It was almost four decades ago, but Tessa Sanderson can still recall the moment she won her javelin gold medal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in vivid detail. “It was the most amazing feeling and the most amazing thing to have happened to me,” she tells me in a restaurant in Stratford, east London, just a stone’s throw away from the 2012 Olympic park. “There were 69,500 people in the stadium and I will never forget it. There were cameras flashing everywhere. I could hear the British people in the crowd cheering me on, saying: ‘Come on, Tessa!’”
The moment she realised she had won was surreal. “I couldn’t believe it; I was in seventh heaven. Everyone started clapping and I knelt down on my knees and put both hands in the air,” Sanderson says. “I thought: ‘This is for my mum and dad. It’s for all my family out there. It’s for the Black people in the community, for my friends and for Great Britain.’”
Sanderson remains the only British person to have won a gold medal in a throwing event at the Olympic Games. And despite having been to six Olympics, won three Commonwealth titles and competed at the top level for more than 20 years, her journey to success wasn’t straightforward. Along the way, she had to overcome obstacles including racism – within the sport and from the public – and what she feels was a lack of support from British athletics’ governing body.
Sanderson, the second of four siblings, was born in March 1956 in Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica. Although she spent only a few years on the island, her memories of it are vivid. “We had this marvellous life there,” she says. “I planted a plum tree at the back of my grandmother’s garden. When I went back in 1974, for the first time, it had grown to be massive. And if you go there now, it’s still beautiful.”
In Jamaica, Sanderson and her siblings were raised by their “fantastic and loving” grandparents; her parents had emigrated from Jamaica to the UK, as part of the Windrush generation, to find work. Sanderson and her siblings joined their parents in the UK when she was six.
“When the news came that we had to leave, it was a total shock. I remember I went and hid,” she says. “I was thinking: ‘God, what’s going to happen?’ When I came to my senses, I thought: ‘I’m going to see my mum and dad, everything will be great.’
“When we flew into Manchester, it was a massive shock, because there was all this snow, all this fog, loads of white people, who we had never seen before. It was so different.”
Sanderson and her family settled in Wolverhampton. Her father was a sheet-metal worker, her mother a factory worker and later a hairdresser. “With four children, it wasn’t easy; it was far from easy,” she says. “Also, the Midlands was rife with racism. Even at school – we were fighting, you would get called a ‘nignog’ and a ‘golliwog’ and this and that. I used to hate Robertson’s jam jars because they had those [golly dolls] on them.”
At school, Sanderson’s exceptional sporting talent became clear, not least to her PE teacher, Barbara Richards. “She was especially fantastic,” Sanderson says. “She took me under her wing and we’re friends to this day.”
At the encouragement of Richards, Sanderson joined her first athletics club, Wolverhampton & Bilston, at 13. There, she came across another inspiring woman. “I saw this young girl who was running. Her name was Sonia Lannaman,” Sanderson says. “She was a Black British sprinter and she was just superb. I watched this girl running and I thought: ‘I want to be like her.’” Lannaman, a future Olympic and Commonwealth medallist, became another lifelong friend.
Sanderson competed in her first national competition, the Amateur Athletic Association Junior Championships, in 1971, before competing in the European Junior Championships in 1973. Her first senior competition was the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, New Zealand. “I broke the British record to qualify and to get to the Games,” she says. “But I remember running down every morning thinking: ‘Has my letter come? Have I been selected yet?’ When it came, I was just ecstatic. My parents were happy – and they knew then that it wasn’t a game.”
Despite Sanderson’s success at the Games – she finished fifth – a lack of funding or sponsorship money became a problem, especially as she was balancing her athletics training and competitions alongside full-time work as a tea lady and a typist. “Trying to get to and from competitions, trying to book cabs that would take my javelin; everything like that was difficult,” she says.
A chance meeting in 1977, while returning home from a competition in Germany, was pivotal. “I was on a flight and a man sat next to me and said that I had thrown very well in the competition,” Sanderson says. “I said thank you and was quite excited, then he introduced himself as Michael Samuelson.” Samuelson, a film producer, was also the UK president of the children’s charity the Variety Club (now Variety).
Sanderson told him her story and explained her funding difficulties. In response, Samuelson formed a group with other Variety members through which Sanderson was able to access £2,000 a year (about £13,000 today) in sponsorship money, which funded her right up to the 1984 Olympics. “It wasn’t huge, but it was big enough to make sure that I could compete,” she says. “That was the turning point.”
