A TAFi Story · 12 min read
Ask anyone in West Yorkshire athletics about her and they will smile before they answer. Ask her about herself and she will shrug and say, “I just point the gun in the air, love.” That is not quite the whole story. Marjorie arrived at Dewsbury in the spring of 1986. Her son Peter was nine and had been told, kindly but firmly, that he was too slow for the school team. A neighbour mentioned the club. Marjorie drove him down on a Tuesday evening, sat on a damp wooden bench beside the back straight, and watched him run last in every heat. He came off the track grinning. She signed him up on the spot, and — because the club was short of officials that summer, she signed herself up too. She has not missed a Saturday meet since. In four decades she has started sprinters who went on to run for Great Britain. She has started club runners in their sixties chasing personal bests that mattered only to them. She has started ambulatory para-athletes, wheelchair racers, guide-runner pairs, and one determined seven-year-old who insisted on lining up in the senior 100 metres and was politely redirected. She remembers most of their names. She keeps their times in a series of blue Silvine notebooks.
“The gun is the easy part. The hard part is knowing when somebody isn’t ready. You watch the shoulders. You watch the hands. If a lad is shaking, you wait.”What Marjorie has quietly built, without ever calling it that, is a culture. New officials are trained by her on Wednesday evenings in the clubhouse over milky tea. Young athletes learn from her that being taken seriously on the start line is a form of respect, and that respect is not conditional on your speed, your body, or your background. Coaches send nervous first-timers to her specifically. “Marjorie will look after you,” they say. She always does. She has also, without fuss, changed how inclusion works at Dewsbury. When the club began welcoming visually impaired runners in the early 2000s, it was Marjorie who redesigned the starting commands so that guide runners and athletes could hear the same cue at the same moment. When a wheelchair racer joined in 2011, it was Marjorie who worked out, with a tape measure and a great deal of patience, how to align the start so nobody was disadvantaged. None of this appeared in a policy document. It appeared on the track, on a Saturday, in the rain. This is the part of athletics that medals do not remember. The volunteers who stay for forty years. The officials who learn every athlete’s name. The quiet architects of belonging. At TAFi we believe those stories are the sport. If you know a Marjorie in your club, a starter, a timekeeper, a coach, a parent who has driven the minibus for a decade we would like to hear about them.