Aaron Lennon was offered the chance to become a sprinter for Great Britain, despite having never run a proper 100 metres race.
The former winger – who played for Leeds, Tottenham Hotsput, Everton and Burnley in a hugely successful career – is one of the fastest players in Premier League history after building a reputation for leaving defenders in his dust.
While Lennon‘s career was largely spent on the flank, the 37-year-old revealed that not only did he start his career in a different position, but the speedster was also offered the chance of another career while growing up in Leeds.
Asked how fast he could run 100m, Lennon told talkSPORT Drive: “I’ve never done it. I’ve never done it.
“My school didn’t do that, we just used to race each other around the block or around the street and in school it would be to the wall and back, but we never did 100m.
“I did one race and I think it was for the fastest in Yorkshire.
“I remember all of these other competitors were turning up with their blocks and I was just ready to race with my trainers ready to go, but I won it easily!
“The schools put it on and said to nominate the fastest people in the class at this age group.
“The first part was 30m, so that was timed and then the top eight went into a 100m race that wasn’t timed, but I won it comfortably.
“I had a coach saying, ‘Do you want to run for west Yorkshire?’ and ‘Do you want to run for Great Britain?’ or whatever it was at the time, and I was like, ‘I want to play football, it’s not for me.’”
Asked if he was always going to be a footballer, Lennon said: “Yeah, nothing else.
“I used to play down the middle when I was really young, I only started to push out wide when I broke into the first team, that was under Peter Reid at Leeds.
“It used to happen all the time. If you’re a fast player they’d push you out wide and also in those days you had two big strikers normally, so I came out wide and it just stuck.
“Nowadays, I’d probably play left wing. I’d be on the left side because now, when do you see a right-footed player playing on the right side? It doesn’t happen anymore.
“I actually played quite a few games on the left and I felt that on the left you’d always have more chances of scoring goals, but I didn’t mind it.”
Asked if he was the youngest player ever to get a boot deal, Lennon remarked: “Yeah, it was with adidas. It was peanuts. It was nothing really, it wasn’t big money.
“Boots were getting so expensive, it was when they were becoming £120! I could get as many as I wanted – the whole street had them.
“The only problem was that at the time it was when they wanted to put my name on the tongue, so every pair that came had my name on!”
