One of Britain’s leading marathon runners is seeking legal advice after being overlooked for the Tokyo Olympics because, she claims, “false information” was presented at the UK Athletics selection meeting.
Charlotte Purdue expected to gain selection for the Games this summer after achieving the qualifying time and being given a medical exemption to miss last month’s British trials.
But she has lost out to Steph Twell despite her time of 2hr 25min 38sec in London in 2019 being more than a minute faster than her rival. Stephanie Davis gained an automatic place by winning the trials, with Jess Piasecki selected for running 2.25:28 in 2019 despite not having raced in 2020 or 2021. Purdue’s appeal was rejected on Wednesday and she has turned to the British Athletes Commission for support as she challenges the decision.
Purdue is widely regarded as the best of Britain’s female marathon runners, and her omission from the Games has stunned senior figures in the sport. The 29-year-old said that the selection panel had received incorrect information about the progress of her recovery from injury.
Three days before the UKA selection meeting, held on March 30, Purdue’s coach, Nic Bideau, provided detailed information about her training to Chris Jones, the governing body’s joint head of endurance.
Advertisement
Based on advice from James Brown, the UKA head doctor, Purdue had taken a six-week break from training to enable the stress injury to recover but Bideau explained that she had been back running for seven weeks. He added that Purdue was already running for up to an hour, with one of those runs including a 20-minute “threshold” effort. He said she had also returned to high-intensity interval training.
However, Purdue claims that the information given to the three-person selection panel was incorrect. It was told — in addition to an opinion expressed by Brown that she was the most at risk of those in contention of suffering another injury setback — that Purdue was back to running for up to 35 minutes and “probably six to eight weeks away from full training”. Last week Purdue ran 83 miles in training, coming close to peak performance in one session.
The minutes of the meeting suggest that the inconsistencies were not challenged by Jones, who was present, or other UKA performance staff.
Purdue says she was then told by Christian Malcolm, the head coach, that she had not been selected on medical grounds — even though Brown, the sport’s leading medic, had concluded that there was no reason to avoid picking any of the athletes for Tokyo.
“It just baffles me how they have reached this decision,” Purdue said. “I am concerned that I’ve not been selected because of Mickey Mouse evidence — false information that is not based on fact.
Advertisement
“I don’t want to make this personal. I don’t want to cost someone else a place in the team. But my coach made the point that the team should not have been announced until the appeal process had been completed. I have to challenge that. This is my career at stake.”
Purdue has been told she will receive a written explanation in the next five days. The appeal board was chaired by Nic Coward, with an independent lawyer on the three-person panel.
In her appeal Purdue also cited what she regards as a potential conflict of interest on the selection panel. Twell is a former Scottish Marathon Project member. Mark Pollard, interim head of performance at Scottish Athletics, was the one specialist member, with Malcolm and Sara Symington, UKA performance director, given the other two votes. UKA has declined to comment.
