'Sport isn't the only part of my identity' Jazmin Sawyers on how fashion helped overcome her Olympics setback

Summer 2024 should have been the summer of a lifetime for Jazmin Sawyers, the 30-year-old Stoke-on-Trent-born athlete who is a National, European, and Junior champion.

She was on track (no pun intended) to compete for a spot in the Paris Olympics, which would have been her tertiary stint representing Team GB at the pinnacle of her sport. The phrase 'third time lucky’ doesn’t ring true in this instance. Just two months ago an unpredicted ruptured Achilles injury crushed any chances that the two-time Olympian had at competing.

A major setback to say the least, yet Jazmin threw herself headfirst into recovery. With an impressively proactive mindset she started sharing her journey on social media, and rekindled her passion for sewing, which of course, as a fashion writer I was desperate to know more about.

I knew from the beginning that this was going to be my kind of interview, when Jazmin answered the phone and told me that she was "just making a cup of tea." Our chat was a few days after this cover shoot, which was her first ever. "I've never done any kind of cover," she tells me with unbridled enthusiasm, "I’ve barely done any kind of shoot that isn't sports, so I was so excited."

"Fashion is something I’m interested in, but people don’t usually talk to athletes about it," she explains, "Having the chance to wear all those amazing clothes and model in a way that isn’t 'can you do long distance', was incredible. I don’t think a lot of people associate athletes with fashion," she continues, "Because we're out on the track in the uniform that we are given."

What do athletics and fashion have in common? Not much, one would assume, unless you’re Jazmin; the British track and field athlete as well as an (in her own words) ‘amateur seamstress’. This made Jazmin the perfect cover star for H Fashion, "To have a little bit of access to this world has been so incredibly cool for me. I'd love to do more of it one day, maybe with my own designs."

Jazmin is perhaps the only athlete to have ever designed her own dress to appear on The Jonathan Ross Show and attend BBC’s Sports Personality of The Year. Resourcefully, she made her own walk-in sports uniform using fabric she found in a "random shop."

Needles and bobbins aside, becoming an Olympian was Jazmin’s dream right from the beginning. She trained at the City of Stoke Athletics Club during her youth, the place that she credits for "raising her." She initially trained as a gymnast before moving over to athletics around the age of 10.

"I always wanted to go to the Olympics and win medals, ever since I was a little kid," she recalls. "I thought it would be as a gymnast, but by the age of nine, I'd figured out that I wasn't good enough to make it to the top. So then I was on the hunt for something else, and when I found athletics, I was like, okay… ‘Here we are’."

It was an accident, however, that she became a long jumper - the sport for which she currently holds the British indoor world record - and initially she planned to become a heptathlete. Unsurprisingly she quotes Denise Lewis as her hero. Jazmin gained a scholarship to Millfield for sixth form - a prestigious private boarding school with a heavy, almost Hunger Games like,focus on sports where she could train full-time.

A coach visited the school looking for athletes to take part in the Winter Youth Olympics, and she decided to give it a go. 'I mean, I’d seen Cool Runnings," she joked. She decided to focus on one sport to build up her fitness, which followed the same training principles as bobsledding to prepare her: short sprints and explosive power. Cue her 'temporary' long jump training.

Jazmin recalls the "special moment," when she found out she’d made the Olympics for the first time in 2016, surrounded by crowds, family, friends, and her coaches. But she always believed that she would make it. "I think I've always had this slightly delusional self-belief, where, if I decided that I could do it, then it wasn't ‘whether or not’ I would, it was ‘where and how’."

Fast forward to 2024, and this year’s Paris Olympics was at the forefront of everything, but a split second in April ruined any chance she had of making it. "It happened during training. I train in plyometrics every week - it was nothing unusual and I didn't get any warning."

"The physio ran over because I went down straight away. I asked if I clipped the hurdle. The moment she told me I hadn't, I knew what had happened and I knew the year was over."

For most people, this soul-crushing accident would have shattered any sort of positive outlook, and understandably so. But for Jazmin, having an injury so serious, actually made it easier to get over. "Some injuries you might think, ‘Okay, well, if I do X, Y, and Z. I might be able to rehab in time’. But with a ruptured Achilles a few months out from the game, there is no hope."

"I know it’s going to take me over a year to come back from this, regardless of what else I do, but I still want to enjoy my life. So what else can this year look like?" Jazmin now shares her recovery journey with her 164k Instagram followers, which helps her because she feels she has "A whole community of people who really want me to do well. To come back and succeed."

