Some day, hopefully in an Olympic park in London in 5½ years’ time, we will be thanking The Times for delivering us an Olympic hero.

Meet Peter Cohen, who read about the first appeal for tall sportspeople in these pages last summer and has been pursuing his Olympic dream ever since.

Cohen is a 23-year-old former “average” rower who retired from the sport when a back injury prevented him from going on. On graduating from Durham University, he started his own recruitment company, but he is prepared to shelve that and put his professional life on hold for 5½ years if he makes it past the last hurdle of UK Sport’s talent identification process and is given the go-ahead to try to make it with the Great Britain men’s handball team.

Cohen did not even know that the sport of handball existed until he read about the search for tall sportspeople in The Times and he is still struggling with the concept that he may become an Olympian. “I just submitted my CV on the handball association’s website,” he said, “and a while later I got a letter inviting me to the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield for testing. There were 50 of us there which, last January, had become 16 for a weekend’s training camp. They have now got us down to six, on a two-month talent confirmation period. If I get through that, I go to Denmark for full-time training.” The confirmation period includes regular trips to Sheffield plus what Cohen calls his homework: he does specific gymwork and is also expected to play twice a week with London’s two nearest handball clubs, in Ruislip and Leyton, which are populated by Danes and almost every European nationality except Britons. “If you had told me a few months ago that I’d have a chance of being a 2012 Olympian, I’d have thought you were joking,” Cohen said. “I tell my friends: this is like the X Factor, only the prize at the end is far better than a fake No 1 single.”

Webmaster Note: Sadly Peter's dream was to be unfullfilled.

Created 25th January 2008 by Mike Fenn
efa@etonfives.co.uk

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