David Greene: From footballer to 400m hurdle ace
Britain’s new 400m hurdles star David Greene caught up with spikesmag.com to talk feet, football and what he hopes to achieve during the rest of his breakthrough season.
Athletes go through many weird and wonderful re-hab exercises to regain full fitness and it is fair to say picking up coins, pencils and pens with your feet probably fits into this category.
This is that is what David Greene, Britain’s top 400m hurdler, has had to regularly carry out in an effort to strengthen his feet, which have been ravaged by tendon problems over the past couple of years.
In fact the 23-year-old Welshman believes he has become so skilled at the art that he jokes to spikesmag.com “I think should be on Britain’s Got Talent.”
But
Greene is set to appear in a much more meaningful show this summer at the Berlin World Championships, where he carries genuine hopes as the seventh ranked athlete in the world in the 400m hurdles.
This season he has improved by almost a second with a stunning 48.62 winning time in Prague and an eye-catching victory at the inagural European Team Championships in Leiria, which caught the attention of BBC commentators Colin Jackson and Jonathan Edwards.
But where has the improvement come from?
“For the past couple of seasons I’ve suffered foot problems that always seemed to hit me at the wrong time of year,” he says.
“What has happened is that this winter I’ve had a long spell of training without any real problems, I suppose there's nothing more to it than that.”
Despite the problems of the past couple of seasons, the Welshman has been able to show flashes of his class. In 2007 he endured a heavily disrupted summer but still managed to win the gold medal at the European Under-23 Championships in Hungary, so perhaps we should not be totally surprised by his progression - a welcome surprise for British athletics.
Born in the Welsh town of Llanelli, which is famous for its rugby tradition, Greene’s preferred choice as a sporting youngster was not the 15-a-side code but football. And he was pretty good at it, too. As a left-winger, like his hero Ryan Giggs, he played for Swansea City schoolboys up until the age of 16 and once scored against Spanish giants Real Madrid.
“I competed in a tournament in Spain where we played Real Madrid,” explains Greene. “I was only 13 or 14 at the time I was only on the bench. The game ended in a draw and for some reason during the penalty shoot out even the substitutes could take a penalty. I put up my hand to take one and managed to put it in,” he adds laughing at the memory of notching a goal against Real Madrid, albeit their under-16 team.
Greene’s professional
football ambitions unfortunately came to an end after injuries gripped him and he began to lose his enjoyment for the game.
A gifted all-round sportsman, Greene had shown an aptitude for athletics and while he was studying sports and leisure management at UWIC when he decided to take up the sport seriously. He landed a 400m hurdles silver medal at the 2005 European Junior Championships to announce his arrival on the big stage. Firm proof that his career was up and running.
Not that he believes playing football was a waste of time;
he insists his initial passion for the sport really helped his athletics.
“Playing football toughened me up,” Greene explains.
“I was shouted at a lot and it was also very competitive. I suffered quite a lot of injuries, too, which helped me deal with setbacks as an athlete.”
He later started working with Bengt-Erik Blomqvist, the former coach to European 100m hurdles champion Susanna Kallur. However, when Blomqvist headed home to Sweden earlier this year Greene linked up with Malcolm Arnold, the man who guided John Akii-Bua to the 1972 Olympic title and Colin Jackson to the world 110m hurdles record.
Greene insists the technical improvement he has made under both coaches has contributed to his more recent success. But what does he believe he is capable of achieving for the rest of the season?
“I started the season wanting to run sub-49 seconds but I think now I’ll have to reassess my goals; I want to run low 48s.
"I started the season wanting to make the team for the Berlin World Championships but now I think I can do quite well there.”
And so it would seem a potential appearance on Britain’s Got Talent might just have to wait.
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