Weirwolf (16 page)

All in, my chair is worth just under £5,000 with the wheels. And the wheels are a third of that cost. That’s because they are made from expensive carbon fibre and are specifically designed for wheelchairs. In fact, there are only three companies in the world that make the back wheels and one in the world that makes them for the front.

In time, I am pretty sure a lot of the British guys and developed nations will be using carbon fibre frames. That will make them a little lighter but the main
advantage
will be that they will be much stiffer. When you’re racing you punch the wheels with incredible, repetitive force. This causes the wheels, which are set at an angle of 12 degrees, to deflect. This in turn causes them to rub on the rubber track, causing high levels of friction. After wind resistance, this is the thing which really holds back wheelchair racers like me. This effect is called scrubbing and during races the wheels scrub sideways as well as up and down. This partly explains why we all love hard tracks. The closer to concrete, the better. But that would
never work for the runners, who want the track to be as cushioned as possible. So the only solution available to us for the time being is to develop a less flexible frame, which would reduce the movement as we push the back wheels and therefore impact on the tyres and the wheels. That would in turn reduce that friction, meaning we could go even faster.

After fifteen years of working with me I obviously wanted Draft – a British company with a proven pedigree – to be involved. But a lot of people – Peter Eriksson included – didn’t agree. They wanted to take all the information that UK Sport had pulled together and give it to Top End, an American company. I said, ‘You can’t ask an American firm to build chairs for British athletes.’ I couldn’t understand it. It was just another example of me and the establishment not seeing eye to eye.

When it came down to it, the manufacturer made no difference. I couldn’t risk the new chair. I decided I would stick with my old aluminium one. It was less stable and less fancy but I wasn’t about to take any chances.

As it was, the head of the French Paralympic team claimed I was doping in technology during the Games. I don’t know what he was getting at there. The racing chair I had was no different to the ones the French were using. Actually, my wheels were made in France. Sure, I had been training in wind tunnels but anyone can do that. The Swiss have been doing that for years. But then the French said the cyclists’ wheels were too round in the Olympics! Maybe
the French felt they didn’t have the money to compete with us and so couldn’t invest in the technology. For me, the French moaning was a tribute to how professional British sport had become. It made me very proud.

I came back from Portugal to get ready for the London Marathon. This race was always a highlight of my season. It’s the reason I started competing. But this year it felt like a grand warm-up to the main event. That didn’t mean I didn’t want to win it, though. I wanted to set the tone for the rest of 2012. Before the race I told my rivals, ‘What I’d say to the guys coming to London is that my training is going great and I don’t think I’ve ever felt in such good shape at this point in the year. I’m averaging about 80 miles a week in the chair.’

It was much closer than I would have liked but I just pipped Marcel and Team USA’s Krige Schabort to the line for my sixth win. It meant I had equalled Tanni
Grey-Thompson’s
record of victories in London. That meant a lot. Tanni was one of the big reasons I got back into the sport after losing my way at the end of the 1990s. If it hadn’t been for her amazing performances in Sydney I might never have come back.

But I also hinted to reporters after the race that 2012 could be my last marathon.

Emily was pregnant again and we were expecting baby number two in October. I told the press, ‘There’s not a lot of goals left. I’ll definitely take a year out after the Paralympics because I want to spend some time with my family.’

I should have learned by now never to try to predict the future.

Inevitably, as Games time draws closer the demands on your time from sponsors and the media grow. I accept that it’s part of the job, and for most Paralympians the
attention
is so rare that you have to make the most of it when it comes along. But that doesn’t mean that we deserve to be ripped off, either. In May I agreed to do a promotional photo shoot for a company that approached me. They offered me less than £1,000 for a couple of days’ work.

Now, that might seem a lot to some people but when you compare it to the sorts of sums the able-bodied guys were getting then it’s nothing. I was very disappointed. Ultimately we don’t do it for money but when you see what others are getting you start asking questions. I am sure people just imagine we all get the same as the Olympians. It’s simply not true.

In the end my agent, Jamie Baulch from Definitive Sports, spoke to them and they agreed to pay me a bit more. You have to fight your corner in those situations. It was a whole day out of my training programme and those were so
valuable
. I don’t want people to think I am not grateful for the support I receive from companies who wish to work with me but it just made me think that, once again, we do get treated a bit like second-class citizens.

Managing all the extra stuff that comes your way in a Paralympic year is always crazy. But this year was like
nothing
else I had experienced. I was lucky because Jamie was an athlete, and he understands that all commitments have to come second to the training and preparation. So we had a game plan that all interviews and sponsor commitments would be finished by June, allowing me to just concentrate on getting it right on the track.

I tried to limit my racing that summer. I didn’t want to overdo it in such a crucial year and with such a big prize waiting at the end. I did a test event in the Olympic Stadium in May. Although the crowd was a bit disappointing – only 2,000 people in an arena which holds 80,000 – it was a good opportunity to try out some new gloves and see how my tyres went on the newly laid Mondo track. Winning didn’t matter and, besides, none of the big foreign names were there.

