Jazmin Sawyers was born in Stoke-on-Trent to a Jamaican father and an English mother, who later became the Chief Constable of Staffordshire.[3][4] She was initially a child gymnast, participating in the sport from the age of four. At ten years old she began to take part in athletics events at school and decided to start practising in various events.[5]
As part of City of Stoke Athletics Club, Sawyers focused mainly on high jump and long jump.[8] At the 2007 English Schools Championships she was the high jump runner-up with a personal best of 1.70 m (5 ft 6+3⁄4 in), finishing behind Katarina Johnson-Thompson.[9] The following year, Sawyers won the English Schools' titles in the long jump and the pentathlon – a feat she repeated in 2009.[8] In 2010, she won a scholarship to study at Millfieldpublic school.
Youth and junior medals
Sawyer's first international appearances came in 2011. At the World Youth Championships, she placed ninth in the heptathlon. She cleared six metres in the long jump for the first time that year and surpassed that mark to win the gold in the event at the Commonwealth Youth Games.[8] She was also a 4 × 100 metres relay champion with England at that event.[10]
Sawyers' bobsleigh training at the start of 2012 meant she was ill-prepared for heptathlon in the summer. She opted to focus on the long jump instead, as this combined well with the explosive strength training she had undertaken for the winter sport.[5] This proved to be a successful switch as she set a personal best and world-leading junior mark of 6.64 m (21 ft 9+1⁄4 in) to place third at the British Championships.[11] Sawyers was the bronze medallist at the World Junior Championships – her distance of 6.67 m (21 ft 10+1⁄2 in) was beaten only by the wind-assisted jumps of British rival Katerina Johnson-Thompson and Germany's Lena Malkus.[12] Sawyers' performance was the second best wind-legal jump by a junior woman that year.[13]
At the start of 2014, Sawyers set an indoor best of 6.44 m (21 ft 1+1⁄2 in) to place second to Johnson-Thompson at the British Indoor Championships.[16] Outdoors, she had a string of victories (including a win at the Universities Championships) in the buildup to the European Team Championships, where she placed ninth overall. Sawyers was again second best to Johnson-Thompson at the outdoor National Championships but both gained selection for the long jump for England at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. However, Johnson-Thompson withdrew prior to the championships and the other leading English athlete Proctor could not compete in the final due to injury, making Sawyer's England's leading medal hope.[17] At the competition in Glasgow her final round jump of 6.54 m (21 ft 5+1⁄4 in) was a season's best and resulted in a silver medal – her first international senior medal and just two centimetres behind winner Ese Brume.[18]
At the 2020 Summer Olympics, held in Tokyo in 2021, Sawyers finished 8th in the final with a distance of 6.80 metres.
At the 2022 World Championships in Eugene, Oregon, she was in third position after all finalists had made their first jump, but was pushed just outside the top 8 when the eventual winner Malaika Mihambo made her first valid jump at the third attempt. She ended in ninth place with a distance of 6.62. At the Munich European Championships that year, Sawyers was in fourth position after five attempts. Ukraine's Maryna Bekh-Romanchuk was in third with 6.76 until Sawyers snatched bronze with 6.80 in the last round, reversing the outcome of 2018 when Bekh-Romanchuk displaced Sawyers from the podium with her last jump of the competition.[20]
2023–present: first major senior title and Olympic injury heartbreak
In March 2023, Sawyers captained Great Britain at the European Indoor Championships held in Istanbul.[21] She qualified for the final with her first jump,[22] and went on to jump 7.00 m to win gold, setting a national indoor record and outright best in the process.
On 25 April 2024, Sawyers announced she had undergone surgery after rupturing the Achilles on her take-off leg and would subsequently miss the Paris 2024 Olympics.[24] She was one of the team of BBC commentators at the Olympic games for the Athletics.
Sawyers is a singer/songwriter in her spare time and, in February 2017 appeared in ITV's The Voice UK. She was successful in securing Will.i.am as her coach during the 'blind auditions', though she told the programme her main priority remained with athletics.[6] She was eliminated from the programme on 26 February in a sing-off against fellow singer Hayley Eccles.[26]
Sawyers was an Ambassador for Right To Play, the world's leading sport for development charity.[27] She visited Right To Play's education programme in Tanzania in 2018.
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