Weirwolf (12 page)

The last lap approached. I just couldn’t get out. Marcel was getting closer and closer. We were knocking elbows now. I needed to get out. If I didn’t, the race was over. I couldn’t wait. If there was a crash I was screwed. Others wouldn’t have let me out. He wouldn’t have let me out. It’s not that Marcel’s a soft touch but maybe he had respect for me. Maybe he just didn’t want to crash.

Our wheels were almost touching and if that happened that would be it. We were both going to end up in a heap. It was so tense. I was using so much energy on concentration, watching always, trying to weigh up when to go. I am quite good at moving my chair around, I can flick my hips and change direction instantly. I sit quite high so I am nimble enough to do that. Then all of a sudden Marcel sat up. It might have been no more than five seconds but the pace dropped, and that was all I needed. I switched direction and I was out. On the inside the pack was getting closer and closer. The crash was still coming.

And then it happened – total wipe-out. The whole field had pretty much been taken down by the most spectacular crash. It was perfect. Now all I had to do was pick up the pace into the last bend. The only challenger left was the Thai athlete Prawat Wahoram. But I knew I could beat him, that my top-end speeds were so much faster than his. So I just charged away, leaving the devastation behind me. And when I crossed the line it was the best feeling in the world.

I didn’t care about how the race had gone and the crash. That’s racing. I have been wiped out before. That’s the way it goes. But after what happened with the 800m and the protest there was still a doubt in my mind – I wondered if it might happen all over again because of that crash. Someone else might try and take my gold away from me. So while I was celebrating I was also nervous that some other drama might lie ahead of me. The officials aren’t supposed to order a rerun unless the crash happens in the first 200 metres but
in the women’s race the night before there had been a crash halfway through and it was run again next day, so what had happened there was in my mind. It was the first thing I asked after the race when I got off the track: was there a protest?

But this time there was no controversy, no screaming rows and sleepless nights. Just a feeling of satisfaction and joy. I had overachieved. Two golds and a bronze and I still had the 400m to go, although I knew at that stage there was no way I could do a marathon. Mentally I had pulled out of that race.

You have to give a lot of credit to Kurt for getting up from that crash and winning bronze, as he was 50 or 60 metres behind me. I didn’t tell him that after the race, though. I still couldn’t look him in the eye.

By the time I was on the podium with him receiving my medal and listening to ‘God Save the Queen’, the Bird’s Nest was virtually empty. The minute the Chinese knew there was no home athlete involved, they went. I didn’t care. I felt myself welling up when the national anthem was played. After everything that had gone on it was very emotional. I was tired, emotionally drained. But I was happy. Suddenly it all felt worth it. All those years of hard work. My feeling about the 1,500m medal was totally different to the 800m. I couldn’t stop looking at it. I still put the new one into the drawer with the 800m one and locked it away in there with my socks and my pants. I only took it out to take a picture with it to send to my friend. But this one felt really special.

After that, whatever happened in the 400m didn’t really matter. It was my favourite event, but China had a genuine local hero to cheer on in Zhang Lixin. He was absolutely flying, way ahead of me in terms of the times he was doing in qualifying. My only chance of beating him was if it rained, because I knew he was crap in the wet. I had raced him in May at the Paralympic World Cup and I beat him by 20 metres.

But here in Beijing he completely destroyed me, winning the 400m by an incredible margin of 60 metres. In those short few months he had become a totally different athlete. And I was moving pretty fast myself, clocking a time which was faster than my old world record for the distance. The speeds he was hitting were just frightening. I have since watched the race back in slow motion and he was putting such pressure down that he was deflating his front tyre. That was the first time I had been beaten in a 400m for three years.

It gave me a good taster of the power of a home crowd behind you. In Beijing, whenever a Chinese athlete was involved the atmosphere in the Bird’s Nest was deafening. It made me want to fast-forward four years to London and my moment in my home town.

Despite the defeat by Lixin I was more than satisfied with my return in Beijing. OK, so maybe the media expected me to win five golds. But I knew what I had been through in the run-up to the Games. I was still ill and yet I had delivered. My golds were the only ones won by the athletics team, which was a massive disappointment.

Overall the Chinese medal tally was scary: 211, with 89 golds, was just off the scale. But when you look at the sheer population of that country you know it is impossible for a country like Great Britain to compete. With the exception of the athletics team, it had been a fantastic Games for Paralympics GB, though. We won 102 medals and finished second in the medal table behind the Chinese. It was the moment we really announced our arrival as a Paralympic force.

