LUKE STRONG
ATHLETE PORTRAITS
“I WAS TOLD ALL THE TIME THAT I WAS TOO EMOTIONAL AND SHOWED TOO MUCH EMOTION.
IF YOU DON'T PERFORM, THEY GET RID OF YOU.”
Hey Luke, where do we find you today?
I'm in Armenia. It's cold! I'm just here with some friends traveling. I hadn't been here yet so had to tick it off.
So last time I saw you, we talked about Bete Noir, this brand...an effort to change the dialogue in sports culture and to shed light on this tormenting paradox that is sport and that is the pursuit of elite sport. It's something that, damaged me, but, at the same time, gave me everything that I am. Those two extremes is what this brand is. Your story is so representative of so many athletes.
No one really cares unless it's someone that's winning at the top of the podium.
You were really candid to me that night. I’d love for you to be as raw, honest as possible here again today.
You can start by introducing yourself and we'll take it from there.
Hi, I'm Luke Strong. I am a world European medallist and five-time British trampoline champion.
Yeah. Pretty impressive. You were the first British male in 30 years to medal at Europeans right?
Yeah, in 32 years. The first to win a medal in the Olympic era.
Wow.
Then I broke my leg like two months after.
How did you get into the sport of trampoline?
It was by accident actually. I went to this youth club with my friends near my house just to play football and go on the PlayStations and things like that.
They had a trampoline there and I just went on it one time and just loved it. I had done a lot of different sports before but never really stuck at anything. I just wasn't really bothered.
But the first time I went on trampoline I was like, I have to do this again. I have to go every weekend. Just from there, loved it and picked it up really quickly and coaches kind of noticed that and then asked me to join a club and the rest was history if you will.
How old were you?
I was 11.
It was just a youth club run by a church group for like kids to go and do different activities and they had a trampoline there with a coach just as one of the activities to do. You only got one go at a time because there were so many kids there. But just from that one go, I loved it and just went every week.
What did you like about it so much?
I honestly don't even know.
> “People ask me that all the time, but I don’t know, It almost felt like it was just what I was supposed to do.”
I had done other sports before and liked them but I easily left them.
Whereas trampoline, as soon as I went on it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I just wanted to get better.
From the moment I first tried it, I was like, okay, I want to do this thing and then the next, and then I want to make this competition and that one and it rolled on like that.
I think it was the first time in my life that I actually really ever truly liked something that I was doing.
Did you ever feel like that turned into an addiction?
Oh absolutely. I was completely addicted to it. I would go and train six hours a day and then I'd come home and I'd watch trampoline, I'd go on my trampoline in the backyard, everything I did, I just wanted it to be trampoline.
Do you remember your first competition?
Yeah. Oh my god, it was the most stressful day of my life.
How old were you?
I was 11. It was only a couple of months after I started. Actually, I started doing competitions and I remember my mum piled all of my friends into the car to come and watch me and stuff like, it was 10 of us in a five-seater car
Did you have a good competition?
Yeah, I won the competition and qualified for the next round, but I remember in the warmup, I kept getting this one skill wrong and I kept falling on it and I remember stamping off the trampoline and thinking 'I'm not doing this competition, I'm going to embarrass myself.'
Then I ended up winning. It's kind of what I've always been like.
So the pre-competition meal hack is a happy meal?:
I mean didn't Usain Bolt used to have chicken nuggets? If it worked for him!?
So tell me a bit about your early days in the sport.
>
We went and messed around and then just entered competitions. I did that for the first two years and was still fairly successful. I went to like junior world championships and won the under-15 British Championships, but, it got to a point where then the national coach said to me, 'you need to move gyms if you want to be serious about the sport.' That was when I moved to Liverpool with the coach that I'm with now. Jay who you met in Liverpool as well. I was 13.
It was a much better environment. It was professional, we conditioned, we had programs and goals we wanted to achieve. It wasn't just a free for all and a joke around. At my old gym, I was by far the best and nobody else was even close. Then I went to this new gym and there were people at my level, it was a very different environment but also very important for my development. I don't think that staying in that old gym I would've ever been here today now.
That was a testament to the people I trained with, but also to my coach, Jay. He always pushed us, and that's what I needed at the time.
When was your first major title?
As a senior, the first title that I won was the Senior Men's British Championships in 2011. I had won junior European medals and junior world championship medals when I was a kid though.
When did the injury shit show start?
That was 2006, it was my first injury. I was on the trampoline and fractured and dislocated my elbow. I had to have surgery but the real shit show started in 2009, when I was 15.
That was when I first broke my leg. I nearly lost my left leg and got told that I'd never do sport again or walk or anything like that.
I got back from that went senior, and won Europeans in 2014, then two months after that I then broke the same leg again for a second time.
I got back from that and trained for the 2015 Olympic qualifications for Rio 2016. But, I had been out of competition for 15 months and I had lost all of my confidence and there was just a lot of pressure put on me from the national coaches and British gymnastics.
