Is 'Lynn the Leap' or Colin Jackson Wales' greatest ever athlete?

I've lived in Wales for six years now and yet I'm still not sure if I qualify to comment on the debate over who is this country's best ever athlete.

But putting on my tin hat, and in the name of sheer cussedness, here goes.

Ask most Welsh people who's their country's greatest ever track and field athlete and only one name comes up, Lynn Davies.

Nicknamed 'Lynn the Leap', Davies is a miner's son who was born in Nantymoel in the county borough of Bridgend in South Wales in 1942.

He won Olympics gold in the long jump in Tokyo in 1964 and set a British record for the long jump four years later which lasted for 33 years.

During a glittering career, Davies also won gold and silver medals in the European Championships and was twice Commonwealth Games champion.

As Wales' only ever Olympic champion in track and field, his position as the country's greatest ever athlete is surely incontestable. Or is it?

Some younger people who won't remember Lynn Davies might be forgiven for choosing Colin Jackson as Wales' greatest track and field star.

Born in Cardiff to Jamaican parents, Jackson is more likely to be known to modern athletics fans as one of the commentators in the BBC's athletics coverage.

His record as a 100m hurdler includes a silver medal at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul and a world record set in Stuttgart in 1993 of 12.91 seconds that lasted for more than a decade. Despite failing to win another medal at an Olympics his palmares includes multiple medals at almost every other major championships, including two golds, two silvers (one in the 4x100m relay) and one bronze in four world championships. He also still holds the indoor world record for 60m hurdles (7.30s) set in Sindelfingen, in Germany, in 1994.

It's only Jackson's inferior Olympics record that puts him in second place to Lynn the Leap in the minds of many Welsh people.

After his silver in Seoul, his next attempt at Olympics gold came four years later in Barcelona. Limited by injury he struggled to 7th place in the final in the relatively modest time of 13.46s. A further four years later Jackson finished outside the medals again, placing fourth in 13.19s in Atlanta after an injury-hit preparation. His final attempt to win an Olympics gold was in Sydney in 2000 when he was 33. This time running in lane one in the final he hit the first and second hurdles and could only finish fifth in 13.28s.

In 2017 Jackson finally came out as gay after years of publicly denying or hiding his sexuality.

Perhaps it's this or his Jamaican ancestry that make him less of a favourite in Welsh athletics' hall of fame to Davies who was a key figure in BBC Cymru Wales' sports coverage in the 1990s.

Despite producing many great athletes, among them world 400m hurdles champion Dai Greene and triple Commonwealth 1500m champion Kirsty Wade, Wales does not have a great heritage in the Olympics.

In total the principality has had only four individual Olympic medalists in athletics. Besides Davies and Jackson, only marathoner Tom Richards (silver in London in 1948) and steeplechaser John Disley (bronze in Helsinki in 1952) have mounted the podium.

Richards was a phenomenal long distance runner whose career flowered late on, partly because the war stopped him and many other fine athletes competing for several years.

He won his Olympics silver in London at the age of 38 and set his best marathon time, of 2:29.59, at the age of 44 in the 1954 Polytechnic race. Indeed he won his only Welsh national cross country title, aged 41, in 1951.

Disley, who became the first British athlete to run the steeplechase in under nine minutes in his semi final in Helsinki, eventually went on to greater fame as the co-founder of the London Marathon with his great friend Chris Brasher.

The only other athlete who might be able to stake a claim to being Wales' greatest athlete is the marathon runner Steve Jones.

Born in Tredegar and raised in Ebbw Vale, Jones was another late developer like Richards. He didn't attempt his first marathon, which was to turn out to be his best event, until he was 28. Until then his career as a gutsy front runner had earned only a 12th place in the world championships 10,000m final (in Helsinki in 1983). After failing to finish his debut marathon in Chicago in 1983, he claimed a bronze medal at the World Cross Country Championships in New Jersey, USA in March 1984 and finished 8th in the 10,000m in Los Angeles later in the same year.

The decision to switch to marathon running turned out to be an inspired one. His second attempt at the Chicago Marathon in October 1984 saw him run away from the field to win in the phenomenal time of 2:08.05, shaving 13 seconds off the world best of Australian Rob De Castella.

In total Jones ran 18 marathons. His best time was the 2:07.13 he ran in Chicago in 1985, a second shy of the new marathon world best set by Carlos Lopes in Rotterdam a few months earlier.

