Tessa Sanderson
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 1996
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Atlanta was her sixth Olympic Games. The first was 20 years before. On Desert Island Discs, Tessa Sanderson reveals the competitive drive that brought her back from retirement at the age of 40 to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. She fondly recalls her rivalry with fellow competitor Fatima Whitbread, and remembers the moment she became the first and only British woman to win an Olympic throwing gold medal.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.2 | The program was originally broadcast in 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a sports woman. This year at the age of 40 she competed in her last |
| 0:34.4 | Olympic game. She didn't win a medal but set a record for the number of times she's |
| 0:38.5 | competed in the event. She throws the javelin and it was against her parents better judgment that she made athletics her career. |
| 0:45.0 | She first represented her country at the age of 17 and in 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympics |
| 0:51.0 | through her javelin 69.86 meters, becoming the first and so far |
| 0:56.2 | the only British woman to win an Olympic throwing gold. |
| 0:59.5 | There's a lot of pain to suffer, she says, but it's a pain I enjoy because I love performing. |
| 1:05.5 | She is Tessa Sanderson. |
| 1:07.1 | Tessa, there are numerous stories about you, you know, with sort of burst wounds and open |
| 1:11.8 | tendons and socks soaked in blood. I mean obviously you |
| 1:15.0 | suffered a lot of honest to goodness physical pain. Yeah absolutely. I went |
| 1:19.0 | through all that mainly because I really felt the first time I got injured that I had to get over this I had to fight it |
| 1:24.8 | take the time I'd then bounce back again. But there's the other sort of pain isn't there |
| 1:28.8 | that the pain the misery of defeat really and I think we... |
| 1:31.8 | Oh absolutely I mean to sit and watch TV and see your mom and dad your |
| 1:36.8 | mother especially crying that's a pain that you know it caused a lot of hurt. |
| 1:41.0 | But you as the athletes? Yeah me me as the athlete and that was one |
| 1:44.8 | incident in 1980 when I failed to make the qualifying mark for the Olympic final. |
| 1:49.9 | And although I was up as the third best athlete in the world I should have really made the |
| 1:54.7 | final I didn't. |
... |
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