Dai Greene is sure he will be hot at the Games after his harsh winter

 
On track: it is nearly two years since Dai Greene last finished outside the top three and he now has Olympic gold in his sights
16 March 2012

Superior conditioning won Dai Greene world championship gold last season and he’s in no mood to lose that edge ahead of the Olympics.

The 400metres hurdler crossed the finishing line in Daegu a man transformed from virtual journeyman to the man to beat at London 2012.

Now, Greene talks with the confidence of someone who genuinely believes Games gold will be his following a gruelling winter.

“I only train for gold,” he says. “I don’t get up and think, ‘I’m getting up that hill to win bronze’. And I don’t think anyone will work harder than me.

“I don’t have any easy weeks. It toughens you up to train in adverse conditions and I will experience the worst conditions of anyone in that Olympic final.

“I don’t think anyone else will have run in the snow in winter training. Experiences in sport make me tougher so I can handle the bigger pressure.”

The suggestion is that with the backing of his coach, Malcolm Arnold, he will be in the best shape of his life come the Games. “The Olympics is the biggest thing you can get as an athlete but to have it at your peak, it’s perfect,” says Greene.

With his fixed piercing stare, Greene can talk with unbelievable intensity fitting of a relentless trainer but just as quickly he’s laughing at life’s more trivial pleasures.

It is this ability to relax at virtually the flick of the switch and then turn it on come race time that makes him such a strong competitor, rather than his speed.

BY his own admission, he says: “I’m not as fast as Angelo ­Taylor or Kerron Clement and I don’t know if I’ll ever be faster but it’s not just about speed in the 400m hurdles, there are so many ways of running the race.”

While most of his rivals have off days, Greene last finished out of the top three in a 400m hurdles race nearly two years ago, plus he is getting better, clocking a personal best every season.

In addition, he has enjoyed an injury-free winter unlike in 2011 when an on-going hip complaint curtailed his training. Looking back at it, he says: “I would have trained better and raced better in the season but even when not 100 per cent fit I was still running fantastic times as well.”

Fully confident he can deliver for Britain in the final on August 6, Greene has come a long way since the run up to the last Olympics in Athens.

He reached his nadir at the trials in Birmingham. “I clocked 51.1sec, a time that I’d run as a junior,” he recalls. “That was the lowest point of my career. I thought maybe I’m getting worse and this is how people are.

“I’d suffered from injuries and couldn’t seem to get fit. So I thought maybe this is it or else I could just race for a few months and work on getting fitter.”

His perseverance paid off. Come the end of the season, he had run a PB and the following year he was

lining up in the final of the world ­championships in Berlin, running a PB of 48.27sec to qualify for the final and was then only marginally slower come the final.

Since winning world gold in Korea, his life has changed beyond all recognition. He has just picked up the keys to a new Jaguar and he is starring alongside Sebastian Vettel in a TV advert. But any suggestion he is about to get too big for his boots is negated by the voice of reason in his corner, namely Arnold.

“Malcolm basically said I could be world champion and make all the money I wanted now, or I stay at the peak for the next five years and people will still come calling,” he says. “Malcolm reminds me of what I need to do.”

The money has certainly helped. Greene still remembers a time when “I was living solely off my overdraft” before adding: “Back then I couldn’t get anything for free and ironically the more money I have the more I seem to get given things for free.”

Olympic gold will certainly not come for free and he sees his rivals for the top spot as the Americans, depending on who qualifies at their trials, Puerto Rican Javier Culson and the South African duo LJ van Zyl and Cornel Fredericks.

The Welshman recently leant on Colin Jackson for advice and plans to talk to David Hemery, the Olympic champion in his event from the 1968 Games at Mexico City.

He also hopes to impart advice of his own to up-coming British athletes having recently been appointed an ambassador to the Jaguar Academy of Sport.

“I would have bitten someone’s hand off to have something like the Jaguar athletes have now,” he says.

Whatever the case and however challenging the journey to the top has been — “it hasn’t been a fluke”, Greene points out — he has made it there and fully intends to stay put.

Dai Greene is an ambassador of the Jaguar Academy of Sport. To find out more, visit www.jaguaracademyofsport.co.uk

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