The US champion, who improved her lifetime best by 1.30 metres to hand Perkovic her first Diamond League defeat for two years and only her second in 27 competitions, is a self-confessed \u2018Scotto-phile\u2019 who had never before competed in the land where her heart lies.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve had an unhealthy obsession with Scotland for my entire life,\u201d said the slightly giddy Lewis-Smallwood shortly after throwing 67.59m in the sun-bathed bowl of Hampden Park, just 15cm short of Stephanie Brown-Trafton\u2019s national record and good enough for third place on the 2014 world list.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo do a PB (personal best) on my first competition here is like all my dreams come true. I cannot think of a more perfect place to do a PB than here in Scotland,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor as long as I can remember I\u2019ve always had a thing about Scotland, so to do it here is like a trifecta of things coming right. I am so happy.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone makes fun of me and my unhealthy love of Scotland. I don\u2019t why but I have always loved Scotland. I love everything about it \u2013 the culture, the people, the accent; Jesus the accent! Everything about Scotland rocks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I arrived I stepped off the plane and I was like, \u2018I\u2019m here, I\u2019ve arrived.\u2019 I have just been grinning from ear to ear the whole time I\u2019ve been here.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one the greatest things I\u2019ve ever wanted to do, to go to Scotland. So the fact that I\u2019m here and I threw well in a place I love is awesome, very awesome.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything about Scotland is magical to me, and it was a magical competition today.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was certainly a great contest for the one-time University of Illinois student who was the last athlete to beat Perkovic, on the Croatian\u2019s home soil in Zagreb last September. She was also the first to finish ahead of her in a Diamond League meeting since former world champion Dani Samuels did so in Paris on 6 July 2012; bringing to an end Perkovic\u2019s a run of 14 straight Diamond League wins.<\/p>\n
Perkovic briefly took the lead in round four with 65.63m and managed 66.30m in the last round, but was short of her 70-plus best partly, she explained, due to an old back injury which resurfaced during training on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t really control my technique, my body just wasn\u2019t working,\u201d said the hobbling Perkovic afterwards. \u201cI almost couldn\u2019t walk but I still threw 66.30m, so I\u2019m not that disappointed. And I\u2019m still the leader in the Diamond Race.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perkovic also had some appreciative words for her victor, a sentiment Lewis-Smallwood was eager to reciprocate when she explained how self-focus and technical adjustments had been the key to her success.<\/p>\n
\u201cSandra\u2019s truly is one of the greatest discus throwers of our time, and she is phenomenal as a competitor, so you\u2019ve got to really stay focused with your own technique, with where you are, and on putting things together,\u201d said the American.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you only think about beating her, it just becomes a game of trying too hard and not really working the technical aspects that can give you the distance. I learned early on not to worry about beating her.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe times that I have beaten her, usually I\u2019ve PB\u2019d too so I\u2019m usually more happy with the PB than anything. I always focus on being the best that I can be.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted an outcome like this today,\u201d she added. \u201cShe is fantastic and a couple of losses doesn\u2019t diminish at all how amazing she is. She\u2019s human. She has off days just like the rest of us and she\u2019s going to come back big.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lewis-Smallwood\u2019s rise has been a long time coming.<\/p>\n
A former sprinter, she started discus throwing relatively late, at 19 \u2013 an age, she points out, when Perkovic was already a European junior champion throwing 66.92m \u2013 and she took time out from the sport before returning to it in her late 20s.<\/p>\n
The decision then to switch coaches to Michael Turk, head of throws at the University of Illinois, has been crucial to her success, she says, although it\u2019s clear her fascination with the event – perhaps second only to her obsession with Scotland – is a significant part of the picture.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe technique he has me doing just works really well for me,\u201d she added. \u201cIt took me a while to work on it, but every time I find a new piece it\u2019s like finding gold. Every time I put something better together, it\u2019s like \u2018Oh yeah, I understand what you\u2019re saying.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cI love thinking about it, I love playing with it, I love the nuances of it, I love working with it. There are still lots of aspects of the event that I have not mastered at all so I am still working on it constantly.\u201d<\/p>\n
All that work is clearly paying dividends for Lewis-Smallwood, who has yet to win a major championship medal and had never won a Diamond League meeting before her Glasgow triumph, as she\u2019s claimed the last two US titles and last year improved from failing to make the final at the 2011 IAAF World Championships and London 2012 Olympic Games to finishing fifth at Moscow 2013.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe improvements you\u2019re seeing from me are partly because I started late so I still have technical aspects to improve on,\u201d she says. \u201cI didn\u2019t have that huge base that you see others have. I\u2019m a bit of a different athlete.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got to train hard. I\u2019ve got to get better technically. There\u2019s a lot that I need to keep working on.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, every time I do well, it pushes me that much harder to be better, to really work the technique. If I continue to get better technically my distances will improve.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for her long-term goals, Lewis-Smallwood is on a four-year plan to peak for the Rio 2016 Olympics, with a good performance at next year\u2019s World Championships in Beijing a significant staging post on the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoing well at the Olympics is a combination of putting back-to-back years together so I want to have two good ones in a row. I need that because it helps my confidence.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a sort of \u2018look before you leap\u2019 kind of girl so the better I do in years like this, it really helps my confidence going forwards.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a good path for me to be on. It may not be a path that\u2019s right for everyone but, for who I am, this works well. I am on a great ride.\u201d<\/p>\n
At that, she bounds off to bask in a well-earned glow of satisfaction, happy to be in the \u2018magical\u2019 land where she is \u2026 and to know where she\u2019s going.<\/p>\n
You might think beating the reigning world and Olympic champion at an IAAF Diamond League...","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"city":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diamondleague.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/city?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Matthew Brown for the IAAF and the IAAF Diamond League<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"