Tessa Sanderson: how the first Black British woman to win an Olympic title fought her way to the top

I t 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