INTERVIEW HELEN GRANT
A sports enthusiast and former regional judo champion, Grant was named as the new sports minister in October, following Hugh Robertson’s move to the Foreign Office
JOHN GOODBODY • SPORTS JOURNALIST
bring to people, not only in their health but also in their feeling of self-worth, something that can help their academic work, careers and lives. She should know. Grant has come
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from being the only black girl in a single-parent family on a housing estate in Carlisle to qualifying as a solicitor, setting up a successful practice, becom- ing the first black Tory female Member of Parliament and finally to being
elen Grants has no doubts. The new Minister for Sport is a firm believer in the benefits that exercise can
appointed a Minister, all while bringing up a family of two boys. Sport, she knows, can help an indi-
vidual’s self-confidence and she needed it when she struggled against bullying and racial prejudice at school. She says: ”From quite an early age,
I knew I was a quick runner because I used to do well in the village sports days. When I was at primary school, I wasn’t especially academic. It was pretty much sport that gave me the self-esteem that those of us, who are into sport, know they can get. It was in the 1960s and, at one stage, I was the
Grant was first elected as an MP in 2010
only person [there] with a darker skin. There was a fair bit of prejudice around and there was some bullying.” The fact that there were what she now terms as “scraps” was a factor in her starting judo for self-protection. It quickly became, she says, “a mechanism for staving off trouble”. “I liked the discipline of the sport and
having to learn the names of throws and I liked the feeling of winning. Judo and my running gave me a focus.” She became the north of England and southern Scotland junior champion and was also picked for her county at ath- letics, cross-country, hockey and tennis. “Sport is in my DNA” she emphasises.
“It kept me healthy and taught me to be part of a team and to know that if you are not a team player then that team is going to lose. “It also taught me the importance of
individual activities. You also think ‘If I can be good at sport, then maybe I can be good at academic work too’.”
Grant used judo to “stave off trouble” while growing up on a council estate in Carlisle, Cumbria 44 Read Sports Management online
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OLYMPIC MEMORIES Did she have any early heroes or hero- ines? “The first Olympics I remember were those in 1972 in Munich. I remem- ber the commentator (David Coleman
Issue 3 2013 © cybertrek 2013
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