Lorraine Ugen, a British long jumper who has sewn her own kit to highlight the fact that she does not have a sponsor, won the bronze medal at the World Indoor Championships.
Ugen, 30, jumped 6.82m to take her place on the podium after coming back from two fouls. During her victory lap, she hung her shoes, which had her personally-designed “unsigned” logo imprinted on them, around her neck, to showcase her lack of sponsorship.
“One of the reasons I started Unsigned was to make it less shameful when you don’t have a sponsor,” she said. “There’s a community. I’m world class, I don’t have a sponsor and if anyone is out there, I’m here.”
Gold was won by Serbia’s Ivana Vuleta who delighted home support with a leap of 7.06m.
Ugen, who grew up in London but trains in Atlanta, said that not having a sponsor put extra pressure on her. “How are you going to support yourself? When you’re living out of your savings account, the money is starting to go down and I needed to figure out a way.” She is now planning to sell her Unsigned apparel to help fund her career.
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She said her world medal would prove a point. “I believe I was good enough to be a contender in the world, and to prove that and get a medal shows that I deserve to have the support.”
Hers was the second bronze after Marc Scott, 28, was third the 3,000m. It was the first major medal of Scott’s career and won in a discipline he considers his third-best event, behind the 5,000m, in which he holds the European record, and 10,000m. The 28-year-old knocked Mo Farah out of selection for the Tokyo Olympics in the trials before the Games. “I am trying to fill those shoes, inch by inch,” he said of Farah. “It’s going very well.”
Scott conceded that the atmosphere in the British camp had been dampened following the withdrawal of top medal hopes Katarina Johnson-Thompson, Keely Hodgkinson, and Elliot Giles from their respective events over the course of the weekend and the lack of wins so far.
“There’s a little bit of gloom around the team,” he said. “Obviously two big names didn’t start – Keely and Elliot – which was a big shame. We needed to get a medal – I am delighted to get a medal for the team.” Without Scott and Ugen’s efforts, Great Britain were set for their worst performance with a full team at a world championships since 1987.
It was also an eventful evening for Great Britain’s David King, who made the final of the men’s 60m hurdles in surreal fashion after an exact tie, to the thousandth of a second, with Shusei Nomoto of Japan in the semi-final. Both men ran the race in 7.565 seconds and organisers had to resort to drawing names out of a bag to decide who could take the eighth lane in the final, since it was impossible to accommodate them both.
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King said it was a “crazy” experience and that he understood it had never happened before. He said that, after the result, he found a quiet space in the changing room where he cried and called his girlfriend. He finished fifth in the final, with the gold won by Grant Holloway of the USA, who had equalled the world record in the semi-finals.
Elsewhere, Norwegian star Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who had taken Samuel Tefera’s world record last month, was denied the Ethiopian’s world title, after the defending champion surged ahead. In a thrilling competition, the 21-year-old Ingebrigtsen, who had set the pace, leading for the entire race, was overtaken with just metres to go by Tefera.
Pole vault star Mondo Duplantis, of Sweden, broke his second world record of the year so far, improving on his existing mark from February with a leap of 6.20m.
