Greg Rutherford participant in 2014 Commonwealth Games
Gregory James Rutherford MBE (born 17 November 1986) is a retired British track and field athlete who specialised in the long jump. He represented Great Britain at the Olympics, World and European Championships, and England at the Commonwealth Games. In September 2021 Rutherford was selected as part of the British bobsleigh team but was injured during preparations to qualify for the 2022 Winter Olympics.
A European Junior Champion in 2005, Rutherford first made a mark on the senior circuit with a silver medal in the 2006 European Athletics Championships. A golden period between 2012 and 2016 saw Rutherford win the long jump gold medal at the 2012 Summer Olympics, 2014 Commonwealth Games, 2014 and 2016 European Athletics Championships and 2015 World Athletics Championships, and top the 2015 IAAF Diamond League rankings in the event. A bronze at the 2016 Summer Olympics proved his final major medal, as ankle injuries plagued him for the next two years. He retired from the sport through injury in 2018.
From 4 September 2015, when his Diamond League victory was confirmed with a fourth event win in Zürich, until his withdrawal from the British Athletics Championships in June 2016, Rutherford held every available elite outdoor title; national, continental, World, Olympic, Diamond League and Commonwealth. Following Linford Christie, Daley Thompson, Sally Gunnell and Jonathan Edwards, Rutherford is the most recent of only five athletes to win the ''Grand Slam" of Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth titles in the same event, and the only one to have also won the Diamond League.
His Olympic victory has a particularly iconic status in British sporting cultural history as the second of three athletics gold medals, between Jessica Ennis-Hill and Mo Farah, and the fifth of six golds in total, from Super Saturday, the high point of the host nations achievement at the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Rutherford is the current British record holder, both outdoors and indoors, for this event with his personal bests of 8.51 m (outdoors) and 8.26 m (indoors). He was a five time national outdoor Champion and two-time national indoor champion, His main domestic rival being the five-time national outdoor champion Chris Tomlinson.
Rutherford was widely regarded as the best long jumper in a generation that lacked all-time great jumpers, but his British record placed him in the top 25 long jumpers by distance of all time, and he was highly regarded for his consistency, determination and championship mettle, frequently recording his best jumps when he needed them in championship competition.
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