How sprinter Levitt turned groceries to gold

A day job as a grocery-slinging speedster helped Victoria Levitt become a world champion sprinter, she says.

The 29-year-old Tesco worker, who prides herself on just how quick she is in the click and collect department, won T44 100m gold at the World Para-athletics Championships in New Delhi earlier this month.

Her stunning debut on the international stage also saw the Nottinghamshire runner collect silver in the 200m event.

Levitt said stepping on to the global stage to race – something she previously thought impossible – was both the “scariest and most wonderful thing” to ever happen to her.

“I never went to the championships expecting to win anything. I just wanted to put together two really good runs,” she told BBC East Midlands Today.

“To come away with medals and to be a world champion was a complete shock.

“To be able to stand on a podium in first place and hear the anthem was just the proudest moment of my life.

Just a week after conquering the world in her sport, Levitt is back home in Mansfield and eager to get back to work – not just on the track with local running club Mansfield Harriers, but also the Christmas rush at Tesco and her other part-time job in administration at a disability charity.

Her breakout success in India, plans for the Commonwealth Games next year and the prospect of Los Angeles Paralympic Games in 2028 are no reasons for her to stop doing the other things she “loves and enjoys”.

“My authentic self on the track is the Vicky that works at Tesco, the Vicky who is the administrator and the Vicky who trains like crazy,” she said.

“It’s because of that work and it’s because of that job that I’m able to do what I can do.”

Levitt says she previously “tried the full-time athlete thing” but got bored in the process.

It was at that point the runner, originally from Dudley, who studied prosthetics and orthotics at university before working in that field, decided to juggle a number of part-time jobs.

Tesco was meant to be a “temp job” over just one festive period. But she found the job helped fuel her competitive spirit.

“As part of click and collect, you have pickers in store,” she explained to BBC Radio Nottingham.

“So we have a pick rate that we have to achieve – a target – and it’s fair to say that I repeatedly go over that target quite a lot. We did have a league table and my name used to be there quite a lot at the top.

“At the time my colleagues didn’t know that I was a sprinter, only the management did. I pulled them to the side and said, ‘Look, you know, I have a little bit of an unfair advantage with this because of being a sprinter’. So I asked if it was possible to take me off the league table because it’s not fair.”

While she knew she was quick “on the trolleys”, she “didn’t think much” of her chances of qualifying for the World Championships.

“When I got the selection through, I was like, ‘Oh dear, I probably need to prepare’,” she laughed.

“The heat training was probably harder than the training itself. Being stuck in a sauna at 40C for 70 minutes on a bike doing speed sessions was dreadful.

“It was all just such a surreal experience.”

The world-beating effort that Levitt produced in India was the high point in her meteoric rise as a disability athlete.

She only took up sprinting seriously after a run of injuries – which included stretching a nerve in her ankle while competing in martial arts and a suffering a leg cut on a trail run – left her with permanent nerve damage in her leg.

At every step of her recovery and transformation into an elite athlete, be it while working at Tesco or on the track, the runner says she has done it the “Victoria Levitt way”.

“Every person’s gold medal is different,” Levitt said.

“My gold medal is a gold medal but climbing the stairs independently might be someone’s gold medal, doing a Couch to 5k could be someone’s gold medal – again, it goes back to that message of ‘do it your way’.”