UK Athletics hadn’t invited them because they were worrying about giving our rivals an advantage. Earlier in the year the British cycling team had complained about holding a UCI World Cup as a test event in the shiny new London Velodrome. Although it was great for the British team to get a taste of what that venue would be like, it also gave all the other countries a sneak preview. That was a bit short sighted and I think UKA had learned from that.

The racing schedule Jenny drew up was supposed to keep me sharp but not overdo it. But everything nearly came unstuck when I had a bad crash at a meeting in Pratteln
in Switzerland. Crashes are part and parcel of wheelchair racing and while they can look shocking they’re often not as bad as they look. This one was.

I don’t remember too much about it but I know I was at the back of the pack and was putting on a bit of a sprint around a bend when Kurt Fearnley suddenly veered into my racing line. He caught my wheel and I went flying up in the air, hitting my head badly as I crashed back down on the track. Emily was there with Mason and she was really worried. I grazed my temple and was a bit dazed but I was basically OK. I was more worried about my chair. But I admit I was a bit shaken up by it. It did teach me one lesson, though. In London I couldn’t take the chance of trying to win from the back of the field.

I learned another valuable lesson when I moved on to another meeting in Switzerland, this time at the Swiss Paralympic Centre in Nottwil. I was racing a 1,500m and I asked Jenny what she thought of the idea of me leading a race from the front to see if I could win from there. I gave it a go.

I felt good out on my own and I was setting a really fast pace but with 250 metres to go Marcel Hug and the whole pack came past me. I must have come seventh or eighth. I knew now that I needed a bit more fitness and endurance. Wise as ever, Jenny told me after the race that she knew that already but it was good I found out for myself.

Peter Eriksson didn’t see it that way. He was going crazy. He couldn’t understand what I was doing, acting as a
pacemaker for such a good field. He felt I should have been winning races myself, not experimenting.

Jenny was really upset by this. She gave him what for.

Afterwards I went up to him and asked him why he had said what he said to Jenny. But he was in denial. He said he didn’t have a row with Jenny. I told him, if you want me to win in London you have to leave me to do it the way I want to do it. I never really listened to him. I just listened to Jenny and to myself. We have a good understanding. I am the one in the middle of the race, she can see it from a distance. Others don’t get it. When people ask her what my tactics are, she explains that she does talk about it with me but in the end leaves it up to me to work it out. I’m the one in the race, the one in the middle.

These were happy times on the track and at home. Through all those dark winter months having Mason waiting for me at home gave me a real escape from all the pressures of training. And Emily was giving out such good vibes and making me feel really positive. It’s become such an important part of my life after all those early years of instability and broken relationships. The fact that she was expecting another baby always brought things back down to earth. Racing and winning in London was important but there were other things in life.

As the clock ticked down we decided to take a little break as a family. So, around my 33rd birthday on 5 June, we all headed to Paris for four days to get away from it all. We went to a spa hotel, did a bit of shopping, went up the Eiffel Tower.

We were having such a nice time – until I got a call to tell me one of my mates had committed suicide. Lewis Pinto was only twenty-four and a promising boxer. I am not sure what went on and I never asked. The family only lived around the corner from me. Whenever I did well he would always be the first one to come and congratulate me. He was a sportsman so he understood how hard you had to work to get to that sort of level. It rocked me for a bit. He was well loved in the community and the funeral was massive. A couple of hundred of us went up the Roundshaw Airfield and lit lanterns in his memory. I am sure he would have come to watch me in London.

The Games were now just two months away. London was getting more and more excited. The Olympic Torch relay was working its way around the country and the coverage on the TV and in the newspapers was impossible to ignore. Everywhere you looked there were adverts or posters reminding you that the Games were coming. It was exactly the motivation I needed as I entered my last and most
critical
phase of training. Having spent so much of my career training in Richmond Park I know the roads like the back of my hand. For London I needed something different to try and take me to a new level and to give me the strength and endurance I needed to win three track events and, at the end of all that, a marathon.

That’s when Jenny persuaded a small group of cyclists to help me with my golden mission. Alan Ephgrave is an amputee cyclist, also known as the one-legged wonder. He has been training in Richmond Park for as long as I have, if not longer. He was a top club cyclist in the 1980s before a crash meant he had to have one of his legs amputated. That hasn’t stopped him and I can tell you from bitter
first-hand
experience that he is still pretty quick. Jenny just went up and asked him one day if he would be up for helping me. He agreed immediately. What’s more, he said he would ring a few of his old cycling mates to get them to come along too. Before long, there I was, part of an exclusive little peloton whizzing around Richmond Park, training for Paralympic gold.

They might have been in their sixties but their age hadn’t slowed them down that much. They could still shift and they helped me get the quality sessions I needed to build myself up for the Games. Alan and the cyclists just pushed me on every day. I thought I used to go fast but when you start training with other people you realise you can go much, much faster. They would sprint and I would have to catch them. Every day it felt like a race. It made me wish I had had them with me all the time.