, and failed to make the final of the European championships.

That “bullet” nickname is used a lot, although, in truth, it seems somewhat wide of the mark for an athlete who’s hardly one of sprinting’s fire-brands. Mild-mannered and softly-spoken, Gardener’s decision to leave Lease after such a long relationship was obviously not easy, and he struggles to find the words to explain his move in a way that’s “fair to myself and fair to Dave.”

“Dave had done a very good job with certain aspects of me, he’d taken me so far, but …” he pauses. “I’d got to the point where I no longer had confidence in the programme. And once you lose confidence in the programme it’s time to call it a day rather than wasting each other’s time. I wouldn’t have been focused 100 per cent, or been 100 per cent committed.

“Malcolm, well obviously his CV speaks for itself. And of course, he’s here in my home town. I would have had difficulties going anywhere else in Britain, so everything just seemed to say this was the right thing to do. It was the right time for me to change.”

Arnold, best known for his work with Jackson, started coaching in 1968 on a development scheme in Uganda where he discovered and nurtured John Akii-Bua, taking him to the Olympic 400m Hurdles title and World record in 1972. Now he’s manager of UK Athletics’ High Performance Centre at Bath University, an institution that provides the base for élite performers from 14 sports, and includes on-site medical, physio, masseur and sports science teams.

The biggest change for Gardener, though, hasn’t been the wealth of first class facilities, including a brand new indoor sprint straight, or the chance to train with a dedicated group (although they’ve helped), but simply the volume and intensity of training that Arnold asked him to do. “One of Jason’s strengths is his lifting, that was fine,” says Arnold. “But he wasn’t running much, and he wasn’t running much at high intensity. That’s all changed.”

The first winter was hard. “It was a huge shock to my system,” says Gardener. “To be totally honest, when I saw the programme I didn’t think that I would last it. I didn’t think my body was strong enough.” But the new World champion is now a convinced and committed pupil. In fact, the improved conditioning has helped to eradicate the old back problems that at one stage had meant he was unable even to drive.

“I suppose it had to be proved to him that it would work,” says Arnold. “He was a bit skeptical at first. Lots of people think there’s some magic somewhere. But I can’t offer any magic, all I can offer is hard work and experience. I’ve shown, through the athletes I’ve worked with that hard work is the only thing that works. There are no short cuts.”

Nevertheless, both coach and athlete know that outdoors is where it really matters, and where it’s all still to be proved. Last summer, despite Arnold’s coaching, Gardener again fell below expectations, failing to make the British team for the Paris World Championships. Gardener points out that there was “a lot going on” - he was taking final exams for his media and sociology degree, for example, and moving house. He points out too that his best time was only a tenth outside Kim Collins’ gold medal-winning run.

“It’s a hard business we’re in,” he says. “There are a lot of good sprinters out there. It’s just not that easy, success. It doesn’t come [he snaps his fingers] just like that. Had I made the World Championships team, it would have been a very good summer.”

For Arnold’s part, last year he was still learning to understand his new charge, how he responds to training and where his weaknesses are. “I always look on Jason, Jonathan Edwards and Colin [Jackson] as being similar types - they are quite light framed people who are immensely strong,” he says. “Funnily enough, some of Jason’s weaknesses are the same as Colin’s - principally at the back end of a race. So we’ve changed a few things to address that.”

Gardener’s changed too, he says. Being World champion has made him more confident in himself. “He doesn’t know it, but the way he bares himself is different.” The final proof will come in Athens, of course. Gardener claims he’s only had two good summers in ten years, in 1994 and 1999, which on a five-year cycle means “this is the one”. He is far too intelligent to make himself a hostage to predictions, however.

“I worked extremely hard to be World Indoor champion and I am doing the same to be Olympic champion. But I’m not going to go to the line saying ‘I’m World champion’, putting that pressure on myself. It has to be one step at a time.”

Published in IAAF Magazine Issue 2 - 2004