Judy Simpson (nee Livermore)
Judy Simpson, born in Jamaica, and brought up in Rugby, was described as having “much in common with young Sue Reeve, tall, long-legged, quick to learn sound technique in the field events”. Like Sue Reeve, her international career began as a teenager and their Olympic careers overlapped at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where Judy finished 13th in the pentathlon whilst Sue Reeve was in the long jump.
Like all Birchfield multi-event athletes, before and since, Judy could have excelled at individual events too, in her case the high jump or hurdles. After the Moscow Olympics the pentathlon was replaced by the heptathlon, requiring proficiency in the 800m and javelin. The latter was to have a profound effect at the 1983 World Championships when she failed to register a valid throw.
Judy moved to Birchfield Harriers from Rugby AC in 1982, was selected for the European Championships in Athens, finishing 7th with a Commonwealth record of 6,286, and followed that with Commonwealth silver in Brisbane.
Training for seven disciplines is tough, and her coach John Anderson’s words before the 1986 Commonwealth Games, reported in the Evening Mail, seem tough too: “the brilliance of multi-talented athlete Judy Simpson will never fully see the light unless she wins, and wins well, in Edinburgh this weekend… I’ve spent ten years working with her but unless there’s a gold medal here and a Commonwealth Games record to boot, I don’t know how much further we can go”
He got his wish, she won Commonwealth gold and then raised the Commonwealth record to 6,623 at the European Championships, sweeping aside Birchfield club records for 100m hurdles and high jump at the same time.
The Sunday Mercury dubbed her “Mistress of Meadowbank”. By the end of that year she had competed in a massive total of 43 multi-event competitions.
By then, injuries were taking their toll, particularly a recurrent cyst behind her knee, and she withdrew at the 1988 Olympic heptathlon. She returned to win Commonwealth bronze in 1990 with the hope of reaching her third Olympics in 1992, but retired that year, not long after Denise Lewis joined Birchfield Harriers.
Judy then became well known to another generation of TV viewers as “Nightshade” in “Gladiators”. At the height of her success in 1986 she had been judged “the most outstanding multi-event athlete in the club’s history.”
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