40 Year Old Jo Pavey (GBR) Wins 10,000m Final
Jo Pavey won her first major championship gold medal at the age of 40 on August 12 in Zurich, and in the process became the oldest female European champion in history.
Ten days after the mother of two stunned Hampden Park to claim a “surreal” Commonwealth Games 5,000 metres bronze medal, she clinched the 10,000m at the Letzigrund Stadium in Zurich.
SUMMARY
Pavey has previously said that she may try to qualify for the 2016 Olympics and the 2018 Commonwealth Games. “I’m going to be quite old by then,” she conceded. By all conventional athletics standards, she passed “quite old” half a dozen years ago. Amazingly, she is getting only better with age.
“I just can’t believe it,” she said after her victory in 32 min 22.39 sec. “I really enjoyed it but I’m really surprised. Is this the wrong event? It just felt so long!”
It was yet another remarkable achievement for an athlete who seems not to know when to call it a day.
There is little about Pavey that gives the impression she lives a normal runner’s life. It is 11 months since she gave birth to her second child with her husband and coach Gavin.
A typical track session near their Exeter home involves Jo running laps, Gavin barking orders from the sidelines with baby Emily strapped to his front, and five-year-old son Jacob playing in the long-jump pit. From the outside they may look like your average 2.4-children family but the reality is anything but.
SPLIT
On Tuesday night, Pavey was taking on 14 athletes in their twenties.
When she competed in her first senior international championships back in 1997, Beth Potter, the other British 10,000m runner in Zurich, was just five years old.
Yet despite every normal assumption about the effects of advancing years, the formbook in fact suggested she stood every chance of ending up on the medal podium. Pavey needed to improve only slightly on her European ranking of fifth to ensure she added to her 10,000m silver from Helsinki two years ago.
To say the race took its time to build is an understatement. An 83-second opening lap set the tone for a pedestrian pace and there was little in the way of increased tempo until the final 2,000m, at which stage Pavey was in the perfect position. Biding her time in third, the veteran waited patiently until using the bell as the signal to kick for home. She was gone.
France’s Clemence Calvin tried to keep pace but to no avail. A two-metre lead became a five-metre lead and, with an added surge down the home straight, Pavey wrote her name in the record books.
So does this mean any thoughts have crept in to retire at the top? “It actually inspires me to keep running,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking of retiring but the last couple of weeks have made me definitely not want to retire.
“At my stage of life my main priority is my kids and it has to work for my family. I’m definitely still enjoying it. I’m fortunate that my running gives us more time together as a family rather than less.
“It’s a big motivation to me that my children have both parents at home because I run. I just feel really fortunate that’s it’s given us a great family life.”
From Ben Gloom, Zurich
Comments
Age is just a number. 40 Year Old Jo Pavey from England won the 10,000m in Zurich last Tuesday. Way to go!! She ran 32:22.
Bob Anderson 8/18/14 5:41 pm