I ended up being the alternate for Rio.
I then walked away from the sport a little bit and didn't know if I was going to carry on, then came back, won a silver medal at Worlds in 2017 and then made the individual final at Worlds in 2018.
Then the ankle injury kicked off, which is the one still going on now.
So you were an alternate at Rio with an injury?
Yeah. Around the Rio time, I was having a lot of issues with the 2009 injuries, which a lot of people didn't realize either.
Where the skin graft was open, I had like a lot of nerve damage and nerve pain. The build-up to Rio for me was honestly one of the worst periods of my whole life.
It was just constant pain. Walking around was painful. I couldn't really train as much as I wanted to and it was crap. It was almost like one of those invisible pains where there's nothing anyone can do, you just gotta do it.
How did you break your leg two times?
The first time, doctors still don't really know today they call it a freak accident.
I was taking off for the first skill of my routine and as I hit the trampoline, it felt like my left leg hit the floor. Then I felt the bone snap weirdly. People said that they could hear it. I fell onto my back. The doctors told me that not even people that had been run over at 40 miles an hour had the same level of injuries.
I don't know - it was just a freak accident.
Then the second time, I landed on the trampoline on a slightly straight leg, and just as the trampoline recoiled it kind of popped the bone off. Not fun...
My ignorance makes me believe that jumping on a trampoline is low impact and thus harder to get injured. Can you explain why trampoline is such an injury-prone sport?
People always think, oh a trampoline is bouncy, it's soft, but every time you land on a trampoline from a high height, it's like landing with 12 times your body weight, going through you when you land.
It's actually one of the sports with the most g-force that goes through your body. There are hundreds of kilograms going through your body each time you land. Then because the springs compress, it just keeps going down. So if you land on a straight leg, the trampoline's then going to go down on your straight leg and then push it back straight into your leg.
That's how I broke my leg for the second time, the energy went through the bone and broke it. Then the other thing that makes trampoline so dangerous as well is the height that you get.
For men's trampoline, you can be 8 meters above the air doing three somersaults connected to 10 other skills and there's a very fine margin for error. You can fall off, you can land on your head, you can do a lot of different things there.
At what point did you feel, like your entourage, the people around you coaches from the national team, from the federation were bullying you or ignoring your pain?
Honestly, it sounds bad, but my whole career.
The time I first remember it happening was the year after I had broken my left leg and was told that it was gonna be amputated and that I'd never do sport again.
After that, they took me off the national program and basically weren't expecting me to come back.
I did all the rehab, came back, went to the junior world championships 10 months later and I missed the final by 0.1.
I came home and the national coach and leader of the program sat me down and said that they weren't going to be able to support me anymore because I hadn't achieved anything and that my results weren't good enough and that she didn't see me ever becoming a senior athlete because my attitude was too bad.
Never did I ever do anything to put anyone off or be horrible to anyone around me.
> “Especially in British trampoline, if you don’t conform they get rid of you.”
That's what they've tried to do to me a lot of times,
It got real bad in 2018 and 2019, when I reported to them that I had a lot of pain in my right ankle. I had a CT scan, and an MRI scan which both came back saying that there was nothing wrong with me.
So the coaches told me to get on with it or give up. I remember the doctor at British Gymnastics saying to me like, maybe it's just time that you think about moving to the next thing in your life or doing something else cuz it's not working for you.
That was really difficult and for eight months, I trained with a fracture in my right ankle that people told me wasn't there.
We were there Monday to Friday, if you're always surrounded by people telling you you're a bad person or there's nothing wrong with you constantly, you start to believe it.
And sadly I ended up walking away from the sport injured because nobody fixed my ankle. I walked away with a lot of issues mentally.
I was in a very bad place and got to the point where I didn't want to be here anymore and contemplated all of that. It was just a very dark time.
I eventually picked myself up and paid for private medical care for myself to eventually get to the point where I am now where my ankle is the best that it's been in a long time and feels better but I had to fund it all myself because British gymnastics basically don't really care about you unless you're adding value. As soon as I couldn't qualify for an Olympic place, they got rid of me straight away.
During Covid actually, I remember getting emails from UK Sports, the ones who pay us, explaining that because it was Covid-19 and no one knew what was happening, no one was going to be taken off funding. Then, a few weeks after that, I was told that they were taking me off funding and it was just too bad that I didn't have a job or income, it was just what was happening.
Why do you think they did that?
I think it was for a few reasons. I think part of was my bad temper and the fact that it wasn't healthy to keep doing that to myself all the time, which I get.
What!?
If you challenged anything that they did or said, they'll just attack you or they'll get rid of you, or they'll make it much more difficult for you to achieve. I could never prove this but my coach also thinks the same thing... I think there is an undertone of homophobia to it in British gymnastics. I always got in trouble for posting pictures with my t-shirt off and would get made to delete posts from Instagram.
