Moulton-raised athlete and former Bury St Edmunds schoolboy Callum Wilkinson set for Team GB’s Paris Olympic 2024 squad after smashing British record

Callum Wilkinson’s last three years of hard work rested on 40 minutes on an athletics track in Manchester. Quite the pressure cooker.

The 27-year-old former Bury St Edmunds schoolboy, who also attended Moulton Primary School, was gunning for a spot in Team GB’s Paris 2024 Olympic squad at the UK Championships on Sunday, battling with the conundrum that there was no set time he had complete the 10,000m race walk in to qualify for a place at the games next month.

Thriving under the pressure, Wilkinson, raised in Moulton between Bury and Newmarket, smashed the British record he set in 2021, recording a time of 38 minutes, 43.91 seconds – more than 21 seconds faster than his previous best.

He flung his glasses to the floor in an outpouring of emotion, geeing up the crowd with passionate fist pumps and the Great Britain flag proudly hung over him.

While he has had to wait for today’s team announcement to hear if he will be competing in France next month, the former King Edward VI School pupil is confident he has done enough to earn a spot at a second Olympics.

“It was amazing. It was an emotional victory because of the pressure going into it,” he said.

“I knew I had to go in there, I had to win the race, it had to be a quick time and there wasn’t a second chance.

“That was the last day of the qualifying window. I needed to just get as many ranking points as possible for Paris, and I’m fairly confident that should be more than enough.

“I was checking the weather forecast multiple times a day in the week running up. I was checking results from Colombia, to Turkey, to Hungary seeing what other walkers had done and their national championships in the last week.

“It’s been such a journey and the Olympics is so special for athletics. This is the pinnacle for athletes.”

While he felt this was his best performance to date, Wilkinson admitted he holds his World Junior Championship title in 2016 and 10th-placed finish at the 2021 Olympics in higher regard.

Following his debut in Tokyo three years ago, the athlete who used to regularly train at Bury Leisure Centre could only see himself improving, but a flurry of injuries laid down obstacles that proved tough to overcome.

Wilkinson underwent surgery on a troubling pain between his shin and ankle last August, with no guarantee it would allow him to reach his previous levels of performance. Despite it being a success, he then suffered a pulled calf at a training camp after the turn of the year.

They were ‘complicated and rare’ injuries that his coach, Robert Heffernan, had not seen during his 25 years working in the sport.

It took time and patience for him to come back fighting, but Wilkinson returned to the track to record a 20,000m personal best of 1:20:27 in La Coruna, Spain.

However, this fell 17 seconds off Olympic qualifying standard time needed to guarantee him a spot in Paris. Fortunately, the event at the weekend was organised for him to have a last shot at qualification – and he took it with open arms.

Wilkinson labelled his past year as a ‘challenge’, which is an understatement, but his tribulations made crossing the line in national record time on Sunday even sweeter.

“When you get these obstacles in front of you, it’s just another question of how much do you want this?’ How much are you willing to do to do it?,” he said.

“There’s been points in the last three years where I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do elite sport again, or probably even be particularly competitive at sport, that it would have to be a hobby and something I would have to be very careful of the effect that pushing myself has on my body.”

With an anxious laugh, he added: “Knowing that you are pushing yourself to the absolute limit and having evidence that this has broken your body before, and the effects mentally that has on you when you’re not able to do that, you question why it’s happening to you.”

Cork-based Wilkinson’s plans rested on success at the weekend, and now, they can be finalised.

As he is set to be named in the squad, he prepares to travel to Switzerland on Sunday with the British endurance team for his final altitude camp before Paris.

The 20,000m race walk, that he hopes to be competing in, will take place on August 1.

Wilkinson could not have put it better when he took to his X account following his victory in Manchester and posted: “Tough times don’t last, tough people do.”