It also helps her to keep track of her journey, looking back at how far she has come. She  hopes to help others going through the same thing, “It's a slow and difficult journey, and I hopefully can make other people feel a little less alone in that. I'm not the first person to go through this, and I won't be the last. I hope that showing the stages that I'm going through can be of some comfort to somebody else who goes through it, too."

Being creative is a key part of her recovery process, "Sport has some incredible highs and incredible lows. So it's quite nice to have something that completely takes your mind off it, so it isn't all-consuming." As well as documenting her journey to recovery on social media; she sews, sings, and writes songs. It really begs the question... is there anything she can’t do?

"I've always found it important to have other things going on outside of sport. And having cultivated all those other passions over the years has made it easier for me to deal with this injury, because it's not the only part of my identity. It’s a key thing for anybody in their jobs, not just athletes," she explains, "If your job or sport is your whole identity, and for some reason out of your control it gets taken away from you, you feel like you have nothing."

Sewing became Jazmin's newfound lockdown hobby during the pandemic, after seeing people online make face masks to match their outfits. She then bought a sewing machine "On Gumtree or somewhere, for like 30 quid," and gave it a go.

"It’s a big part of my life and I love it. I’ve never had any training, so it often goes wrong, which I document on Instagram, and we all have a good laugh when I mess it up. Sewing is great because it's something that's so far away from sport that it takes my mind off it."

The multi-talented star has even started creating her own outfits for events. Her most recent? A pink sequinned heart dress to see Taylor Swift in concert, which was almost identical to the one the singer wears in the Me music video (Swifties, if you know, you know). "I loved that I could go from nothing to something that I can wear and enjoy."

Most designers plan custom pieces and special occasion outfits months in advance, but for Jazmin, "It just depends on what I'm feeling, and I don't plan in advance at all." When she tells me that she starts a piece about 24 hours before an event, and stays up all night to finish it, I can hardly contain my astonishment.

"I went on The Jonathan Ross Show last year after winning the European Indoors and made the outfit for it. But I started it around six in the evening the day before, made it through the night and then just slept on the way to the studio." Her dress featured cutouts at the shoulders inspired by one of her go-to brands, Lirika Matoshi. Jazmin also made an impressive green mini dress for the 2023 BBC Sports Personality of The Year which she "threw in her bag after the last stitch and drove to the ceremony."

I tell her it seems like she thrives in chaos, and she wholeheartedly agrees, which she compares to her success in the long jump, "My best jumps actually tend to come either in rounds five or six when the pressure's on."

Despite being quite literally a last-minute fashion creator, lots of Jazmin’s inspiration comes from brands like Lirika Matoshi, “I absolutely love the cutouts, the shapes and femininity of it, especially with my sports background. Day to day I’m usually in Adidas lycra." Her dream purchase? A Chopova Lowena Carabiner skirt.

During our conversation, it became clear to me that sentimentality is at the heart of her sartorial agenda. One of her favourite sporting competition rituals is to visit shops in the towns she’s competing in and find local jewellery stores. "I like to go big on jewellery," she explains, "Most of the things I have, have a memory attached to them."

She's even made her own walk-in uniform after seeing US sprinter Noah Lyles do the same. "I found a fabric that had a guy doing long jumps on it, which was crazy, so I made a two-piece to do my walk-in for the Florence Diamond League. I wore an outfit that I made, with the sport that I do on the fabric, walking into an international event. It's so fun to merge the worlds."

As the 2024 Olympics looms Jazmin is the perfect cover star for our 'Out Of Office' edition, not just because she’s already an Olympian, but because she embraces being so much more. She summarised it herself to me without even realising, "I believe that I can do things until there's some sort of proof that I can't."

Photographer: David Reiss Assisted by: Gabor Herczegfalvi
Stylist: Harriet Nicolson Assisted by: Stella Dickson
Hair: Sheree-Jourdan using Hair By Sam Mcknight Self Control Styling Gel, Curly Girl Movement Curl Styling Milk and Curly Girl Movement Curl Defining Gel
Makeup: Laila Zakaria using Danessa Myricks Beauty
Nails: Réme Griffin @ Snow Creatives using Nailberry
Videographer: Jermaine Binns @ Leanne Perrins Films