Lynn Davies: 'A losing mentality sometimes pervades the whole country, and it's wrong'

The long-jump legend now bestrides his sport, and he has ambitions for it. Alan Hubbard meets a man with an Olympic cause

Lynn Davies makes you sick. There he is, pushing 61 and looking as fit and spruce as the day coming up for 39 years ago when he propelled himself into Olympic history by winning an Olympic long jump gold medal in Tokyo. If he has put on a pound or two it certainly doesn't show; nor, he insists, is there a bottle of Grecian 2000 in his bathroom cabinet. Tall, dark and still impossibly handsome.

We of similar vintage – it was the first Olympic Games I covered – can only marvel at how he does it. So what is the secret of his eternal youthfulness? "Clean living of course," he laughs.

On that rain-sodden afternoon, more reminiscent of Tonypandy than Tokyo, the 22-year-old Davies achieved one of the most unexpected of triumphs and became Lynn The Leap, a sobriquet that has become endearingly adhesive throughout a post-competitive career that has embraced TV's Superstars, technical director of Canadian Athletics, and British team manager during the boycott-hit Moscow Olympics in 1980.

Here is one of the great champions of British sport. His British record of 8.23m survived for 34 years, the longest of any British mark, until it was broken last April by Chris Tomlinson. As a sprinter – he was also in the Tokyo relay team – he had a best time of 10.40sec and was on Cardiff City's books as a footballer until Ron Pickering persuaded him of his true athletics potential.

Davies remains the only Welshman to have won an individual athletics gold at an Olympics and Lynn's Leap has been voted the greatest moment in Welsh sporting history.

When we met last week in the café of the University of Wales Institute Cardiff (Uwic) where he is senior lecturer in physical education, overseeing one of Britain's finest centres of excellence with a £10m state of the art indoor arena serving a 1,000-strong sporting campus, Davies was about to pen a personal letter to the Prime Minister, one of the 50-odd Olympic gold medallists who, marshalled by the rower Matthew Pinsent, have written to Tony Blair urging him not to toss aside the golden opportunity of going for an Olympic Games in London.

In his case, the missive carried a little more weight, as he has recently become the president of UK Athletics, which makes him the new figurehead for the sport in this country.

"I want to see the Games in London for all sorts of reasons, from the regeneration of that part of East London to the immeasurable boost it would give to sport in this country," he says. "I can't understand the Government's reluctance to make it happen. If we don't bid, you just wonder what other countries will think of us.

"Obviously one of the reasons for the nervousness is that England lost the World Cup bid for 2006 and they want assurances that a bid for the Games will be successful. But you don't go to the Olympic Games with a guarantee of a gold medal. You have to work for it and do your best.

"It's like when an athlete starts losing it. You think, what the hell, is it worth it, we're only going to lose again? Sometimes this mentality seems to pervade the whole country, and it's wrong. The whole point is in the trying."

Unlike most other sports, athletics has now adopted a policy of installing former top-notch performers to run the show rather than blazers. Davies takes over from another Olympic gold medallist, David Hemery, while David Moorcroft is the body's chief executive and Alan Pascoe is the promotional driving force.

Pascoe says Davies has always been one of his athletic heroes. "The most remarkable thing about him is that he is as competitive now as he was when he was an athlete. If he walks into a room and you say, 'Lynn, bet you can't jump up and touch the ceiling with one hand', he'll do it with two. Show him a card trick and he'll show you a better one."

For his next trick Davies has to ensure that the popularity of athletics is first maintained and then enhanced. A recent poll shows it has overtaken even football in terms of what success the public would like to see achieved internationally. Moreover Britain is about to host, in Birmingham, what many believe will be the most successful World Indoor Championships and there is a strong chance the bravura performances by British athletes in the Commonwealth Games and European Championships will be compounded not only in Birmingham but at the outdoor World Championships in Paris this summer.

He decided to go for the UK Athletics presidency, he says, because he feels the sport faces some "wonderful opportunities" at the moment. "I think it is the right time in my life to have some mainstream involvement and to make a significant contribution. It is not just the legacy money [£41m has been promised by the Government to compensate for the loss of the 2005 World Championships] but we now have a structured five-year plan for the future of the sport."

