The 1977 European bronze medallist and 1976 Olympic finalist tells me abut her swimming career, competing with East Germany, and the pressure on today's athletes.
Susan Jenner can point to the exact moment she was at her peak as a swimmer. As she prepared to turn at the halfway point of the 200m butterfly at the 1977 European Championships in Jönköping, Sweden, she hit what athletes call ‘the wall’.
“I just thought, oh my God my thighs are on fire, they’re burning,” she says. “I turned and the next hundred I was just floating through it. It was a wonderful experience going through that barrier.”
She had improved her own British record time by four seconds, and was “glowing” as she climbed out of the pool knowing the bronze medal was hers, and that she had beaten Tamara Shelofastova of the USSR into fourth. Beating a Soviet was a “big deal”, but her euphoria was pierced moments later.
“They gave me a paper saying I had to have a drug test,” she recalls. “The ironies of life.”
The improvement in Jenner’s time meant she had to be tested, and she felt the palpable inconsistency that the two East Germans who had beaten her, Anett Fiebig and Olympic champion Andrea Pollack, were free to go.
“Andrea Pollack was wonderful,” she remembers. “She and I swam the same events all around the world, and we had a bond, a connection. It wasn't their fault. They were young girls and had no idea what was being done to them.”
The affection Jenner feels for her rival courses through her animated storytelling as she reminisces about their meetings on the international circuit in the mid-1970s. Despite my pressing, she shows no lingering doubt or bitterness at what might have been if proper drug testing had been in force, and the state-enforced administering of drugs to East German and Soviet athletes, widely known today, had been stopped. Even looking back at herself standing on the block for the Olympic relay final at the 1976 Montreal games, Jenner remembers only the excitement of the occasion.
“I was just delighted to be competing in Olympic finals and semi-finals, and felt no pressure at all,” she says. “I suppose I was realistic. At that stage I was so far from the East Germans [that winning] didn’t seem possible.”
She improved rapidly the following year, and in 1977 won her bronze in a championship where East Germans won twelve of the fourteen women’s events (the other two went to the USSR), plus a further twelve medals. The previous year, in Montreal, a 16-year-old Jenner had made the semi-final of the 100m butterfly as well as the relay final, beaten each time by Pollack and her teammates.
“I first saw the Olympics on television when I was 8 years old; the Mexico games in black and white,” she recalls. “I said ‘I want to go to the Olympics’. It was an eight-year dream to do it.”
She had grown up in a sporty household, with her grandfather, former flyweight boxer Jack Brown, encouraging her.
“I'm pretty small for a swimmer,” she says, comparing herself to her near six-foot teammate Sharron Davies. “But my grandfather put in my mind that it was an advantage to be small.”
And Jenner made the most of her time in Montreal as she realised the childhood ambition.
“It was phenomenal,” she says. “The Olympic village is an amazing place. You had athletes from all countries mixing together – I remember seeing Kip Keino and Olga Korbut, and thinking ‘Wow!’ – and everything was free.”
She still remembers her first encounter with glow sticks, and her excitement that the village had its own cinema. The athletes would swap kit as souvenirs – she treasures an Australian t-shirt depicting a duck-billed platypus wearing swimming trunks – and she recalls lying on the music room floor being blown away listening to Bridge Over Troubled Water for the first time.
“One of the officials said, ‘Are you nervous?’. I said ‘No, this is wonderful, this is fantastic, this is my dream!’ ”
During London 2012, former Olympians were asked to mentor young upcoming athletes. Jenner saw how professional things had become.
“Everyone had a dietitian, a psychologist, a physio – a team,” she says. “Mine was my mum driving me to the pool, and she was my dietitian!”
She appreciates the normal life she had in the 1970s, remembering the “fun” of taking her exams at the Olympic training camp, and having to hand over meagre travel expenses for a TV appearance on Blue Peter, such was the commitment to amateurism. But the kids she was mentoring in 2012 were already training full-time, and even the successful ones could not be guaranteed to stand out in future.
“In 1976, Britain only won three golds, so [gold medallist swimmer] David Wilkie was a hero,” she says. “In 2012 it was 29 golds, so things had changed a lot. Rebecca Adlington winning two golds in Beijing in 2008 was a real breakthrough for British women swimmers.”
Despite her misgivings about the pressure on modern athletes, she emphasises the roles of those coaches who enabled her to realise her dreams; club coach, Al Richards, who would “push and push”, and Olympic women’s coach, Jack Queen, after whom, along with her grandfather, Jenner named her son.
“They were amazing coaches,” she says. “To have someone who believes in you and challenges you is essential. Maybe you don't realise it at the time, but it's a bit of luck that you happen to get the right coach at the right time.”
Richards was a tough authority figure who rarely gave compliments, and who had travelled the world, reading widely on the training methods of leading swimmers such as American, Wendy Buglioli. He focused Jenner’s training on one stroke.
“Every session I only swam butterfly, which was really unusual back then, and it made a massive difference to my success,” she says. “When you swim ten 200m butterfly sets every day for months, you improve dramatically!”
Jenner is still in touch with Richards, and was with Queen until his death five years ago. Listening to her recount the endless morning and evening training sessions with these “wonderful” coaches, the mind wanders back to the stories of her East German rivals. In 1998, several swimmers, including Andrea Pollack, went public with allegations team coaches and physicians systematically administered steroids without their consent. A number of doctors were convicted of actual bodily harm, and fined or imprisoned. The contrast is vivid. With sadness, Jenner tells me Pollack died of cancer in 2019, aged 57.
“It wasn't her fault, she didn't say, ‘give me drugs’ at that age,” says Jenner. “I would rather have the bronze and be able to have a normal healthy life than have been forced to take steroids and suffer like that.”
Pollack, to her, was a victim in a time when political strongmen’s power struggles bled across competitive sport, and into the lives of so many unfortunate teenage girls who were otherwise just like her. And perhaps this profound sympathy and compassion for her friend and rival is what led Jenner to the starting block for the Olympic final, and to the podium in Sweden a year later, absorbing the experience and striving to win, but accepting of the challenge she faced.
“Everybody knew they were on drugs but nothing was done about it, so it was just the way it was,” she says. “The system allowed it somehow, and we were playing in that system.”
As our conversation closes, I push her on her place in history. Does she not feel the European gold from 1977 ought to be hers?
“Some people have said that, but no, I won the bronze,” she says. “Suddenly giving me a gold forty years later means nothing. You can't change what has happened, and it didn't happen on the day.”
Jenner retired at 22. Her father had died which blunted her competitive edge, and she had moved between scholarships in North Carolina and San Diego. She reflects that the East Germans might just have been faster anyway, and points to the USA’s boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow; nobody knows what could have been, and to dwell on it would not be healthy.
"You've got to look at the whole picture,” she says. “It's very difficult to look back and say it was black and white. You don't know what would have happened. Of course I think sport should be drug-free, but you can't apply today's lens.”
Now an award-winning author, and professor of Leadership and Organisational Change, Jenner still wears her Olympic ring. And when she listens to Simon & Garfunkel, she remembers that time in her swimming career, and the people who guided and supported her, with gratitude and affection.
As she tells me, “You have to embrace it and look forwards.”
*
