Lynsey Sharp, European champion, Commonwealth silver medalist, Olympian, announces her retirement

This is Stuart Weir’s salute to Lynsey Sharp upon the announcement of her retirement.

Lynsey Sharp

Aged 33, Lynsey Sharp has announced her retirement. She achieved a lot as a British 800m runner, competing in three World Championships and two Olympics and being national champion three times.  Career highlights include being European Champion in 2012 and Commonwealth silver medallist in her native Scotland in 2014. She reached a World Championship and Olympic final, running her PR in the 2016 Olympic final (1:57.69), and also took a European silver in 2014.

Her achievements are all the more creditable as she was often battling injury and illness.

She had a break from running 2020-22, during which time she had a son (Max).  In 2023, she ran eight times with a best of 2:03.59. After announcing her retirement, she told BBC: “I felt that I wasn’t able to give anything 100% whether that was training, being a mum, being a partner – just life, really.  I felt I was being pulled in different directions, and I wasn’t earning any money doing it.  That puts you in a different position from when you are being paid to do something.  I was literally only doing it for myself. It could not be seen as a career anymore. It made me realize that my priorities had changed.

“At the end of the 2023 summer, I thought I had competed well for my first season back, but in order to get to the next level, it required so much more time, energy and everything than I was willing to give”.

Going back to the big achievements, she once told me: “As a career highlight, I think Glasgow [2014 Commonwealth Games] will be hard to beat.  As I was growing up, I would never have imagined having a major championship like that in Scotland and being able to medal.  Looking back, I still think how amazing it was”. Even that race did not go smoothly as she spent the previous evening in hospital, something she incredibly took in her stride: “The year leading up the Commonwealth Games had been so interrupted it was not really surprising [to be ill] because that was just how the rest of that year had gone.  Nothing had gone to plan.  There had been so many obstacles so it did not faze me; being in hospital was just another thing to overcome”.

Sharp was a controversial choice for London 2012 when having only achieved the B standard, she was preferred to…