Laviai and Lina Nielsen on why they want to train in London

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The sisters have seized the chance to stay put in the British capital and work alongside coach Tony Lester, as they seek to establish the UK’s premier sprint group

Having lost track of the number of air miles they have racked up over recent years, Laviai and Lina Nielsen are relieved to be home with a new aspiration: to help their coach Tony Lester create the top sprint group in Britain.

It was back in 2021, post-Tokyo Olympics, that their foreign ventures began; not by choice but – the way they see it – by necessity.

“I knew I needed to make the step up but couldn’t find a coach in the UK that was a good fit or had training partners around,” explains Laviai. “I could see a lot of our sprinters were going to the US so I thought that could be an option.”

Spells in Florida, Austria and Denmark duly then followed but, after a 2024 season that saw them both earn Olympic 4×400 metres bronze medals, they jumped at the opportunity to return to London this autumn.

The sisters had never particularly wanted to leave their home country in the first place, but felt they had few options. Of the five female British sprinters (100-400m) announced on top-level UK Athletics funding earlier this month, all train overseas with foreign coaches. The Nielsens and Lester believe that speaks volumes about athletics coaching in Britain – and they want to do something about it.

“I think we have a lack of coaching in the UK, especially across the sprints,” states Laviai.

It was this dearth that initially prompted the move abroad and subsequently led them to their current coach in the Danish city of Aarhus.

Lester knows more than a thing or two about his art. During a 14-year period in various roles for UK Athletics, he helped the likes of Roger Black, Mark Richardson, Nicola Sanders, Abi Oyepitan, Tim Benjamin and Marlon Devonish all compete on the global stage. A series of disagreements with the governing body’s combative head coach Charles van Commenee caused him to leave athletics, before he returned for stints with national federations in Germany and Denmark.

Now he is preparing to head for Brunel in west London, where he hopes to fill the void for British sprinters seeking a world-class group at home.

So far, five Olympians are onboard, with Team GB relay athletes Ama Pipi and Niclas Baker joining the Nielsen twins and Ireland’s Sharlene Mawdsley. The door is permanently open for further additions.

Lester, like the Nielsens, does not believe sprint coaching is currently up to the required standard in Britain. He places the blame firmly on governing bodies rather than the coaches themselves.

“The UK doesn’t lend itself to supporting coaches,” he says. “Even when I was a national coach back in the day, we never had coach education. So how can we upskill our coaches? We need seminars and need to send coaches to workshops around Europe.

“All the money was spent elsewhere and I think that’s unfair because our coaches get judged as being s**t when they are not. I just don’t think they get enough support from the people in charge, be that UK Athletics or UK Sport or whoever.

“So athletes come through the system and do the same stuff they did 15 years ago. I’m not going to sit and diss UK coaches, but I look around and think: ‘Who is there that is a really good coach?’ I don’t know.

“Why are Daryll Neita and Jeremiah Azu in Italy? Why did these guys [Nielsens] go to Austria? Why do so many guys go to America?”

Lester began coaching the twins after a chance encounter with Lina in a hotel lobby at the 2023 Lausanne Diamond League. “We always laugh because it took him three days to then reply to my text, which left us thinking we weren’t good enough for him,” says Lina.

In their first year under his charge, both sisters ran personal bests, and their bond grew unexpectedly closer when he suffered a distressing cardiac arrest while taking a training session in Denmark exactly a week before the European Championships.

“It was a very lucky day that there were so many people at the track,” recalls Laviai. “There was a doctor on site pretty much immediately so his life was saved very quickly.”

Lester adds: “Had I been on my own, I wouldn’t be here talking to you now.”

The addition of a new pacemaker has left him feeling “bulletproof”, but the episode was one of the catalysts for him to return to his family at home and attempt to build an elite group around the Nielsens.

“We want to emulate what the sprint coaches are doing in the US and set up a really good group in the UK,” says Lina. “The only other similar group I can think of is Trevor Painter’s group, but that’s for middle distance. That’s what we want to create in London.”

Painter, and his wife Jenny Meadows, have become standard bearers on the UK coaching scene after seeing their M11 Track Club go from strength to strength, with Keely Hodgkinson, Georgia Bell and Lewis Davey all winning medals at the Paris Olympics.

“I’ve known Trevor forever and he’s done some great work,” says Lester. “But he’s had to work hard to get to this level – it hasn’t been easy. I was very lucky because I was employed by UK Athletics for 14 years. Trevor wasn’t even employed by UK Athletics so he’s done an amazing job.”

As his athletes – old and new – begin making their way to their new west London home over the coming weeks, Lester is readying himself to leave his role in Denmark before beginning his new step into the unknown from the start of January. Success for him and the Nielsens is the initial aim, but it could have far wider implications for British sprinting.

» This feature first appeared in the November issue of AW magazine. Subscribe to AW magazine here, check out our new podcast here or sign up to our digital archive of back issues from 1945 to the present day here

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