Shevhone Lumsden’s inspiring journey from brutal knife culture to the race track
WHEN Shevhone Lumsden bursts off the 100m blocks, he turns heads with an athletic prowess which leaves opponents in the wake of his 10.59-second sprint dust.
As the runner-up in last year’s Under-17 English Schools Athletics Championships, his name is beginning to gain traction in elite sporting circles.
But few know the real story of Shevhone’s remarkable journey from carrying a knife amid London’s gang culture to Europe’s race circuit.
He said: “Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself that my new way of life isn’t just an illusion.
“Running used to be about being quick enough to escape situations on ‘the road’ (slang for the streets) — now it’s about the dream of winning medals for my country.
“It’s not easy to open up this chapter of my life but if I can show one other boy or girl who thinks there is no way out of the knife culture, I’ll lay it on the line.”
Shevhone traces his descent into a darker underworld back to the moment his dad was jailed when he was just five years old.
He said: “He was making some wrong choices and when I was five he disappeared from my life for six years. That meant my mum and my two older sisters and me were struggling.
“I saw Mum working a lot of jobs, mainly in care homes.”
Shevhone, who is now 17, held on to the dream that everything would be OK once his dad returned home — but the reality proved much harsher.
He recalled: “Dad came home in 2012 when I was in Year Seven. I remember feeling so happy and thinking everything would get back to normal but just two months later he went to sign on with his probation officer and was re-arrested and deported back to Jamaica.
“I’ve only had limited contact with him since then and still don’t know the full story.
“I remember coming home from school and seeing my mum and sisters crying. I just tried to stay strong but inside I was breaking up.
“From then on, the loss of my dad was something in my head that just wouldn’t go away.”
This rupture in Shevhone’s early life led to a predictable path of unworkable school placements. He said: “It felt like nothing in life was going to work out for me. I stopped listening and was excluded from two schools. By Year 11 I was in a pupil referral unit.”
Shevhone drifted into a haze of marijuana smoking and hanging out in North East London with older boys enmeshed in gang culture.
He said: “Whenever I got kicked out of school and went somewhere new, people were guarded towards me and thought, ‘Here’s the bad boy coming’. I suppose I was acting out what I thought I was worth.
“I had always loved sprinting and won quite a few school sports day 100m finals but whenever I got a feeling that maybe I could really be an athlete, the other feelings would pull me back.
“Let’s just say the area I chilled in had well-known gangs and everyone I knew carried a knife, including me.
“I never went to the extreme and stabbed someone but I wasn’t the best of examples either — just another angry kid struggling to find my identity in an environment where the only role models sold drugs and made their own rules.
“By the time I was in my mid-teens I had been arrested for both knife and weed possession — so it’s fair to say I was going down a dark path.”
But then a chance meeting with one of London’s most charismatic youth workers changed everything.
Beat the blades
THE Sun on Sunday launched its Beat The Blades campaign in May in a bid to combat the UK’s worsening knife crime murder rate.
The campaign – backed by a task force of leading figures – calls for a ban on online knife sales, more community sports, specially trained school bobbies, a crackdown on middle-class drug use and help for child drug-deal “slaves.”
Shevhone explained: “A really caring teacher at my pupil referral centre sent me to a man called Colin James, who runs a charity called Gangs Unite.
“Within weeks, that place became a second home and Colin became the dad I had lost ten years before.
“He sat me down and just said, ‘What do you like doing?’ When I told him about athletics he came straight down to my local track to watch me in a sprint session and told me I was going to be a champ.
“I think that’s when everything began to turn around and I stopped hanging out with the wrong people.
“Just the simple thing of having someone there for me going out of his way to watch me was a good feeling.
“My mum was as supportive as she could be but she was working a lot and hadn’t been able to watch me.”
Before long, Shevhone’s talent began to shine through and last year, aged just 16, he finished second in the U17 England Athletics Championships — an achievement which won him a place at Oaklands College, an athletics academy in St Albans, Herts.
Shevhone said: “My name is beginning to become known among selectors and my next goal is to race in the European Athletics U20 Championships next year.
“One day my dream is to pull on a Team GB Athletics shirt, but if it wasn’t for Colin I could so easily have been pulling on a prison shirt.”
The Sun on Sunday launched its Beat The Blades campaign earlier this year to fight the UK’s worsening murder rate after a surge in the number of fatal stabbings.
We unveiled a task force including youth workers, community leaders and MPs to help tackle the issue, and called for a series of hard-hitting reforms to combat the problem, including a ban on knife sales online.
In an exclusive interview, Home Secretary Sajid Javid backed the initiative, and also pledged to lobby colleagues to plough money into sports projects. He explained: “As Culture Secretary, I realised how you can use sport to do so many other good things for society.”
Shevhone agrees sport can help reduce knife crime. He said: “It is a great way for people to get away from the road.
“A lot of the time I was doing illegal things because I had nothing else to do and no mum at home to check up on me. It’s so basic.
“There is a lack of opportunities for young people. Year Seven, Year Eight boys look up to the older boys on their estates and want to copy them.
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“The poverty in the environment is the biggest factor. I’m not excusing the fact I carried a knife — it was a bad choice — but the roads where I lived weren’t safe.
“I didn’t carry it to be violent, I carried it to protect myself.”
These days, Shevhone is only worried about protecting himself from his nearest opponent on the track but he says he will never forget his roots.
He said: “If my story can inspire others to make different choices it will make me feel happy.
“When I’m more established I would like to do mentoring work because if I didn’t have Colin in my life, my talent would have been worth nothing. Thanks to him, it means everything.”