Number Plates News

Athlete's Plate May Overcome Finance Hurdle

14 January 2010

New Zealand champion hurdler, Rebecca Wardell, hopes to give her career a boost by selling her personal number plate. The athlete plans to raise the much-needed cash in order to finance her training programme for the heptathlon event at the Commonwealth Games to be held in Delhi later this year.

The initiative involves the sale of the registration 'HURDLR', which she was given when she was a world-ranking hurdler. Personal plate prices in New Zealand start at around the equivalent of £225 and a distinctive one like Rebecca's could easily fetch far more on the open market.

"I thought selling it off might be a good way of raising a bit of cash," said Rebecca, who added, "I switched to heptathlon, so I wasn't a hurdler any more. Since then it has been sitting on the shelf."

Wardell managed an impressive seventh in the heptathlon at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and was ranked 23rd at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

The measures she is prepared to go to in order to fund her sport clearly reflect a common disparity between the funding of athletics and other sports, particularly Rugby, where top teams like the All Blacks attract massive sponsorship. Rebecca is an amateur and currently studying transport engineering whilst following her vocation. "I am a student as well," she says, "and I have to pay my coach and pay for all the stuff when we go overseas."

In the world of UK athletics, Olympic Gold medallist javelin-thrower, Tessa Sanderson famously owned her own personal plate, 5 TES.