Jackson keeps cool to walk away with title

Teessider is rewarded for sweating through super-hot training regime by breaking Australia's strangehold on road discipline

(getty images)

When it came to the heat of battle on the streets of India's capital yesterday, Jo Jackson was suitably prepared. "For the last three weeks before I came out I was training in a heat chamber at 32C and 60 per cent humidity," the Teesside race walker said. "It was tough going, being on the treadmill for an hour in that heat, but it worked."

It did that. In the morning heat and humidity, Jackson produced a cool, collected, high-class performance to end Australia's 20-year stranglehold on the women's walk at the Commonwealth Games. After breaking clear in the early stages of the 20km contest, the 25-year-old from New Marske on the Cleveland coast never showed any sign of wilting. She finished in 1hr 34min 22sec, a decisive winner, 2min 33sec ahead of her closest rival, Claire Tallent, denying Australia and a husband-and-wife double, Jared Tallent having already won the men's race.

For Jackson, it was a historic moment: the first major champion-ship success by a female British race walker. It was also a throwback to Don Thompson's celebrated 50km victory at the Rome Olympics in 1960. Thompson, an insurance clerk from Cranford in Middlesex, prepared for the heat and humidity of the Italian capital by hauling heaters and boiling kettles into his bathroom and exercising in steaming conditions. When that did not prove sufficiently stifling, he rigged up a Valor gas stove, and almost passed out from the effects of what he later discovered to be carbon monoxide poisoning. "Yes, he was famous for doing that," Jackson said, chuckling. "It wasn't quite the same for me."

Indeed not. A member of Middlesbrough and Cleveland Harriers, and the first athlete from Teesside to win a Commonwealth athletics title, Jackson prepared in a state-of-the-art heat chamber at the UK Athletics' NationalRace Walking Centre at Leeds Metropolitan University, where she studies sports performance.

Still, there was a homespun element to her success. As well as being guided by Andi Drake, the former international race walker, she is also coached by her mother, Maureen, who was at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium to see her medal ceremony.

Finishing just outside the medals was Jackson's England team-mate Lisa Kehler, a 43-year-old doctor and mother of four. A veteran of five Commonwealth Games now, and a three-time medal winner, she trained in her living room with the central heating turned up on full and also wearing a sauna suit. The Wolverhampton woman was fourth in 1:40:33. "I can't argue with that: fourth place with a season's best, at my age," she said.

Given that Louise Hazel spent much of her younger days training at the March Amateur Boxing Club, few would be prepared to strike up an argument with the Cambridgeshire athlete who has established herself as the second-best heptathlete in Britain – behind Jessica Ennis, the world and European champion – now that the injury-plagued Kelly Sotherton has given up the seven-event competition to concentrate on the 400m.

Hazel has never actually boxed in competition, nor even sparred, but in the absence of Ennis she gave the KO to the opposition and claimed the title Sotherton won in Melbourne four years ago, winning on points, some 6,156 of them, 56 more than Canada's Jessica Zelinka managed as runner-up.

"To come away with the gold is more than I ever could have expected," Hazel said. "Going into the last event, the 800m, I kept repeating what Julie Hollman had told me: 'You're cool. You're calm. And you're collected.' I kept saying that to myself all down the back-straight and it worked."

Hazel is mainly guided by Aston Moore and Fuzz Ahmed, but Hollman, her former coach, still has some input. The only Briton ever to claim the scalp of Carolina Kluft in a heptathlon, Hollman also coaches Grace Clements, who took the bronze medal.

There was a silver in the long jump for Greg Rutherford, while away from the track-and-field arena there were golds for the English archers Nicky Hunt and Duncan Busby, winners of the individual compound titles, and for the English shooter Anita North in the women's singles trap event.