No bar to achievement – AW

Former Commonwealth high jump champion Dalton Grant explains how his Academy took off

A European indoor champion in 1994 and a Commonwealth Games gold medallist in Kuala Lumpur in 1998, it’s ironic that the 56-year-old who sits opposite me perhaps had his greatest performance back in 1991, on a day where he failed to make the podium.

Incredibly his superb 2.36m jumped in Tokyo was good enough only for fourth on that day at a World Championships most famous for a titanic battle between Carl Lewis and Mike Powell, with the latter eventually prevailing and superseding the exploits of the great Bob Beamon in the long jump.

The Greatest Show On Earth

Dalton Grant went to three Olympic Games in Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992) and Atlanta (1996), with seventh place in Seoul being his best performance at ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. One senses he feels that he never did himself justice on this stage and while he keenly tells me about his work as a board director for London 2012, I can see his sadness as he recalls: “The joy of winning the bid was overshadowed when the London 07/07 bomb went off a day or so later.”

Coaching credit

Grant is keen to credit a plethora of coaches and mentors who he feels privileged to have worked with during the course of his career including Ron Wyld, Ian Grant, Richard Gyesie, Daley Thompson, Elżbieta Krzesińska, Colin Jackson, Linford Christie, Keith Connor, Malcolm Arnold, Tudor Bidder and some of the years he was also self-coaching. Significantly he was also guided by Frank Dick, the British Athletics director of coaching from 1979 to 1994. In addition, he learned from the late, great Bruce Longden who guided Sally Gunnell to Olympic 400m hurdles gold in Barcelona (1992).

Grant feels that he learnt so much in his journey as a world-class athlete, that’s what has driven him to set up Dalton Grant Academy to pass back his knowledge to the next generation. “I was fortunate to be surrounded by winners like Linford Christie, Colin Jackson and Lord Coe who was my team-mate at both club and country,” he says. “We both played a part in bringing the 2012 Olympics to London.

“I was added to the London 2012 team before Lord Coe by Barbara Cassani, who was the first leader of the 2012 London bid team. We all took what you could describe as a ‘gladiator’ approach to competition.”

He is keen to credit the iconic Ron Pickering, who died in 1991 with being inextricably linked to a golden period in the 1980s when…