29th November 2018

STANLEY WINS UK COACHING LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN LONDON

British Athletics’ Head of Field & Combined Events Peter Stanley has scooped the Lifetime Achievement of the Year Award at the UK Coaching Awards 2018.

Stanley has spent the past 30 years in the sport, playing a key role in the successes of some of Britain’s greatest track and field athletes.

His achievements range from directly coaching Olympic, world, European and Commonwealth champion Jonathan Edwards two decades ago to currently supporting athlete-coach pairs such as World indoor and Commonwealth gold medallist Katarina Johnson-Thompson and Bertrand Valcin.

The UK Coaching Awards, held at the Honourable Artillery Company in London, recognise coaches who have excelled and shown outstanding commitment in a certain area or to an individual and/or group.

This year has seen great success in field events for Stanley with Nick Miller (coach: Tore Gustafsson) winning Commonwealth gold in the hammer, Lorraine Ugen (Shawn Jackson) leaping seven metres in the long jump and becoming part of a trio of Brits to make history in August as Britain qualified three females for a European Championship final for the first time in 49 years.

Age-group athletes have also flourished with another hammer thrower Jake Norris (Paul Dickenson) and heptathlete Niamh Emerson (David Feeney) both winning gold at the World Junior Championships while the latter was also a bronze medallist at the Commonwealth Games in April.

Stanley’s achievement follows a year on from colleagues Stephen Maguire, Benke Blomkvist and Christian Malcolm being collectively named High Performance Coach of the Year in 2017 following the success of the British 4x100m relay team at the IAAF World Championships.

Stanley said: “I am very proud, it is a really wonderful award to get. The people who have helped me are too numerous to mention but I have got lots of coaches and colleagues who still give me advice and share their knowledge and experiences with me. So, I suppose I am a product of all of them really and I want to say thank you for all the engery and time they have put into me.

“My top three coaching moments would be Jonathan breaking the world record twice in on day, Jonathan getting a gold medal in Sydney, which was four years after we thought he would win a medal so there was a lot of endeavour going on over that time and then the amount of time I worked with Chris Tomlinson which was from when he was 14 years old to when he was about 26.”