Rutherford scrapes into long jump final

Greg Rutherford will be drawing on his vast experience when he lines up in the long jump final on Saturday (August 13) after a qualification round which left fans on the edge of their seats.

Greg Rutherford sealed bronze in the long jump denying GB a complete repeat of Super Saturday from London 2012 but making it a pretty Special Saturday anyway.

Jeff Henderson of the United States went onto win the competition with a season’s best of 8.38m, snatching victory away from South Africa’s Luvo Manyonga by a centimetre, while Rutherford secured bronze with an 8.29m leap at the death.

“I promised my daughter Rhianna I was going to get her a medal and I was thinking “I can’t let her down”. If you’d told me ten years ago I would be gutted with an Olympic bronze, I’d have told you not to be so stupid.

“Big names went out of the competition yet again and I was very almost one of them”, the Briton said, adding: “I’ll be very different tomorrow”.

The Milton Keynes athlete prides himself on being a big-stage performer – he has won gold at his last four major championships, completing the clean sweep of Olympic, world, Commonwealth and European titles – and he showed plenty of bottle here. “It was more frustration than anything else”.

“I didn’t think that I would be sitting here four years later”.

“When you look at the strength in depth we now have within the team, we’ve got youngsters coming through who are doing incredible things and old hands who are still in there”, he said.

He said: “Watching Mo go round was motivation for me. Going into tomorrow it’s a completely different competition”.

“When I fell down, for a moment I thought my race was over, my dream was over but then I managed to dig deep”.