Sawyers delighted to return after 20-month absence

BBC News

27-05-2025

"It'll be a long road, but I'm ready to work hard," said Great Britain long jumper Jazmin Sawyers when sharing the painful news, external of her Achilles rupture last April.The injury, which ruled her out of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, came just over a year after her best moment in the sport to-date.Her ecstatic celebrations produced memorable images as she won the 2023 European Indoor title, jumping a UK indoor record of 7.00 metres in the process.The 31-year-old finally competed again this month after a 20-month absence, leaping to 6.53m at the Loughborough International Athletics Meeting."It felt so, so good. I was more nervous than I can remember being for a competition," Sawyers told BBC Radio Stoke."My heart rate was high all day. Since the minute I woke up, I wasn't able to be calm. "But, just to get back and still feel like myself, to be jumping a kind of distance that I have opened with in any other normal season, I'm so pleased," she added.Sawyers, a finalist at Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, did make it to a third Olympics, last summer - but as a television commentator for the BBC.While her enthusiasm and expertise alongside regular contributors like Steve Backley and Jeanette Kwakye won high praise, it was certainly not her first-choice role.She wrote on her Instagram after the Games: "I'm certain I won't be joining them again in Los Angeles in four years time. I actually have something else I'd like to do."
'We're back in long jump business'
Earlier this month, Sawyers said she was back to full speed and strength in the last of a series of videos, external that she nicknamed "The Achilles Diaries".On Saturday, she rubber-stamped her return, improving her 2025 best to 6.66 in Weinheim in Germany.The qualifying standard for September's World Athletics Championships in Tokyo is 6.86m, but she could still be considered for a place with 6.75m if she is high enough in the world rankings."At the minute, I'm unranked because I haven't done five competitions in the last year, so I've just got to build that back up and hopefully make my way back to my best," she said.Her injury left her unable to defend her European Indoor title in Apeldoorn in March, or contest the World Indoors in Nanjing later that month, but Sawyers is encouraged by those who competed in her absence."We're having a real moment with long jump. There was a year or two where we didn't have multiple athletes fighting for spots," she said. "But we're back in long jump business and so many of the women are brilliant athletes. Molly Palmer is due a huge jump, the same with Alice Hopkins."Palmer beat Sawyers to gain victory in Loughborough, while Hopkins made her major championship debut in Apeldoorn."We're going to keep seeing these athletes jump further," Sawyers added."That is only a good thing. It means that we all push each other on to be better."