We had even beaten the Americans into third place. But then America’s attitude to the Paralympics is strange. I often feel sorry for the American athletes because they have real talent and yet they get hardly any coverage in the media for the Paralympics, even though in the big city marathons you are treated like a superstar. It’s bizarre and I think the country should do more to help their disabled athletes. It is a strange contradiction that a country like China should take the Paralympics more seriously than a country like America. I hope they step up in the future.

As for the rest of my Games, I pulled out of the
marathon
straight after the 400m. The team officials understood. They were expecting it. I just didn’t have enough energy. Now it was done I could relax.

Having missed the opening ceremony I was determined to enjoy the closing party. We had a few beers before going over to the stadium for one last time. I just felt so relieved it was over. I had been away for a month and a bit and I couldn’t wait to get on that flight and go home – which was obviously a bit strange for me.

After the ceremony Boris Johnson threw a brilliant party for the team at one of the Beijing hotels. Free beers, free food. He gave a speech and had a chat to me and some of the other athletes. He told me I would make London proud in four years’ time. We had never had this sort of
celebration
or recognition before. Much of this was being driven by the need to make a success of the London Paralympics: from the very beginning the London organising committee had made it clear that they wanted to treat the Paralympics as an equal partner to the Olympics. I knew this would lead to a step change in the way we were treated and viewed. And on that heady night in Beijing I felt the start of
something
really special, a shift in attitudes. For the first time it felt like we were being taken seriously.

I didn’t want that night to end. I recruited Pete Wyman as my drinking partner and, along with a few other members of the squad, we headed to the BBC party. I was still up as dawn approached. The only problem was, we had to be ready to leave for the airport for our flight home at 6.15 a.m. And now the others had all left me and I was still lost somewhere in the city. I jumped into a cab.

Pete Wyman rang me, asking, ‘Where are you?’

‘I don’t really know, Pete,’ I said. ‘In a taxi somewhere.’

I told the driver, ‘Take me to the Olympic village. And fast.’

He had no idea what I was saying. So he stopped and asked some other people at various hotels. Blank looks. So he tried again. Same shoulder shrugs. This seemed to go on
for ages. Back at the village someone was in my room
packing
my bags for me.

I phoned Pete again.

‘I still don’t know where I am,’ I told him.

Now they were getting a bit worried. Pete went to Tim Jones, who was our team manager, and broke the news. Tim said, ‘He is old enough and brave enough. If he can’t get back here just meet us at the airport.’ He was absolute class, so calm.

Meanwhile I was still going round and round in circles. Totally lost. Then, somehow in my drunken state, I
remembered
I had my accreditation on, so I looked down and found the Chinese symbol for Olympic village. I showed it to the driver. He understood and thankfully I was only three or four miles away. What an entrance I made that morning. What a state I must have looked. I remember coming in through the barriers, round to the GB team’s apartment blocks, and everyone was there. Waiting. They all had their official kit on. Everyone was cheering and clapping. I dashed up to my room, no time to change. I was still wearing my parade kit from the closing ceremony. It was only thanks to one of the team’s assistants that I even had my bags ready to go. I jumped on the coach and took a long, deep breath. At the airport I was just so happy to see that plane with the gold wing tips and nose. Then I found out the best news of all. All gold-medal winners had been allocated a seat in business class. What a lucky touch.

And then it got even better. At first I was allocated a
window seat, which is difficult for wheelchair users as they have to clamber over someone else to get to the toilet. They looked into moving me but said there were no available seats as all the aisle spaces in business were already taken by people with wheelchairs. I was about to settle down when suddenly one of the stewardesses approached me and told me they had found a seat and that they were going to move me. I thought I might be heading to the back of the plane but instead we went forwards. Right to the front of the plane. And I mean the very front. Seat number one. Sebastian Coe, who was on the same flight home as us, had agreed to swap it with me. I couldn’t thank him enough. He has been a great ambassador for the Paralympics.

Once the plane took off, I was out like a light. I must have slept the whole way home. I was so hungover. When we landed at Terminal 5 we were given an amazing
reception
. At that time the building work was still going on and all the construction workers were cheering as we taxied to the gate. That’s when I started to realise that we were being recognised, that things were starting to change for us Paralympians. Mind you, because of a mix-up with my luggage I missed a photo call with the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. I didn’t mind that too much – I was so tired I just wanted to see my family.

