Greg Rutherford has revealed the brutal physical cost of trying to add a Winter Games to his Olympic legacy.
Montell Douglas, who competed in the 2008 Beijing summer Games as a sprinter, will return to the Chinese capital as part of Britain’s bobsleigh team.
But Rutherford, who challenged himself to make the same team 10 years on from winning London 2012 long jump gold on Super Saturday, came up short.
“There’s so many reasons why it didn’t happen,” he wrote on Instagram. "A huge part from my point of view was the injuries.
“During the process I had…muscle pulls, a damaged diaphragm with internal bleed, torn quad in two places, back spasms, herniated disc in neck with spinal bleed, fractured shoulder..”
Rutherford, 35, earned selection to the bobsleigh squad in November, sparking hope he could double up as a winter and summer Olympian.
But the leap proved too much as Brad Hall’s four-man team got the nod over Lamin Deen’s quartet containing Rutherford, whose World Cup debut was delayed by the shoulder injury until earlier this month.
“The process of coming out of retirement and attempting to compete for my country again wasn’t easy on me mentally or physically,” explained one of Britain’s greatest ever athletes. “But I gave it my all and I still believe I achieved something.
“I wanted to prove that the body can do amazing things, that even if your life’s path seems set there’s still options out there if you’re brave enough to take the plunge.
"I may not have made the Olympics this time but I did manage to compete for @teamgb twice the World Cup circuit only 8 months after coming out of retirement in a sport I had never done before."
Rutherford, whose attempt to qualify was made into a soon-to-be-released documentary, One Last Push , will instead work on the Games as a pundit.
Douglas will team up with Mica McNeill in the women’s event and admitted: “I feel completely overwhelmed, honoured and blessed.
“Part of this journey for me wasn’t individual, it was to try and represent females in sport. There’s been many men that have crossed over. We haven’t had any women.
“To be the first is something I really wanted to achieve,” added Douglas, who did not turn to bobsleigh until she was 29. “So I’m blown away.”
Despite being stripped of funding after the last Olympics in Pyeongchang, Hall reckons he can medal in both 2 and 4-man events.
His team are fired up by what they claim was a “misleading” attempt by UK Sport to take some of the credit for their hugely successful season by giving them a £120,000 grant after the hard work had been done.
Hall’s brakeman Greg Cackett said: “We felt that it was an unnecessary 11th hour attempt to say ‘we’ve given this’, whereas actually the money came after we could have done anything with it.”
This is a team well used to taking motivation from where they can, having also gained strength from the attention paid to Rutherford’s bid.
“We don’t do this for recognition but it is nice to get it,” said Cackett. “We weren’t just flying under the radar but completely ignored because we weren’t the story.
“Greg has a great profile and he was wanting to do quite a big thing, we understood that. We were just hoping the media narrative would change a bit when the proof came out in the pudding and the results came through.”
