Weirwolf (13 page)

D
rive a few miles north of the Olympic Park at Stratford and you come to the Lee Valley, a sprawling stretch of London which the rest of the city seems to have forgotten. Although it extends into the Essex and Hertfordshire
countryside
, much of it is an ugly mix of industrial estates, train lines and electricity pylons. A fortune has been spent on it in recent years to try and redevelop it and smarten it up. It’s there, in a bit of the park just outside Edmonton, that you will find the Lee Valley Athletics Centre, the nerve centre of the sport in Great Britain.

In the run-up to London 2012 the head coaches from UK Athletics ordered all contenders for the Olympic and Paralympic squads to base themselves there. I totally
understood
why. It had cost about £15 million to build and was an impressive place, with fantastic facilities. But for me, it was a total waste of time. I couldn’t wait to get away.

It was November 2010: just under two years to go to the Games. I had just won the New York Marathon, probably
my biggest achievement since Beijing. Until then I had been overweight and struggling. Unbelievable as it might sound with a home Olympics and Paralympics just around the corner, I just couldn’t get motivated. Whenever I got in my chair that summer I felt uncomfortable. I was way above my optimum weight of 58 kilos. I don’t know if it was because I was bursting at the seams or if there was a problem with my chair set-up but I had to put padding around everything to stop it hurting me when I raced. My legs would tingle whenever I stayed in my chair for a long time. I was beginning to worry.

When I look back at pictures from that period now, I think, ‘How on earth did I push my chair?’ My arms were all flabby and I look so out of shape. In races that year, it was always a struggle just to stay in contention. But it can’t have been that bad as I was always there or thereabouts. I knew at that point that as long as I got my head down and worked hard I would be able to get back to my best.

New York was the moment which really announced my return to form. I had to really train hard through the late summer and autumn but by November I felt much happier. I had got myself a new chair and I set off with Emily in confident mood. It was the first time we had been to New York together and it was great to have her with me. I had done most of the hard yards by the time we landed so I only had to do light training sessions once I got to New York. We were staying in a lovely hotel in Manhattan and after
breakfast
I would get in my race chair and push up to Central
Park for a gentle work-out. I used to get a few funny looks from New Yorkers as they made their way to work, but I loved the place. After training I would head back and shower and change before spending the rest of the day with Emily, shopping or taking in the sights. It felt like a holiday.

I had to snap out of my chilled-out mood when it came to race day. This was no city break. It was really hard going and I had to fight all the way to the end to beat Japan’s Masazumi Soejima in a sprint finish. My arms were hurting so much, because I went for it too early. In the end I was hitting the push rims on my wheels so hard I couldn’t really feel anything. Somehow, I held on.

As I crossed the line, Emily was the first person I saw. I headed straight for her and she gave me a massive cuddle. It was the first time she had been at a big event with me so to have her there when I won was magical, really special. Winning New York had always been one of my ambitions. But because it always came at the end of a busy track season, it often felt like one race too far. This year was the perfect moment and it gave me such a big lift.

Sadly, things turned sour quite quickly. After returning from America I was making the long journey to
northeast
London to Lee Valley two or three times a week for training. The World Championships in New Zealand were coming up in January and I needed to maintain my fitness and build up my strength. Lee Valley is undoubtedly a world-class facility and the physios and strength and
conditioning
coaches there are some of the best in the business.

But I didn’t get treated like a world-class athlete. The staff there seemed to spend all their time focusing on the able-bodied athletes and us Paralympians were treated like second-class citizens. Sometimes they would forget that I was even turning up.

I was supposed to get one-on-one attention from one of the strength and conditioning coaches or the physios but it never seemed to work out that way. They were always popping to see me for a few minutes here and there before going back to see the able-bodied athletes. They weren’t like Jenny and they weren’t following her instructions. I had never worked with them before and they didn’t know me, or my body, well enough. That’s why I got injured.

Because of the distances involved, UKA agreed that I didn’t have to drive across London to Lee Valley every day. So instead I split my time between there and my old routine of training on the roads of Richmond Park and on the track at St Mary’s University College in Twickenham. But UKA were overseeing everything and they had me on
weight-training
programmes when I was working out on my own. One of them involved lifting up dumbbells straight in front of me. At first the coach told me to do a 6kg weight but I said there was no way my shoulders could cope with it. I privately overruled him and dropped it to a 4kg but it was still too much. During a session of lifting I suddenly felt a sharp, agonising pain in my right shoulder. To give you the full technical description, the bursa pad in my rotator cuff had been badly injured by the exercises. In simple terms: it
was buggered. Just reaching up to use my front-door key would cause a sharp pain to shoot through my shoulder.

Now, I don’t think the exercises were wrong. I just don’t think they suited a disabled athlete or someone in a wheelchair. The coach thought they would help strengthen my shoulders but they didn’t, they hurt them. As far as I am concerned this particular coach wasn’t really suited to training Paralympians – he was more comfortable with training able-bodied athletes. It made me angry that I wasn’t being given support tailored to me. After all, I was a double gold-medal winner and one of the biggest medal hopes for London. But that is just the way it is and I don’t think it will change in my lifetime. We’ll always be second best.

That’s not to say there is any resentment or ill feeling between the able-bodied and the disabled athletes who compete for Great Britain. In fact, the opposite is true. I know a lot of the guys very well and they always talk to me as if we are all part of one big team. It’s not their fault. I don’t even blame the coach. It was the system.