All the judges would ever comment on is that my tattoos make me look scruffy.
What's the motivation to keep going?
I honestly don't know
Then there's a small voice saying, oh just one more try... you just never know. When people think that you can't is when I really just want to do it. I've always been like that.
I think it's for me as well. I've been through so much crap with the sport. It's been a very toxic end to it. That makes me sad as well because it was something that I love so much that I don't want them to have the power of getting rid of me.
I want to stop the sport on my terms.
Do you still love it?
In a weird way, yes, but I also hate it at the same time.
It's caused me the most awful times in my life that yeah, but I keep coming back because it's something that I love and I cherish and has given me a lot of good things.
I think that's a big reason why I want to come back as well. I don't want to end the score this way.
I'd love nothing more than to have been kicked out of the sport and shunned and then to come back, do it all myself, and prove everybody wrong, that I can do it. They all think that they got rid of me and I just want to come back and say 'fuck you all'.
Why sport? Aside from that motivation and the revenge, why sport? What is it that you love so much about it?
I just love the challenge of it. It's so difficult in terms of the skills that you have to do and then you have to make everything look nice, and you have to jump high and you've got to be in the middle of the mat..
There's always something that can be better. It never gets boring, which is difficult because you're constantly chasing so you're never satisfied. I need that in life too, I'm always climbing up the walls or wanting to travel and move, I think that's why trampoline is good for me, there is always something else to accomplish. You can travel the world doing what you love, why wouldn't you want to do that?
Trampoline is very unique in the sense that it's not just the fastest to the post like swimming for example. It's very different as I'm not always in control of my own destiny. I have to hope that the judges like me on that day or they like the look of me. A lot of it revolves around human opinion. Part of me is very jealous of those sports because I would love it if trampoline was a sport you couldn't argue with in scoring, if you pass the line first - that's it - you've won.
That's what I love about sprinting, it was completely objective. There's no argument to who is the best but that was very suffocating at the same time. You're chasing the clock.
Yeah I can imagine, especially when you get to your peak where it's the smallest margins and you're beating your time by 0.001, it must be so frustrating. But that's actually what caused me the most stress in trampoline. I'd go to a competition, feel like I had a good performance, then the score comes up and it's shit.
I remember going to the World Championships and one of the judges told my coach she deducted 0.2 from my score because she didn't like my hair and I didn't smile enough
I missed the final by 0.1 that day. That was the difference between being paid 8,000 more pounds a year.
I was like... oh, thanks.
That's an expensive haircut.
My coach wanted to punch her in the face right there
That's the difference with athletics, doesn't really matter if the person next to you is homophobic if you run faster than them.
Are all the new tattoos a way of self-sabotage in a way?
Maybe. It's annoying, because how can a tattoo make what you're doing on the trampoline look any different?
Like a tattoo doesn't make my knees bend, it doesn't make my arms fly out. If you don't like my tattoos fine but It's not in the code of points to deduct that.
Wow Luke, thank you. I have a tradition where I ask athletes to write a little poem, a letter to sport. I call them letters from a broken athlete. It normally starts with 'Dear Sport'. What's yours?
Dear sport,
My joy.
My passion.
At times my only friend.
So maybe that's why this hurts so bad? How can I give you everything and still feel like I have nothing?
This journey has taught me more than I could have imagined and taken me places only once dreamed. With you, I've faced my hardest lessons and battled back from hell too many times. I really think I hate you but strangely love you even more.
Thanks for taking the time Luke.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Enjoy the rest of your holiday.
Thank you. See you later.
And we'll speak, Ciao.
Bye bye.
> “But, in that organization, they don’t like anybody who speaks their mind. You’re, you’re expected to line up, do what you’re told not answer back, and that’s just how it is.
I remember asking a question about when the leotards and when they were getting delivered and a coach stood up in front of everyone and said to me, ‘I don’t know who the fuck you think you are. You’re a jumped-up little prick and if you don’t shut your fucking mouth, I’ll make sure that you never make a team again.’”
>
> “That was the first time that I ever felt that nobody really believed me. She didn’t really like that I was from the north of the country and a little bit outspoken. She thought I had a bad attitude and didn’t always do as I was told. Then it was microaggressions, people constantly trying to change the person that I am. I was told all of the time that I’m too emotional, and I could never become a senior athlete with the way that I act. It was very difficult to be myself. I was always on edge and worried about what people thought of me and worried about getting in trouble for being the person that I am.”
>
I was just super hard on myself. I was a really bad perfectionist and I'd get really annoyed at myself for making mistakes.
Sure, it's not a great attitude to have, but what I always used to say is, I don't know how Serena Williams can smash up a racket and then she'll still win a match and that's accepted, but in amateur sport, you're expected to just be perfect constantly and it's not attainable for every person. I know so many people who have walked away from a sport that they love because they just can't fit into the box that amateur sport is.
