Christine has got a new Games dream

1/3

13 April 2012

Christine Ohuruogu knows she can never completely sprint away from her past but the 50 seconds it took her to win gold in Beijing's Bird's Nest Stadium may have been the turning point in her career.

The pile of letters and cards Ohuruogu has received at her parents' Stratford home since becoming Britain's only athletics champion of the Games are unanimously supportive.

And she hopes the reaction to her 400metres triumph means she's now at last being seen as a great athlete, not as the woman who missed three drugs tests.

"It's really touching," she said.

"There's been no unpleasantness at all. For me now, I can feel it's all behind me. I'm a forward-looking person. If I wasn't, I don't know how I would have got through everything."

Ohuruogu, 24, makes it clear she wants this to be her last word on the saga which she calls her trip to hell and back. To her, closure came last November when she won her appeal against the British Olympic Association's lifetime Games ban imposed after she served a one-year suspension.

When she returned from Osaka as the world 400m champion straight after her punishment, her triumph was treated with hostility in some quarters.

Ohuruogu knows there are still those who will never accept what three separate independent inquiries concluded she missed her random tests through the innocent mistake of "forgetfulness" and an inability to get to grips with a complex new random testing regime.

Yet when middle-distance great Steve Cram declared in Beijing he hoped the public would "now see her as a proper British hero because that is what she is", he was articulating what most in his sport felt.

The Evening Standard recognised her incredible achievement by naming Ohuruogu among it's 1,000 most influential people in London for 2008. Beyond athletics too, Boris Johnson's recent invite for her to have the honour of raising the Olympic flag outside City Hall suggested also that London's 2012 hierarchy may now have overcome a notable reluctance to embrace her.

Yet whether she's repackaged as the face of 2012 or not, Ohuruogu is adamant it does not matter to her.

Her message, she says, would remain the same if she was just some Games wannabe, not the athlete seeking to be the first British woman ever to defend a gold medal on the track.

"My priority is to encourage excitement for the Olympic Games in London among younger people," she said. "We have to get everyone behind these Games and the biggest support for them has to come from the young.

"Beijing was one of the most exciting things I've ever done and I want the kids round where I live to make the best of it in Stratford.

"It's good for the kids to see that you're walking down the same roads and breathing the same air as them, that you're not any different, that they can look at you and think 'If she can do it, then why can't I'?"

We are talking after Ohuruogu has given a lecture to a bunch of wide-eyed children about her Olympics. She watches a re-run of her triumph and lets them handle her gold medal with awe. "Enjoy what you do and do it with a passion," she tells them.

Britain may never have produced an athlete with a steelier character than the one who's spreading her Olympic gospel. "The kids watch my race and I tell them 'Yeah, I may have won in Beijing but, you know, it wasn't my best race," said Ohuruogu. "I'm still searching for that best race."

Should that search end on her E15 doorstep in August 2012, she will have no complaints.

MORE ABOUT

Athletics, Track And Field

Drugs

Christine has got a new Games dream

Read More