At first, the shoulder didn’t feel too bad but after a while I couldn’t lift my arm above a certain degree. It was so sore and even doing little things like opening a drawer would make it click – it was really painful. Within a few weeks I was supposed to be flying out to New Zealand for the World Championships but my faith in the whole Lee Valley set-up had evaporated. That was when relations between me and UK Athletics started to fall apart.

After Beijing a lot of the really good people at UKA like Tim Jones, Pete Wyman and Kathryn Periac left. They were largely replaced by one man – Peter Eriksson. A Swede with a long and distinguished career in coaching, he had been hired a year earlier as the performance director for the Great Britain Paralympic athletics team. He was well known on the wheelchair racing circuit and had joined from Canada where he had a great track record, coaching gold-medal winners like Jeff Adams and Chantal Petitclerc. As an athlete he had been a speed skater but in coaching he moved into the mainstream world of athletics and then into disability sport.

With the tough-talking Dutchman Charles van Commenee overseeing the whole of the British athletics programme, it was Peter’s job to make sure that Paralympic athletes like me were integrated with the Olympians in one big training and performance system. All the pressure on me to train at Lee Valley and to follow the guidance of the UKA coaches and physios came directly from Peter. But I am not the sort of person who responds well to that sort of pressure. I am an individual who likes to set my own agenda, and to work with my own coach and people I trust. From the start I knew we were going to clash.

New York was the first of a series of flashpoints which would almost derail my preparations and plans for London 2012. When Peter found out I’d injured my shoulder he assumed it was because of the New York Marathon. He hadn’t wanted me to go in the first place. Jenny called him
to explain it had happened in the gym but he claimed it was all the training I had done for New York. At that point Jenny’s patience snapped. ‘Dave told you he wanted to do New York,’ she told him in a heated phone call. ‘I’m his coach and I wanted him to do it and he won it. It was one of the best races I’ve seen him do in a long time.’ After that Jenny told me there was silence at the other end of the line. That was one of the things I personally found frustrating with him. I found it hard to get any sense of what he was really thinking. He would probably say that was good
leadership
, a good way of motivating you. But I am not so sure. I never really knew where I stood with Peter.

The shoulder injury was starting to cause me real problems. It had brought a complete stop to all my
training
plans. And with time running out before the World Championships, UKA suggested I should resort to that last refuge all sportsmen and women must consider from time to time – the cortisone injection. Just before Christmas I went to see a specialist recommended to me by UKA at a clinic in St John’s Wood. After giving me a shot of local anaesthetic, he then sank the enormous needle into my right shoulder.

The idea was to reduce the inflammation in my
shoulder
so I could train properly again. It wouldn’t deal with any of the pain I was getting but it would take down the swelling. It worked straight away. After three days’ rest I started training again and it felt great, totally back to normal. You can see why some athletes overuse it. You are
only supposed to have two in your entire career but I am sure there are plenty of people who have taken more jabs than that just to keep going. That year I trained all the way through Christmas – except Christmas Day, of course. I am no Daley Thompson, who famously trained twice on 25 December. I just couldn’t do that to the family. Now I’ve got kids it’s even more important.

Despite the way the injection had worked I was still convinced by this stage that I wasn’t going to go to New Zealand. I had missed nearly eight weeks of training and I felt I had no chance of winning any medals. I didn’t want to go as an also-ran. Psychologically it would be too
damaging
so close to the London Games. I called Peter up to tell him the news. ‘Look, David, you are going to the Worlds, and that’s final,’ he told me, in his usual blunt manner.

Now I completely lost it. I was shouting and swearing down the phone at him, trying to make him understand that I wasn’t capable of winning. It was a real scene. He wouldn’t back down and told me to think about it for a few days.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, out of the blue, I got a call from UKA’s sports psychologist, Sarah Cecil. That really got my back up. I don’t think sports psychologists should be forced on people by governing bodies or coaches. It’s something the athlete should decide to do. It made me deeply suspicious. I thought everything I said would end up going back to Peter. It was a complete waste of time.

As most people were getting ready to celebrate the New
Year that night I called Jenny to try to work out what to do. Ultimately it was Peter’s call and he had already warned me I could lose my lottery funding (this wasn’t the only time I heard that when I didn’t fit into the UKA agenda). Jenny was getting so much flak from Peter about the way I was behaving. But she told me that night that she would stand by my decision, whatever it was.

On New Year’s Day I rang Jenny again – I didn’t want to speak to Peter – and told her my decision: ‘OK, I will go. But don’t count on anything. I will try to get as fit as I can in the time I have left.’

A day before we were due to leave, I called Peter and apologised for the way I had behaved. It hadn’t been very professional to swear at him in the way I had. I told him I would see him at the airport. He just said, ‘Okay, I’ll see you there.’ That was all he said. How could he be so unresponsive?

For a nervous flyer like me the prospect of a 24-hour flight to New Zealand was a nightmare. But I was so worried about all the training I had missed that I forgot a lot of my fears. I asked the medical staff if they could work out a way of getting me over the jet lag quickly, so that when we got to the pre-Championships training camp in Auckland I could start working on my fitness straight away. As the plane took off for the first leg of the trip to Los Angeles, we
were all given melatonin and some vitamins. They worked a treat and when I woke up I wasn’t groggy at all. In fact, I didn’t have any jet lag until five or six days after we got there. It was exactly what I needed and it gave me a great advantage – I was able to get straight into my training.