When I came through arrivals my mum was there to meet me with Ronie. I hadn’t expected that. I cried when I saw them. I told them I was mentally drained and I felt
shocking
. I had been out all night, I hadn’t showered, I’d been ten
hours on a plane, my hair was everywhere. I looked a mess and I just wanted to get home. Then my mum told me there was a big reception waiting for me back on Roundshaw. I didn’t want to do it at the time but when I got to the Phoenix Centre on the estate there was this huge mob of people and a big banner congratulating me. I said a few words. I don’t remember what. It just came out. And then there were all these kids just wanting to see and touch my medals. Seeing how those kids reacted to the medals was really special. Maybe that would keep them off the streets and stop them making the same mistakes that I made all those years back.

Suddenly the medals felt even more precious. Until you show them off you don’t know the impact. After a couple of days of catching up with friends and getting some sleep I went to see Jenny. It was quite emotional and she was crying. She always has a tear in her eye when I do well. For her, this was the culmination of a life’s work. But as she contemplated what we had done in China she also had her mind on the next challenge. Beijing was just the beginning. London was coming.

I
hadn’t had much luck with relationships. After the split from Kaylie I had become deeply distrustful of women. Over time those feelings had eased but I was still very cautious. I didn’t want to get hurt again. When I came back from Beijing I had a few flings but nothing serious. Then I met Emily Thorne.

It was May 2009 and I was taking it pretty easy on the training front. I was just having a drink in my local when I saw her. She was just popping out for a fag and I said hello. I knew who she was but we hadn’t really spoken before. She didn’t live on the estate, but she was still local. I stopped her in the doorway and talked to her for a bit. Then, either later that night or the day after, we connected through Facebook and started to chat.

From there, things moved pretty fast. I took her to the cinema to see the Dan Brown sequel to
The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons
. She didn’t like it very much but the film was irrelevant. It was the start of something really special.

At first I was slightly worried Emily was a bit young – I was twenty-nine and she was nineteen. But she didn’t talk or act like someone immature. She wasn’t young in the head – she probably acted older than me sometimes. She was like no one else I have ever been with. She knew I was into wheelchair athletics, but she didn’t really know what I had done, and had no idea that I’d won gold medals in Beijing or anything like that. When she came to understand, it didn’t make any difference. I liked that about her. From the very start, really, I knew she was the one. You just get that feeling, don’t you? You can’t explain it. She is just so genuine and caring, a decent person to talk to. She tells me now that in the early days when we had just started going out all I used to talk about was my racing. I must have been quite boring and I guess I’m lucky she’s still here. I just talked about racing and training. But it’s that honesty that has changed me as a person. It’s made me better as a racer. I can now switch off and try to talk about other things.

After about a month we started talking seriously about moving in together. She had left school with good grades and was working in the local branch of NatWest. She was renting her own flat but because I was on my own in the house she used to stay over a lot. The first time she stayed, I dropped her back at her house at 6 a.m. because I had to go to training. It gave her a taste of what was to come, but she took it well.

Given my past experiences I wondered whether things were going too quickly, whether I was stepping in too
fast. But I had learned from my mistakes. If she went out I wouldn’t get paranoid. I believed in her. I knew she wasn’t going to betray me and I think that’s why I instantly fell in love with her and knew that we’d be together for a long time.

Right from the start Emily knew I had a daughter from a previous relationship but she never expressed any concern about my past suddenly becoming part of her present. I still didn’t rush things; I wanted to wait to make sure I knew where it was headed first. But when the time came the two of them hit it off straight away.

A couple of months after we got together, I went off to Ibiza for a lads holiday. I had never had the chance to do that before. I’d booked it before I met Emily and hadn’t expected to be in a serious relationship. In the end I spent most of my time texting or calling her. But my ten days there, going to the clubs, staying up through the night,
chilling
on the beach, were still amazing. Obviously drugs are everywhere in Ibiza, in all the clubs and bars. But it never crossed my mind. I would just have a few beers and have a laugh and that was it. I had left those days behind long ago.

That holiday summed up the year after Beijing. 2008 had been brilliant – in the end. But it had been a major struggle, what with the illness and everything else going on at home. After all that I was determined to take it easy for a few months. I was still training and racing but the golden glow of the Games soon faded. I did get a bit of extra funding from UK Athletics but the race fees and the sponsorships
didn’t really change. There was a bit more recognition and I would be announced at meetings as the double gold
medallist
but I was hardly a superstar. It didn’t bother me. I had got used to it and didn’t have high expectations. I just did my own thing. I raced and trained and I didn’t worry about recognition or money.

Later that year, Emily got pregnant. It was a total shock: completely unplanned and totally unexpected. It was so early on in our relationship. But it didn’t seem to matter that we had only been together a few months. I was happy and so was Emily. We were ready.

