Stef Reid desperate to top the podium in Swansea

“I was so excited, so it was devastating to not be on form and have some issues with injury and stuff like that. So I want to win in Swansea, I want to know what it feels like to have a championship title and stand on top of the podium. That is my focus.”

Great Britain’s world record holder Stef Reid is desperate to top the podium on Friday (22 August) when she competes in the long jump T44 at the 2014 IPC Athletics European Championships in Swansea, Great Britain.

Despite regularly being in contention for top spot, BP Ambassador Reid has yet to taste gold medal success at a major event and is determined to change this at the Europeans.

See how Stef Reid is striving for better in this short video

After winning the silver medal at the London 2012 Paralympic Games, Reid was one of the favourites for the gold at the 2013 IPC Athletics World Championships in Lyon, France.

But after a torturous year with injuries and personal circumstances, Reid could only managed fifth place and had to watch on as her European rivals - Iris Pruysen of the Netherlands and France’s Marie Amelie le Fur - won gold and silver respectively.

Now, with regained focus, Reid has a clear goal in Swansea.

“I have never stood on top of the podium, so I badly want to do that,” she said.

“At the World Championships in Lyon, at the end of the season I was looking at that and it was probably the best shot I have ever had.

“I was so excited, so it was devastating to not be on form and have some issues with injury and stuff like that. So I want to win in Swansea, I want to know what it feels like to have a championship title and stand on top of the podium. That is my focus.”

After losing out in 2013, Reid has made changes to her life and taken time to get her body back in fighting shape in a bid to regain her best form.

The changes appear to be paying dividends. Reid heads into the European Championships in the form of her life and as the hot favourite having broken the world record twice already this season.

So what has drastically changed for Reid to enable her to find her form once more?

“I have been able to train more,” she said.

“2013 was a really tough year for me, there was the huge high of the Paralympics in 2012 and I had done well there. But I kind of just realised that the build up to that was one of the toughest things that I have experienced and I didn’t realise how hard that was going to be.

“My husband [Canada’s Brent Lakatos] is also a wheelchair racer, it was a pretty new marriage and we were finding ourselves living 4,000 miles apart. Brent was training in Texas and I was training in London and it was really difficult.

“We made the big decision to both move up to Loughborough, so we got involved in that and then I had some other things like family and a underlying back issue that finally caught up with me.

“I knew that to get where I wanted to be, I needed to take that time to get my life back on track.”

If Reid is to finally win that elusive major championship gold, she knows she will have to beat Pruysen and le Fur - a challenge that she is relishing.

“We are going to have a great final, and I am looking for a repeat of Lyon,” she said. “I am hoping that everyone will be in form and that it will be competitive.”

The 2014 IPC Athletics European Championships run from the 18-23 August and Reid will line-up in the long jump on Friday starting at 16:15 local time.

The event will be streamed live, together with live results, at the event website.

The live stream from Swansea 2014, together with videos on demand of individual races, are available to embed on websites in some territories via the IPC’s YouTube channel. For further information please contact IPC Digital Media Manager Natalia Dannenberg-Spreier.

In addition, HD quality broadcast footage from Swansea 2014 is available from the IPC’s Broadcast Manager Jose Manuel Dominguez.

Daily highlights will be available for digital channels via Omnisport, whilst individual races as video on demand can be embedded via Perform’s e-player.

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Caption

The rivalry between Great Britain's Stef Reid and France's Marie Amelie le Fur could be a highlight of Swansea 2014.