Liz McColgan-Nuttall is remembering the day she went shoe shopping. She is remembering it because the shoe game then wasn’t quite like it is now.
It was in the competition village at athletics’ World Championships in Tokyo, where the brands all had their bases and stalls. That was 30 years ago this August.
She needed some spikes and didn’t have a footwear sponsor, which might seem a little mad for someone who had won silver in the 10,000 metres at the previous Olympics.
Liz McColgan celebrates winning the 10,000m at the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo
She had been beaten by a Soviet runner at Seoul ’88 and to get an idea of how she felt about that, it is necessary to know the medal has only made it out of a sock drawer in the past few weeks.
But that’s a different tale. The Tokyo story is about how one of Britain’s greatest ever runners came to be at a World Championships without sponsored shoes.
That saga had started with Nike learning a year or so earlier that there was a little girl growing inside her. Nike, ever the charmers, weren’t so overjoyed.
‘Nike dropped me pretty much right away and I lost my contract,’ McColgan-Nuttall says. ‘There were no earnings for the months I was pregnant after that.’
Nike seem to have been shamed into updating their approach in the past couple of years, but back then the situation left a new mother in need of some fresh kit when she rocked up in Japan.
‘I was walking through the village and went up to the ASICS stand,’ she says. ‘There was a man there who asked what I was doing and I told him I was running the 10k. He signed me up there and he let me pick out what I wanted.
‘I ended up pointing to these spikes and he was like, “No, take this one”, but I was set on the others because they had the right heel for me.
Liz McColgan, pictured with daughter Eilish in 1996, tried to shield her from the pressure
‘It turned out I had chosen the cheapest ones. They were about £14 or something. I didn’t get a single blister and the race went pretty well.’
Pretty well indeed. Three decades before super shoes changed athletics beyond recognition, a 27-year-old Scot with the cheapest spikes on the shelf won a famous gold medal.
It was 27 degrees and one by one she demolished that field in 31min 14 sec, barely nine months after giving birth to a daughter.
In its aftermath she was named BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and over time she collected records and titles around the world from New York to London, but Tokyo will always be ‘special’. This summer more than most.
THE daughter is pretty well known in her own right these days. Eilish McColgan is 30, a European silver medallist over 5,000m and an Olympic finalist at Rio 2016.
She’ll be in Tokyo imminently for a few more laps, just as she was there when her mother had her biggest moment and again for an anti-doping conference in 2015. It was during the trip six years ago that she went for a jog and a man stopped her in a park. He asked if she happened to be a relation of Liz McColgan. ‘Mad!’ says Eilish. Yet the resemblance really is quite something.
Their story has been told often enough, but there is a nice symmetry in that the daughter will shortly be contesting the Olympics in a city where, 30 years ago to the month, her mother brought fame to the family name.
The younger’s limits tend to be set lower than those the elder achieved way back when, but there is no doubting she is a delightfully versatile and talented runner, shown by her having achieved the qualifying standard for each of the 1500m, 5,000m and 10,000m in the space of seven days in June.
Her seven British titles also include the steeplechase and 3,000m, so she has exceptional range, but her mother’s distance — 10,000m — is the priority in Tokyo. Winning is out of her reach but one particular time is not.
‘What I really want,’ says Eilish, ‘is to break my mother’s Scottish record of 30:57. It’s her last one — we want to keep it in the family.’
Her best crack earlier this year came up one second