Nevertheless his winning time was a British record which lasted for 33 years until Mo Farah beat it in the London Marathon in 2018.

Sandwiched between his two record-breaking Chicago runs, was Jones' victory in the 1985 London Marathon in a course record of 2:08.16.

This stellar start to his marathon career hit a temporary blip when he finished 20th in the European Championships marathon in Stuttgart in 1986 after 'hitting the wall' at about 20 miles when he was leading by two minutes. Jones came back to finish second in the Boston Marathon (2:12.37) in 1987 and won the New York Marathon (2:08.20) in 1988. However his career never again reached the heights of his glorious Chicago victories in the mid-1980s. His most notable race post 1988 was a victory in the Toronto Marathon in 1992 in a still remarkable time of 2:10.06 when he was 37.

Today the former RAF technician who ran for Newport Harriers works as a painter and decorator and athletics coach in Boulder, Colorado.

So if Jones wasn't Wales' greatest ever athlete, then who is? Essentially it boils down to Lynn the Leap vs Colin Jackson.

Some sports fans fail to see beyond Lynn Davies' Olympic gold in Tokyo in 1964. Davies, an essentially modest and humble man, admits he may have been fortunate to win in Tokyo. He remembers it as a cold, wet and windy day and said the officials refused to move the event to another long jump pit which might have shielded the athletes better.

Davies claims this bout of 'Welsh weather' may have made all the difference as he defeated the two favourites for the title, American Ralph Boston and Igor Ter-Ovanesyan of Russia, by a narrow margin to win gold. Looking back to that day, Lynn said: “My aim was to reach the final in the long jump competition and maybe, at the very outset, to get a bronze medal. I didn’t think I could beat the two world record holders, Ralph Boston and Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. My aim was to get bronze.”

Four years later was a very different matter as in the thin air and high altitude of Mexico City, the athletics world gasped when the American Bob Beamon seemed to defy gravity by posting a winning jump of 8.90m, the first in history to exceed either 28 or 29 feet.

Deflated by seeing the gold medal taken away from him in the very first round, Davies finished in a disappointing ninth place. Afterwards Davies is quoted as having said to Beamon, "you have destroyed this event".

Earlier that summer, at Berne in Switzerland, Davies had set a new British record of 8.23m, a mark that was to stand for 33 years. He is still to this day one of only four British athletes to have cleared 27 feet – quite a remarkable feat considering Davies mainly competed on cinder tracks which were far inferior to the synthetic run-ups available today.

Colin Jackson, meanwhile, was a master of the 'dip' – the action at the end of the race when the athlete leans forward to make sure he crosses the line first.

In fact Jackson was so good at it he sometimes dipped under the beam that recorded runners' times.

He was also a very quick starter – going on the 'B of the bang' in the phrase made famous by Linford Christie. He was also technically probably the best hurdler of his generation. Part of this was thanks to his association with coach Malcolm Arnold. The pair had an equal drive to find perfection. In a revealing interview Jackson lifted the lid on this, saying that even when he broke the indoor world record for the 60m hurdles, rather than congratulate him his coach had said: "What happened to hurdle six, you fell off it a bit?"

Ironically the 60m world record is the only one he still holds after the Chinese athlete Liu Xiang equalled his outdoor 110m hurdles world record at the 2004 Olympics and then broke it two years later.

Naturally fast and a good jumper, Jackson began his athletics career as a multi-events athlete but soon switched to the hurdles when he realised it would bring him more success.

In short he is probably a more naturally talented all-rounder than Lynn Davies but the big gap on his CV is that elusive Olympic gold medal. Davies meanwhile does have that glittering prize. As Wales' only individual Olympics gold medal winner it gives him a status in Welsh athletics folklore that Jackson may not be able to match. But then Davies never set a world record. Nor did he win a world championships (because they only began in 1983 long after he'd retired).

Jackson has certainly had the more successful media career as his face and name are well known throughout Great Britain, while Lynn the Leap's media career was restricted to Wales.

The debate over who was better – Lynn the Leap or Jackson – could rage on and on and will probably only ever be settled when Wales produces its next Olympics gold medallist or world record holder. Only then will we get a fairer perspective on whose achievements are the more enduring. For now I will call it an honourable draw.