Pushy coach got Michael Bingham into athletics

Jul 9 2010 by Nick Purewal, The Journal

PERSISTENCE pushed football-mad World Championship silver medallist Michael Bingham into athletics.

These days Bingham is the one doing the badgering – admitting he hounded his coach into letting him switch from Decathlon to the 400metres – but back at McCallie School in Tennessee, the North Carolina-born 24-year-old had to be lured away from soccer.

The avid winger was turning out for his Chattanooga school’s First XI years before time, but only caught the athletics bug when a track and field coach refused to take no for an answer.

“I played football at my high school and all through that,” he explained, “and then I went to boarding school and I went for it again there too.

“I was in the varsity side when I was about 13 or 14, just because I was quick and they could put me on the wing.

“So soccer was the only sport I had played all my life up to that point.

“But I quit because one of the athletics coaches convinced me to come out and run one meet and I loved it.

“In time I ended up moving into Decathlon, and I went in that direction because it was fun, and then eventually I started running sprints because I thought I would enjoy that more.

“I did decathlon because it was fun, then I tried running sprints because I thought that was fun too.

“I had to convince my coach that I should be a sprinter and not a multi-eventer.

“I started telling him I wanted to specialise, and he agreed to let me do it for a couple of months.”

A good move, because Bingham helped Great Britain blast to the 4 x 400m relay silver at last year’s world event.

However successful a sprinter he becomes though, he cannot quite leave his footballing roots behind.

“I’ve watched the whole World Cup,” he continued. “I enjoyed it but some of the refereeing calls were really controversial.

“A lot of cards were pulled in some and then none in others, and I think sometimes the refs take control of the matches when it should just be the athletes playing. You shouldn’t really notice the ref in the game.

“So I was really frustrated, especially in the Ghana match.

“I think it should be an OK final, Germany ran into a good defence for the first time in the whole tournament so that’s what gave them a little trouble.”