Jessie Knight on making the grade in 2020
Jessie Knight started 2020 as a good but little-known British athlete and finished the year being pictured in the October issue of AW as one of coach Toni Minichiello's "athletes who have impressed me". It is hard not to have been impressed by the 26-year-old primary school teacher.
She first made people sit up and take notice at the Glasgow Grand Prix in February. As a 400m hurdler in a race against some impressive 400m flat runners – three of whom had been in the 2019 World Championships final – Knight knew that if everyone ran to form "I should have been last".
"I was the most nervous I’ve ever been before a race," she remembers, "but in warm up my coach, Marina Armstrong, said: 'just put your blinkers on and run'. My race plan was to stay as close to the leaders as I could, not expecting to be at the front. I was thinking that if I could hang on to the back of the leading group of really good athletes, I should get a good time."
But when the athletes broke from lanes, to her surprise Knight found herself in front. She recalls thinking that she did not feel tired. She kept running and "managed to hold on and win, which is still to this day the highlight of my life."
She adds: "I still can’t believe it. That was the first time I ever saw myself as a really good athlete."
Knight finished in 51.57 ahead of Poland's European champion Justyna Swiety-Ersetic (51.68). A week later she was back in the same arena, running as favourite and winning the British indoor 400m title in 52.76.
Having done athletics since she was eight years old, Knight became weary of working full-time as a teacher and trying to fit in training and gave up in 2017, leaving the sport completely.
"I think the main reason I gave up in 2017," she explains, "was because my real job as a teacher took over and I just didn’t have the time for athletics any more."
Her routine had involved getting up at 6.15am and not getting home until 9.30pm or later.
The good news for athletics is that Knight missed it so much that she came back and decided to "commit 100% in terms of sleep and diet, and not just turn up to training and go home without really being an athlete."
"I decided it was going to be all or nothing and I contacted Marina Armstrong who became my coach. And from that day it has been upwards."
In 2019 she had what she describes as "a massive breakthrough", lowering her PB to 56.04 in the hurdles. She had come third in the British Championships but was frustratingly 0.04 outside the qualifying time for the Doha world championships.
After her successes in Glasgow at the two indoor events, her realistic goals were to make the GB teams for the Olympics and the European Championships and to try to have as big a breakthrough in the hurdles as she had had on the flat. She also needed to adjust her hurdles stride pattern to her new 2020 flat speed. Then the year started to unravel. Just when she wanted to do the technical hurdles work, lockdown came and she didn’t hurdle for two months.
Her reaction to the postponement of the Olympics tells you a lot about her character.
"I must admit that initially I was devastated," she says. "I felt that I had finally got myself to a point where I could make GB teams and could have got to the Olympics, the pinnacle of any athlete’s career, and it was postponed. But I quickly turned that into ‘let’s keep working hard every day’ because there could be races at the end of the season."
Between August 9 and September 17 Knight ran nine races in six countries around Europe as well as winning the British 400m hurdles title in Manchester. Having run 56.04 in 2019 she ran under 56 seconds five times in 2020, she lowered her PB to 55.27 and won races in Belgium and Poland (twice). She ran in two Diamond Leagues – Stockholm (400m flat) and Rome (hurdles) – as well as a Continental Tour Gold event. She was credited with a PB in the 400m in Stockholm (52.52) but does not recognise it as it is slower than her indoor PB!
"Last year I was probably a 56-second hurdler on a good day and a 57-second runner consistently. Now I’m 55-low every time and that’s very exciting and that’s exactly where I wanted to be this year"
Assessing her short summer season, she says: "I am absolutely over the moon with the three hurdles races. Completely changing my stride pattern from last year has meant that I dropped a lot in time and an exciting thing for me is that I’ve got quite a lot still to work on. Last year 50% of the time I wasn’t making my stride pattern but now I’m hitting it every single time. That is a new territory and now I’m standing on the line feeling like an experienced hurdler and gaining in confidence.
"Last year I was probably a 56-second hurdler on a good day and a 57-second runner consistently. Now I’m 55-low every time and that’s very exciting and that’s exactly where I wanted to be this year.
"I was also proud of my 400m flat races because I was out of my comfort zone," she adds. "As much as I came fourth and fifth, I was in the mix, it wasn’t as if they were miles ahead. I was in the pack. So I’m really happy that I did those races and it was good experience for me.
"It was the first time I’ve been to a Gold Continental Series meet and my first Diamond League, so I just wanted to stand on the line and enjoy every moment of it and do the best I could. I did enjoy them and I didn’t put myself to shame."
Since September she has reduced her teaching to three days a week to allow her to space out her training and have more recovery time. It is great to see an athlete rewarded for her hard work but one feels that with Knight there is a lot more to come.
(Photos by Getty Images for British Athletics)
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