Darren Campbell’s life story pulls no punches
Darren Campbell is not only one of Britain’s greatest sprinters but he is one of the sport’s most interesting characters as well. Rising from the mean streets of Moss Side in Manchester, he reached the Olympic podium and now his fascinating and eventful life story has been published.
Track Record has been skilfully ghost written by Trystan Bevan, while there is a foreword by Olympic heptathlon champion Denise Lewis and a preface by BBC 5 Live commentator Mike Costello.
The autobiography must have been a pleasure to put together, too, due to the rich raw material of content that Campbell has gathered during his life.
I say Campbell, but he was actually born Darren Andrew Grant and only adopted the surname he is now known as later in his life. It is one of many surprises in a book which has remained largely untold until now.
It starts with memories of his tough upbringing in one of the roughest parts of the country and the part he nearly played in a pub robbery with a gang when he was 16. To escape the area and a probable life in crime, he moved to Wales and his sprints career began to flourish.
After winning European junior titles and world under-20 silver medals behind Ato Boldon, he left athletics for a period to play football for Cwmbran, Plymouth Argyle and others. But when he came back to sprinting he won the 1998 European 100m gold and then, at the Sydney Olympics, took 200m silver behind Kostas Kederis of Greece.
Many people regard Campbell as the true winner that day due to Kederis later being discredited after missing a drugs test at the Athens Olympics. “Surprise is probably an understatement,” Campbell reflects on an event where he was beaten by a man who had been a 400m semi-finalist at the European Championships two years earlier.
“Nobody saw it coming. I for one certainly didn’t see it coming and I was in the lane next to him with 30 metres to go. His timeline to gold was, performance-wise, in a word, astonishing.”
However, Campbell says the suspicion and innuendo surrounding Kederis at the time irritated him. “I felt like spelling it out to my team-mates – wait a second,” Campbell writes. “I’ve just won Olympic silver here. For about him – give me some respect.”
From Sydney, Campbell went on to anchor the England sprint relay team to victory at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester. It was his home turf so it was not surprisingly an emotional moment.
The satisfaction of winning medals aside, Campbell was also suffering from bouts of depression at the time. This emerged in the media but in his book he now revisits that period, shedding new light on how he felt and how a home Games in Manchester helped him get his career back on track.
Campbell also talks about his war of words with sprints legend Michael Johnson, which erupted at the Athens Olympics. He also revisits the Olympic gold medal moment with Mark Lewis-Francis, Marlon Devonish and Jason Gardener in the sprint relay at those Games too.
This is definitely one of highlights of the book as he gives a blow-by-blow description of the race. “There was a recognition,” he says, “that if we perfected everything on the day we could create a tremor large enough to shake the Parthenon.”
His story does not end there, though. The book goes on to talk about coaching, building up a sports supplements company, his relationship with Dwain Chambers, opinions on his coach Linford Christie and it ends with the details about his life-threatening illness in 2018.
There is also a large selection of photographs too covering Campbell’s life, including a cover from AW after his Sydney 2000 success.
Track Record is a recommended read for fans of British athletics – especially those who followed the sport through the 1990s and turn of the millennium – and also those interested in what it takes to run fast.
» Track Record by Darren Campbell with Trystan Bevan is published by St David’s Press for £13.99 paperback or £9.99 eBook
