Jazmin Sawyers: Long-jumper, dressmaker and The Voice contestant

Jazmin Sawyers is staring out through her chosen Zoom backdrop of the Big Brother diary room and, appropriately enough, there will be at least one candid confession.

The year was 2013 and Sawyers, then one of the most promising teenage athletes in the country, was desperate to get inside London’s Olympic Stadium again to see her heroes in the flesh.

She had already gone to extreme lengths 12 months earlier to secure every Olympic ticket possible, including for what she calls the “mind-blowing” experience of Super Saturday, when Jessica Ennis-Hill, Mo Farah and Greg Rutherford all struck gold in the space of 44 dizzying minutes.

“I was entering competitions, posting videos of me doing back flips on Twitter – doing everything I could,” she says.

The London Anniversary Games, however, had proved rather more challenging and would call for an even more resourceful solution.

“I turned up anyway in my kit, and convinced them to give me an accreditation,” she says, grinning mischievously. “I told them, ‘I am the reserve for the long-jump. I have heard someone is injured. Can I get my accreditation please?’ There is no reserve in the long-jump. It took a bit of convincing… but someone gave me one.”

Exactly a decade later and Sawyers, who produced a spectacular seven-metre jump to win at the European Indoor Championships in March, will be one of the headline acts at the London Athletics Meet on Sunday in front of what she calls an “unbeatable” 45,000-plus home crowd. It is set to be the biggest one-day athletics meeting in the world this year.

She certainly intends to look the part. Among a myriad talents, which include a singing appearance on The Voice, a law degree from the University of Bristol and a bobsleigh silver medal at the 2012 Winter Youth Olympics, Sawyers has a passion for sewing and regularly makes her own outfits.

And, with the razzmatazz of the Diamond League “walk-on” introductions, she is planning a surprise on Sunday that she promises will be “very colourful” and fit with a pop-culture theme.

Previous outfits – including an all-black jumpsuit with cutout love hearts for an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show and a two-piece top and skirt covered in images of long-jumping for a previous Diamond League walk-on – were certainly memorable. “I think it’s important for athletes to have hobbies that are completely different from the sport,” she says. “It keeps you an all-rounded person but also takes your mind completely off the pressures of elite sport. I’m trying to lean into fun things.

“It sounds silly, but dressmaking can feel like problem-solving. I’ve never been trained in textiles so I’ve got to figure it out. I’ll cut it out. I’ll put it on. I’ll pin it. I’ll take it off. I’ll sew it. I’ll make a mess. I’ll unpick it. I did the outfit for Jonathan Ross the night before.

“I can get so zoned in that it feels like a kind of meditation. It’s a relaxing process and I have an outfit at the end – win-win.”

Music remains another huge passion and, of all her many experiences, appearing on The Voice – where she was mentored by Will.i.am – was the one that she found most nerve-racking.

“When I do long-jump, you can’t tell me it wasn’t far when it was, and I can’t argue I was good if I lost,” she says. “But I could go out on stage with a microphone and give what I think is the performance of my life, and every member of the audience could think it was awful. It’s also not my first arena. I spend every day training to be a long-jumper, so I’m much more comfortable on that runway. But I do love it. A different kind of satisfaction. Especially when you are performing your own stuff – something that didn’t exist until I got it out of my brain. That is very cool.”

Sawyers remains open to other adventures in the future, but it is easy to sense an overriding energy, enthusiasm and focus just now on athletics, as huge opportunities loom over the next 13 months.

Her indoor leap (and beaming reaction) in Istanbul was probably the British athletics moment of the year so far and she is acutely aware that her British indoor record of 7.0m is also a distance that generally wins medals in the biggest global outdoor competitions.

The last British woman to win an Olympic long-jump medal was Sue Hearnshaw, who took bronze in Los Angeles in 1984, but you have to go back another two decades to Mary Rand in Tokyo in 1964 for the last champion.

The major objective for Sawyers this summer will be next month’s World Championships and, with the Paris Games to follow, this would be the perfect period for her career to peak.

“I have been disappointed not to win a medal every time I’ve gone to a global championships,” she says. “It’s just this time I think everyone else will be disappointed with me because we’ve seen what I can do.

“Istanbul was definitely a turning point. Seven metres is like the magic number. Actually achieving it, after aiming for it for 10 years, feels like I’ve stepped into a new zone… a different mindset of confidence. I now have the proof.”

Sawyers, 29, actually first jumped over seven metres as a junior way back in 2012 and, while it was recorded a marginal foul, she subsequently kept the video on her phone as a constant reminder of her capabilities.

Major early inspirations include heptathletes Denise Lewis (whose autobiography, Personal Best, she read several times over) and Ennis-Hill, with whom she was training within months of roaring her on to Olympic gold.

“When I trained with Jess, something shifted in my head,” she says. “I realised that every athlete that won something is just an athlete that works hard. I was thinking, ‘It’s not some magic formula. There’s no secret’.

“I don’t think there is that one piece of advice. These are people that have just been putting the hours in for years and years and years, and made smart decisions. But also not absolute perfection every training session. I’ve never seen anyone have perfect preparation for a championship.”

Like Robbie Williams, a fellow proud child of the Potteries, Sawyers has the “Staffordshire knot” tattooed on her arm as a reminder of home, while another colossal inspiration has been her mother, Jane, the former chief constable of Staffordshire Police.

“She was one of the only female chief constables at the time. It was more difficult for a woman rising through the ranks, but she never made it seem that way,” Sawyers says. “It was just, ‘Yes, of course I can’. It was an obvious possibility to aim high, even in a male-dominated field. So I went forward with that mentality in everything in my life. She has done everything that I have ever seen her go for.

“I hope that those qualities are passed on to me. I think that’s the way I was raised. Rather than, ‘Let’s put a limit on what might be possible’ it’s, ‘Let’s just see. Can you? Why don’t we find out?’.”

The London Athletics Meet takes place on Sunday, July 23 at the London Stadium. For tickets visit britishathletics.org.uk.