Interview with the hurdler Berwyn Price

Description

BERWYN PRICE
a hurdler’s tale

My name is Berwyn Price. I was born on 15 August 1951, and I’m currently living in West Cross in Swansea.

My life has all been revolving around sport. As a youngster at school, I was very keen on all sports. I used to love tennis and running, and I played a bit of rugby and cricket, too. As I got towards the sixth form, I realised that, if I wanted to become good at any one sport, I’d have to specialise. It’s no good having a dabble in everything.

Do you remember a guy called Lynn Davies who was a long jumper for Wales? He won the gold medal in the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. He was from Nantymoel in the Valleys, not all that far from where I was born and brought up. In 1964, I’d have been in Year Four or Five at school, and I saw Lynn’s exploits in the newspapers and he did inspire me, and I thought, “If he can do it from the Valleys, then why can’t I?”.

one against one

It must have been in 1970, when I was nineteen, that I took part in the European Junior Championships, held in Paris. I managed to win it, won the gold medal. So, that was my first big competition. That’s a very nice memory for me that one, a long time ago though, 1970. That’s forty years ago. I must be getting old! I also went to the Commonwealth Games in 1970 representing Wales, up in Edinburgh, and since then I’ve been to three other Commonwealth Games (I won the Commonwealth Games for Wales in 1978, in Canada), three European Championships for Britain, two Olympic Games for Britain, World Student Games for Britain, a number of European indoor championships, etc., etc. So, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been to about fourteen or fifteen major championships over the years.

The hardest competitions I’ve ever competed in were the two Olympic Games.

There were athletes from all over the world and back in the ‘70s, the two major countries were the United States of America and the Soviet Union. The US had superb national athletes. The Eastern European countries, including the Soviet Union, used to have some athletes who, in hindsight, used to take drugs, so it was very, very hard, which is why I never won a medal at the Olympic Games. It should be about just one man or one woman against another and I just hope that one day we’ll be able to sort out all the cheats, so it is a level playing field for everyone. How old was I when I went to my first Olympics? That was 1972, so I’d have been twenty-one. It was a wonderful experience. I was ranked in the world’s top ten, but I was never good enough to win a medal. The most successful, and the most memorable, though, was winning the Commonwealth Games for Wales in 1978.

In athletics, you’re on your own. It’s down to you. I think if you want to perform at your best, you need to have a few nerves. I used to get very nervous, and about two or three hours beforehand, I used to think to myself, “What am I doing? Why am I here? Why am I here?”.

I’ve been very lucky. I’ve travelled a lot around the world with my sport. The only continent I haven’t been to is Antarctica. I think the place I enjoyed most of all was New Zealand. I went there for the Commonwealth Games in 1974, to a place called Christchurch. I won the silver medal there. I have to say I don’t have all my medals on display. I have a big shoe box up in the attic. They gather dust up there.

nail varnish and Guinness

I remember once running for Wales in Luxembourg, and we were up against an Irish team, which was well known for its humour. I was running in a 400 metres relay. Well, we didn’t have any batons to warm up with. The Irish had a bottle of Guinness, so they used that as a baton. They weren’t totally daft, though. They drank the Guinness first!

Another time, I was competing at – again, I’m showing my age, now – I was competing in East Berlin in an indoor meeting, Great Britain against East Germany, and our plane landed in West Berlin. The Berlin Wall used to segregate the city, Communist on one side and Western on the other. Well, you had to go through the Wall at a place called ‘Checkpoint Charlie’, and you had all the tanks and guards with sub-machine guns and all the rest of it. On the way back, we’d had a party after the competition – because in East Germany there’s not much to do and the East German team had gone home early – so, we had to make our own entertainment. We put all the names of different artistes in a hat and we had to draw them all out and act out that person. I drew out Danny La Rue who’s a male who impersonates females, so the women in the team dressed me up in mascara, lipstick, eye shadow and all the rest of it, and bright red nails. We had a good time, had a bath after and got rid of it all, but I couldn’t get the nail varnish off and nobody had any nail varnish remover. Can you imagine that? So, going back through Checkpoint Charlie, we had all these stern guards with sub-machine guns, and there’s me, handing over my passport with bright red nails. Do you know what my nickname was in the British team after that? They used to call me Blodwyn, not Berwyn. That was my nickname, Blod! So, we had some good times. I won’t tell you about the time I had to share a double bed with Geoff Capes, a six-foot-six, twenty-five stone shot-putter, though!

Wales

Obviously, in the Olympics, you don’t represent Wales. You represent Great Britain. It’s not a Welsh team. So, although I was a Welshman, I was part of a British team when I went to the Olympics in ’72 and ’76.

I think Wales’ success, as part of the British team in Beijing was great for the nation as a whole, for Wales and for Britain. Certainly, seeing Nicole Cooke win that first British medal in the cycling road race was a wonderful occasion. I think the interest and the lift that our competitors in Beijing provided for the country as a whole was an example of how important sport can be in terms of not only the well-being of the country but also in encouraging people to take part, keeping people fitter, keeping people healthier, reducing the burden on the National Health Service. I just wish that we had more effort going into people taking part in sport rather than just watching it on the television or from the terraces.

legacy?

One concern I have about London 2012 is this talk of legacy, because it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of money to make sure that we have more and more people taking part in sport, through the excitement of being involved in London 2012.

I’m a little bit concerned so much money is being spent at the top end that there’s not enough being spread at the bottom. They’ll be our future champions, of course, in 2016 or 2020. Let’s spend that money, now. Get our youngsters in while we can.