Hello I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My customers My castaway this week is the Olympic gold medalist Denise Lewis. Her discipline was the

heptathlon and it was at the 2000 Sydney Olympics that she leapt through, sprinted and

huddled her way onto the winner's podium. It was the culmination of more than

two decades worth of ambition. Growing up in Wolverhampton, the only child of a single mum, she was just

seven years old at the time of the Moscow Games, but she was smitten back then by the gold

medal winning performances of Daily Thompson and Sebastian Coe.

She says, I thought these people aren't human, they're immortal.

Suddenly the light bulb was on.

I knew what I wanted to be.

Can that possibly be true at seven you knew?

Did you? Absolutely. I was mesmerized. I remember watching those those games just

enchanted. I think the moment I remember Sebastian Coe crossing the line and the look of

complete just satisfaction and watching Daly Thompson on the podium winning his goal medal also.

Obviously I didn't realize it was the Olympics.

I just knew it was a big competition.

There were athletes from all over the world competing. I was watching the flags, the colours of their vests.

And I just thought to myself, I want to be there. That's what I want to do.

And is it also true that you must have been a little bit younger, but the workers at the nursery

that you were first in thought that chances were you were going to be the first black Prime Minister

...