That’s why it was so hard to take when Emily
miscarried
. A couple of weeks before the twelve-week scan Emily suddenly started saying that she just didn’t feel pregnant any more. I kept telling her it would all be OK. But when she had the scan, we were told there was no heartbeat. They couldn’t see anything.

Instantly Emily’s face changed colour. She was in total shock. I didn’t know what to do. It was so, so hard because you have such high expectations and for her it was even worse. The hospital told us the baby had stopped growing at around six weeks.

Because it was so early in the pregnancy, we hadn’t told many people. My mum knew, though, so when we got back home I told her the news. In floods of tears I explained how the baby had stopped developing, that there wasn’t going to be a baby. The worst thing about the whole experience was that Emily was still carrying the baby. We had to go
back home with it inside her. It absolutely killed her,
knowing
this little thing wouldn’t grow any more. Even worse – she would have to go back a few days later and have an abortion. I did my best to comfort her but she was crying a lot. The whole experience made us inseparable.

When it was time to take her for the dreaded abortion, we found ourselves sitting in a waiting room where 90 per cent of the women obviously didn’t want their children. All Emily could think about was the fact that she wanted her baby and yet all these other women were giving it all away. It broke our hearts.

I tried to make Emily feel better by telling her that perhaps there had been something wrong with the baby and this was nature’s way of dealing with it. Maybe it wasn’t a healthy egg. I asked her, ‘I know I’m disabled, but could you live with a disabled child?’

I knew I couldn’t. It would destroy me because I know what I went through. It’s slightly different for me because I’m more able than most. But because I was brought up disabled, I wouldn’t want a child to be brought up in the same situation as me. This sounds incredibly cold and
heartless
but I would probably consider an abortion if I knew for sure that a child of mine would be disabled – because of my own experience. You don’t know how disabled they’re going to be. My mum and dad didn’t even know. They didn’t have a choice. I’m so happy and blessed that my children can run around and do the things I could never do. It makes me smile when I see Mason running around
the sitting room, jumping on the sofa, because I could never do those things. When I come home and he comes running towards me, it makes my day.

I know my experience would help a disabled child to come to terms with whatever problems and challenges they had, but I always just prayed that it would never happen to my kids.

Maybe in the future, science and medical care will advance to the point where they can correct disabilities like mine. It is already possible for people who have had an accident to undergo therapy which might help them walk again. If you have known what it is like to walk and then you lose it, it’s obvious you would want to get that back. But it’s not as obvious for people like me as you might imagine. How do you learn to do something you have never known? And what might the people close to you think? Would it change the way they see you? Personally, if someone said they could wave a magic wand and give me the power to move my legs then I probably would. But it wouldn’t be easy to come to terms with something like that, as idealistic as it sounds.

It took Emily a long time to come round to thinking that it wasn’t meant to be. But a year later she was pregnant with Mason. This time she went for early scans – no one was going to take any chances. Inevitably, she was so scared of losing that baby, petrified of every single pain or twinge that she felt. We were always up the hospital. All I could do was tell her that everything was going to be fine. And just hope.

Mason was born on 1 August 2011. After everything we had been through it was just such an enormous relief, the best feeling in the world. We knew we were having a boy, and for me that was extra special. He came a month early because by that stage Emily was so big. He was seven pounds and three ounces – and that was with four weeks to go. Imagine how big he might have been if Emily had gone full term.

Even though none of the scans had raised any issues or concerns, I still had my doubts. When the midwife handed him to me, I immediately checked he had all his fingers and toes. Made sure his legs were working. But he was fine. So alert, his little eyes already scanning the room.

For Emily it had been a painful experience. Although the labour was relatively short – seven hours – she had to stay in hospital. It was nothing serious, just a few stitches and a couple of nights of observation. She was so worried about someone coming and swapping Mason for another baby that she was terrified of going to the toilet.

I was so proud of my new little boy. And when he started to smile and recognise me as his daddy, it gave me such a lift. Whenever I came back from a bad training session or I was hurting, I would instantly forget all about it. It made me stronger as a person. Training and competing just became my day job. It was different to how it had been with Ronie – I was only twenty-four when she came along. I was young and naive then, and this time I wanted to be more involved. Even though Mason came a year before
London, I was never worried about him being a distraction because I had always wanted a family. Life comes first and, besides, he actually helped me with training. He gave me a greater drive and sense of purpose. Now I wasn’t only doing this for me, I was doing it for Emily and my family. A better future for all of us.