Davies has to pick up the remaining pieces of Picketts Lock and run with them towards a more certain financial future. "There was no doubt that losing the World Championships was a huge blow to this country's image, as well as a loss to athletics, but the fact that we are getting £41m over the next five years gives a huge boost to the sport, with the opportunity to do all sorts of things. We have been promised it and we have been told it's there, and it would be very, very unfortunate if there is any turnabout," he adds menacingly. "UK Athletics needs to develop a financial independence so it no longer has to be subject to the whim of politicians. If you are reliant on government, there is a big problem."

Indeed, what happens to the immediate future of the sport may be all down to the president's mien. He is likely to take a less patient, harder-nosed approach to dealing with bureaucracy than the gentle Hemery, a much-admired and popular figure but one who found it hard to come to terms with the duplicity of politicians and their Civil Service advisers. Davies is more used to the wiles and wherefores of sports politics, having formerly worked for the Sports Council of Wales, of which he is now a member, and dealt with government departments during his spell in Canada.

Talking of problems, he believes the most pressing one domestically is continuing to attract young athletes into the sport, not only because of competition of other pursuits, but the fall-off in schools. "There are a lot of kids coming in to athletics, but there is also a big drop-out rate. We've got it right at the top end but we have to maintain the base of the pyramid."

Not least, of course, in the war against drugs. Davies acknowledges that internationally the reputation of athletics has been disfigured by chemistry. "When I was competing it never crossed your mind that someone you were competing against might have been on drugs. Success in sport is based on you thinking you are doing something to gain that edge, but if I wanted that little bit extra, I would go and run up sand dunes at Merthyr Mawr. If I thought I could lift 10 kilos more than Igor Ter-Ovanyesan [his great Russian rival], I would try and do it.

"Everything seemed to change after Tokyo. Athletes would resort to almost anything in order to win a gold medal, which of course might bring them a million dollars or more. Because I never believed that my rivals were taking drugs, I never felt I would be at a disadvantage, and the sad thing, of course, is that athletes are not taking them to be at an advantage, but not to be at a disadvantage. Because we still want parents to encourage their kids to come in to the sport we must ensure that testing is vigilant, and that the cheats are kicked out."

Great competitor he may be still, but Davies reckons that he knows his limitations. At one end of the university track is a long-jump pit, replete with sand. Was he ever tempted to take a Lynn-like leap into it? "Oh, never. Look, I jog for fun, I play tennis for fun. After jumping eight metres, how do you think I would feel jumping four metres?"

We both recall Tokyo as the last of the true Olympics, before that deadly cocktail of drugs and politics took their damning effect. "You could say it was the last of the 'amateur' Olympic Games," Davies says. "There was very little money in sport at that time, even the football players were on £20 per week. So we had no commercial expectations, we weren't allowed to make money. When I came back from the Games, I taught as a PE teacher at Bridgend Grammar School, so I had a full-time job, and athletics was a leisure pursuit. But we still trained as hard as they do today.

"They were my favourite Games, and not just because I won. The ethos was so different. There was never any talk about drugs, or what a gold medal might represent in terms of making money. There were no real security checks; the thought of a terrorist attack never entered your mind. It was only after going to the subsequent Games in Mexico City and Munich that you realised what a totally different experience Tokyo was. I suppose you could say that it was after Tokyo that the Olympics lost their innocence.

"There was more mystique about what we did. There weren't probing cameras everywhere and interviews as soon as you came off the track. Nobody expected us to win medals in those days, we just hoped the good old Brits would do their best against the Americans and the Russians.

"Today Lottery funding means absolute professionalism and you are expected to perform because it is your job."

Two white lines painted by the local council, marking the 8.07m distance of his winning jump, remain outside the former family home in the South Wales mining village of Nant-y-moel, but Davies is not one of those misty-eyed codgers who rail on about all their yesteryears.

Had he been born 20 years later, he would be a multi-millionaire now, but in his day a gold medal was not so readily convertible into a commercial currency. Does what-might-have-been ever cross his mind? "To be honest, I suppose it does. I remember going to meet Colin Jackson in Cardiff and he turned up in this super new Jag. He said it was one of four cars he had at the time. And there I was with my dear old banger on its last legs.

"I respect, admire and slightly envy today's athletes like Colin and Jonathan Edwards with the amount of money that can be made. They need never work again. To some extent I would have loved that, but it's always nice to have something else.

"I've no regrets because you can't measure the sort of experience I had with monetary rewards alone. You can't buy that sort of thing. It would have been nice to earn a fortune but I'd still do it all again for nothing." The way he looks, he probably could, too.