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Rutherford hopes to keep up the family values

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Greg Rutherford knows that history will be on his side on Saturday when he competes in the IAAF Diamond League at the iconic football venue of Hampden Park in Glasgow.

It is a big weekend for the city which is staging the ‘London’ leg of the series as the Olympic Stadium in England is being renovated.

At the end of the month Glasgow is hosting the Commonwealth Games, and the Diamond League - which is over two days and starting on Friday night - will be the start of a brilliant period for sport for Scotland.

For Rutherford, this is the chance to triumph on a big stage again at a setting which is embedded in his family’s tradition.

Olympic long jump champion Rutherford’s great-grandfather Jock was a footballer with Newcastle and Arsenal and in April 1908 he played for England against Scotland at Hampden in front of a crowd of 121,452. It was a world record for a football match and the sporting genes which have carried through to Greg have him hoping he could produce something special on Saturday.

Speaking to heraldscotland.com, he said of his great-grandfather’s presence in that match: 'Hopefully that's a good omen as the last Rutherford to compete at Hampden helped set a world record. It's a fantastic bit of family history.'

It is probably fair to say that the long jump world record will not be troubled this weekend; Mike Powell’s 8.95m is heading towards its 23rd anniversary.

But Rutherford will be determined to put down another marker of his own ahead of the two big championships which await him in the next few weeks, with the Commonwealth Games a fortnight away and the European Athletics Championships in Zurich starting in exactly a month's time on Saturday.

It was on 24 April that Rutherford jumped 8.51m, a distance that has not been threatened too much since. Germany’s Christian Reif has come closest with 8.49m, while American Jeff Henderson, who is fourth on the World list with 8.43m, is in Glasgow as a big rival to Rutherford.

After recovering from injury last summer, he cannot wait for what lies ahead and as he said to the dailyrecord.co.uk: 'Last year I wasn’t in as good shape as 2012. My mind ended up not in the right place because there appeared nothing on the horizon that could fix my problems.

'I tore a muscle and thought that was it, my career was probably over. After that, I took two months off to recover and relax a bit and that massively helped. Now I fully expect to jump further than 8.51m because I am jumping further more consistently.'

At a fine time for European sprinting, it is a big night in Glasgow on Friday for Britain’s James Dasaolu. He is determined to seize the final spot in the 100m team for Zurich but has raced only once this summer, in Lausanne last week, where he produced a 10.03 performance. Even though Dasaolu ran 9.91 last summer, fellow Briton Chijindu Ujah tops the domestic rankings in 2014 with 9.96 but was only third in the trials.

If Dasaolu can build on his 10.03 on Friday night, he could be given the nod for the European Athletics Championships and in a race where he needs to go fast, there will be no time to hang around in the blocks. He is drawn next to Trinidad’s Richard Thompson, who has a season’s best of 9.82, while three lanes away will be Jamaican Yohan Blake.



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