But the intervening years were frustratingly tumultuous. After recording her first podium finishes in 1977 and winning gold at the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Canada, she failed to qualify for the 1980 Olympics. She recovered from this disappointment to win silver at the 1981 European Cup, being denied gold by a world-record throw. That year, a serious injury put her out of action for almost two years; she had to watch the 1982 Commonwealth Games on a television at the end of her hospital bed. She returned to competition in 1983, achieving her career-best throw in June and finishing fourth at the World Championships in August.
So, by the time the 1984 Olympics came around, Sanderson was feeling stronger in “mind, body and soul”. At the Games, her throw of 69.56m set a new Olympic record and won her the gold medal. She became the first Black British woman to win an Olympic title, although she did not realise it at the time. “It wasn’t until months after I won the medal that people were saying to me: ‘You’re the first.’ But when I got told that, I thought: ‘This is happening; I’ve done something amazing.’ I’d like to think that I set an example, because after that lots of girls, Black girls, started throwing the javelin. And I was really beginning to feel proud.”
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Alongside her struggle for funding, Sanderson’s path to glory was affected by a fierce, increasingly high-profile rivalry with Fatima Whitbread, her fellow British javelin thrower. At the time, Sanderson felt that Whitbread received favouritism from the British Amateur Athletic Board (BAAB), given that its promotions officer, Andy Norman, was a family friend of Whitbread (and later became her husband).
“From 1978 until the Olympics, the rivalry between Fatima and I kicked in big time, so much that it almost got to [the level of] hate,” she says. “I felt that no one was fighting for me apart from my family and my coach. Everything I felt that she was getting – promotion, competitions – I wasn’t.”
As far as Sanderson was concerned, the rivalry was bitter. Whitbread won bronze at the 1984 Olympics, and came second to Sanderson at the 1986 Commonwealth Games, but beat her in several other competitions. Today, Sanderson says the duel with Whitbread was a factor in her success. “If that hard and tough rivalry wasn’t there, maybe I would not have won,” she says. “It was on such a level that it was aggressive. During a lot of the latter years, we hardly spoke. I regret it, in a way … we could have become better friends during competition times.”
As a Black athlete, Sanderson often felt overlooked and underestimated by British athletics in general and by Norman in particular, who began dating Whitbread while he was still planning Sanderson’s competitions. “I think he was very biased, but I did feel at times that he was racist towards me, because he would fob me off like nothing,” Sanderson says. “And sometimes the language he would use, such as saying [phrases such as]: ‘Those Black athletes over there,’ it did make me feel very peculiar.”
Sanderson says she complained about it at the time to the British team managers and the BAAB, “but they did nothing, so I had to fight”. In 1987, Sanderson threatened to boycott six official athletics events, for each of which she was being paid £1,000, compared with Whitbread’s £10,000. Her threat led to her being offered an improved deal.
After winning Olympic gold, Sanderson thought that any remaining obstacles would be removed. But she was wrong. “I expected things to land in my hands, but they didn’t,” she says, laughing. “I had to work for absolutely everything. I had an Olympic gold medal, I had no sponsorship, I had to work my job” – she was still working as a typist – “and then three weeks afterwards I was made redundant.”
Nonetheless, she continued to enjoy success, winning four major gold medals between 1986 and 1992, when she began a four-year hiatus from the sport. She insists that she didn’t seriously entertain retiring from athletics until she called time in 1997. By then, she was 41 and had failed to make the finals of the 1996 Olympics and the 1997 World Championships. But she remained active in athletics, becoming a vice-chair of Sport England between 2002 and 2005 and later founding the Tessa Sanderson Foundation and Academy, which supports promising athletes; beneficiaries include the medal-winning Olympic sprinter Asha Philip.
Leaving behind the exhausting, itinerant lifestyle of an international athlete afforded Sanderson the time and space to start a family. Although they had met in 1984, it wasn’t until decades later that she reconnected with and, in 2010, married Densign White, a British former judo champion and Olympian. Sanderson had had several unsuccessful rounds of IVF prior to their relationship; she and White fostered and later adopted twins, Cassius and Ruby Mae, now 10. “Cassius is very much into football, and Ruby is a diva who loves to dance and cook,” Sanderson says. “They’re my world.”
Aside from her kids, Sanderson is most sentimental about the memorabilia she has collected. “I’m terrible; my husband calls me a hoarder. I’ve kept everything from almost every Olympic Games, from the Coca-Cola bottles in 1984 that had my own number on, to a pair of Levi’s jeans that were sent to me and had my name on them.”
They still come in handy. “A couple of months ago, my daughter had a ‘Who would you like to be?’ day at her school and she dressed up in my Barcelona Olympics top.”
