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Olympic champion Greg Rutherford has opened up about a fraudulent experience that left him empty-handed after attempting to sell his old guitar on a resale website.
The former long jumper, now 39 and hailing from Milton Keynes, shared his story as a guest on the Spent podcast, a collaboration with Nationwide, where he discussed his past buying and selling adventures.
In conversation with host Matt Edmonson, Greg recounted how he was persuaded to purchase a pricey guitar and amplifier, swayed by a friend involved in a band.
After filing a complaint with the online marketplace where he listed the guitar, the buyer was refunded entirely, leaving Greg without compensation.
During the podcast, Greg, who captured his long jump gold on the iconic ‘Super Saturday’ at the London 2012 Olympics, reflected on the influence of his Swedish friend who played guitar, saying, “I immediately thought, ‘that’s really cool.'”
‘So I went straight to the music shop, bought a relatively expensive guitar, amp, the whole lot.’
However, when he tried to learn how to play his new instrument, the father-of-three revealed he couldn’t even learn ‘two chords’ and therefore ‘never touched it again’.Â
Olympic gold medallist Greg Rutherford appeared on the Spent podcast, in association with Nationwide, to discuss his spending habits
He decided to sell the instrument, which had been played for a total of ’10 minutes’, on an online marketplace and quickly found a buyer.
However according to Greg: ‘[The buyer] got it delivered to his house. He then claimed it arrived snapped in half. He then got a full refund for it and I got nothing.
‘So I lost a very expensive guitar and amp and he basically got it for free… then he showed a picture and it was scratched up, beaten up – so clearly, it was his old guitar.’
Elsewhere in the podcast, Greg revealed he had an IAAF-accredited long jump track and sandpit built down the side of his house – but joked he has used ‘less than 10 times’ during his career.
‘I invested quite a lot of money in this,’ he said, noting that, in theory, it was a ‘great investment’.Â
However, in recounting the story Greg explained he was living predominantly in the US at the time, and so ‘never used it’.Â
Greg, now a father of three, won his gold medal on ‘Super Saturday’ in the London 2012 Olympics
Matt joked: ‘The rest of the time, is it like a litter tray for stray cats?’Â
Greg acknowledged that this was often the case – and that foxes also are attracted to the sand pit.
He said: ‘It does have a cover on the sand, but if you leave the cover off for about 30 seconds, a cat will poo in it.’
As Greg and his wife Susie discuss potentially moving home one day, he joked he doesn’t know how he’ll market the track to potential buyers – however during the pandemic he tried to offer it up to athletes who needed to train.
He explained many athletes struggled to get access to tracks during the Covid pandemic, meaning he could offer them somewhere to train and put his runway to good use.
Greg revealed his justification for installing the runway was to make him a better athlete, which would in turn make him more prosperous.Â
‘I thought, “spend money to make money”,’ he recalled. However Greg’s career ended abruptly shortly after the runway was installed due to injury – after spending what he describes as a ‘silly amount of money’.