My greatest race: Shirley Strong - AW (2024)

British sprint hurdler looks back on the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles when she won silver in 12.88 behind Benita Fitzgerald-Brown

I was so focused on what I was doing and what I wanted to do, it didn’t really come into my mind that people from the Eastern Bloc weren’t going to be in Los Angeles due to the boycotts. Obviously, we were disappointed that not all the best people were going to be there, but it didn’t stop our preparation. The aim was to compete at the Olympic Games and get a medal, regardless of who was there.

The previous Games in Moscow was very subdued. We could go out, but we had to be supervised and very careful if we went out without any people with us. But LA was just free. You could do what you wanted. It was absolutely amazing and it was very glamorous.

We went to houses in Hollywood for dinner and co*cktails and things like that and we were just excited about the Games being in LA because it’s constantly in sunshine. It’s just beautiful over there and we were welcomed with open arms. It was just lovely.

We were in the sun all day, every day. We did our training sessions and then, in the evenings, we had so many things on. There was a kind of intranet that was available in LA, which was the latest thing then. You could contact anybody on campus, almost like emails.

I moved house this year and found one of the messages in the attic that said I couldn’t meet up because I was meeting the Prime Minister of Australia for dinner. I have no recollection of that at all, but we did so many things. I remember going to Disney World one day and I met Lionel Richie (I was such a fan of his) but I don’t remember a lot of the social side of it. I remember the competition.

When you have the first walk out into the stadium, it just takes your breath away. But you have to just lean on all your training and you become so focused. As soon as you’re getting ready, trying the blocks and just trying out the first few hurdles, you don’t really notice the huge crowds or the atmosphere during the race. That came afterwards when I went to go and watch other people compete. When you’re actually competing, it’s as if you block it out.

There was a lot of pressure on me to win it. I still believe to this day that if my coach, Jim Harris, had been there after I had a bad semi-final, I would have performed better in the final.

We’d worked on the first hurdle. At the World Championships in Helsinki the year before, another coach tried to try to get me to change my steps to the first hurdle and that really threw me out for a while. Jim went absolutely ballistic – he was furious that a national coach could try and do that with me in such an important year. But we got it sorted in the end. Jim was a brilliant coach. He knew how to treat me and what to say to me and I wished he’d been at the Games.

These days, athletes all have their own coaches with them but back then only the team coaches got accreditation, nobody else could. Jim could still have been in LA, but wouldn’t have been in the village with me, or there in between the semi and the final.

I hit a hurdle in the semi-final. It completely knocked me and I qualified second. In the final, they said I was in the lead until the last few hurdles. It was so minute that it was difficult to see mid-race. Myself and Benita Fitzgerald-Brown [of the USA] were raising our lead legs at the same time but she did come off the last hurdle quicker and that’s what did it.

I hadn’t actually expected her to challenge because she had done nothing before and did nothing after, so it was a bit out of the blue. I was expecting Michèle Chardonnet, the French girl, to be my main competitor. Maybe Kim Turner, the other American, but certainly not Benita. It was a real shock that she came through that day.

READ MORE: My greatest race archives

I knew instantly she’d won, even though we were five lanes apart. I just felt disappointment at coming second. I had a few tears straight after the race. On the rostrum, apparently I was booed, only because I was British and it came after the Mary Decker Slaney/Zola Budd fiasco and the crowd were booing all the Brits. But I didn’t really notice. I was just so disappointed that I wasn’t one step higher, I didn’t really take the crowd in that much.

I’ve never celebrated since and I can’t watch the race anymore. I’ve probably only watched it twice. I’ve never been satisfied with it. And people say you should be pleased with the silver medal. But I never will be because I wanted the gold. That’s just the way it is. I am still not happy with the silver.

As told toMarkWoods

»This article first appeared in the July issue of AW magazine. Subscribe here