Martyn Rooney | The Inside Track

Giving The Game Away

Martyn Rooney is a double 400m European Champion, a former captain of Team GB, and an athlete who has been at the top of their sport for over ten years. ⠀ ⠀ Despite the incredibly successful career that Martyn has had, he is no stranger to disappointment and controversy. With Martyn, as is often the case with track and field athletes, these highs and lows have unfolded on the biggest stage of them all – the Olympic Games.⠀ ⠀ At just 21, having been touted by Steve Cram as the next Seb Coe, Martyn represented GB at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Coming fourth in the final, losing to an unusually quick Russian team, Martyn was not the only one who was suspicious about their performance. 8 years later, when it emerged that a member of the Russian team had been doping, and they were rightly disqualified, Martyn received the medal he was owed in 2008. As Martyn touches upon in our podcast, winning a medal is undoubtedly life-changing, but when it comes eight years later than it should, it can lead to frustration and exasperation.⠀ ⠀ Perhaps his most famous Olympic moment though came in Rio in 2016; In a BBC interview straight after his individual race, when asked why the race didn't go well, Martyn famously claimed that he’d “ran like a dick”. In his last hope for a medal that year, Martyn was disqualified in the 4 x 400m final, when a team-mate was deemed to have stepped into the wrong area of the track. This was an incredibly frustrating thing to deal with, and his insights into how he coped with this were fascinating from a sports psychology perspective.⠀ ⠀ It was so good to get inside the mind of an elite athlete like Martyn, who has experienced the best that athletics can offer, as well as some of the frustrations that come with being involved in the sport. Martyn has his own podcast, called That Greaves and Rooney Sports Podcast, which we highly recommend – follow the link in our story for more of it.