Weirwolf (17 page)

Of course, there is a limit to how fast you can go. The top cyclists on the tours can hit about 40mph on the flat whereas I can get to just over 23mph in a wheelchair. But what it did was set me targets all the time, pushing me to new limits and giving me not only speed but much more
stamina and endurance. Mind you, I think the riders learned a lot from me. They were amazed and shocked at the way I push and can keep going. Even in the park since the Games I have had cyclists come up to me after a session and say it took them half a mile to catch me up because I was travelling so fast.

As the weeks went on I was just getting faster and faster. I was shocking myself. Just before I left to join the team I did a marathon in Richmond Park. My time was 1 hour 28 minutes. That was extremely quick. But I felt so good that I still got up next morning and did another hard session. The cyclists just looked at me and said, ‘That’s it, Dave. You are ready. You are going to win four gold medals.’

But I didn’t want to think like that. I still had to worry about Marcel or Kurt, or the Chinese. Who had they discovered?

That’s why I didn’t want to go to Portugal with the British team for their pre-Games training camp in August. I didn’t want to break my flow, to change my rhythm. Besides, I had already been to Portugal twice that year, first in April to test the new chair and do a bit of training and again in July, to really hit out the hard miles in the
blistering
heat. Some days it reached 42 degrees and I dropped a lot of weight.

Going off on my own like that had already upset the powers that be at UK Athletics. So I was determined to show them it wasn’t a holiday. Although Emily and Mason came with me, I stayed in another hotel away from them.
I just met up with them when I wasn’t training – which wasn’t always easy as I trained twice a day most days.

Come August, I felt another trip to Portugal would be pointless. I had done all my fine-tuning and my
training
was going so well. So I sent an email to UK Athletics explaining my decision. I urged them to trust in me and to understand that it was only because I was so determined to deliver for Great Britain that I didn’t want to risk anything going wrong so close to the Games. I was facing the biggest ten days of my life and I wanted to do it my way.

My fear of flying also played a big part in my decision to snub the camp. I simply didn’t want to get on another plane a week before the Games. The problems I suffered in Beijing because of that extra flight were still fresh in my mind and I just didn’t want all the stress.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s one of those things that will probably never change. I think it’s control. Even when I’m a passenger in a car I get anxious. When I was a kid I didn’t have a problem with flying. It’s just something that’s developed over time.

Every flight is different. Sometimes I will think about it days before, other times it won’t hit me until I arrive at the airport. But once I am there I hate every minute of it, the whole build-up. I will do it because I have to but so much stress goes through my body. Sometimes I can be physically frozen to the spot, paralysed by fear. Other times I can’t stop moving, jigging around nervously. I have tried
hypnotherapy
and talking to people about it. I have even thought
about going on flying courses. But in the end I don’t want to sit next to people who are nervous themselves because that might make me worse.

I can’t even blame it on having had a terrible experience on a flight. You hear of planes dropping a hundred feet or of emergency landings. I have never had anything like that. I did have a bad flight from Switzerland to Italy once. The sky was black and it didn’t look like it would ever stop
raining
. We were delayed and delayed and then, suddenly, air traffic control spotted a break in the weather and decided to go for it. This pilot must have made five or six attempts at landing before he gave up and decided to divert back to Zurich, where we had come from. I was with Jenny and although she tried to reassure me once we landed back in Zurich I had made up my mind. I booked a flight straight back to London. I called my dad and told him to collect me from the airport at this time from this flight and then said I would explain when I got home. I was so scared I just wanted to get back. I know this must sound insane and totally irrational because I had to get on another plane to get home, but that was just how I dealt with it.

Whenever I go away I can’t ever really relax. I will be sitting in my hotel or I’ll be training and all of a sudden, it’s back. That feeling of dread. That thunderclap of a
heartbeat
, a fluttering in your guts.

‘Only another two days to go until I have to get back on the plane.’

It can become a huge distraction and I don’t want
anything to affect my racing. That’s why I now drive to Switzerland for race meetings. I know it takes so much longer and is tiring but once I knew I could do it and got used to driving on the wrong side of the road, it was a no-brainer for me. These days sport is so international, it’s a fact of life that you have to travel to compete and to make money. But as an Arsenal fan I do take some
reassurance
from the fact that Dennis Bergkamp used to get the train or go by road to Champions League matches because of his fear of flying. I am not the only one but there is no question it is something that has held me back in my career and created an extra set of problems to deal with. When I know it’s a long haul and it’s a bigger plane, I do feel safer. If I am lucky I sometimes get upgraded, and that makes me feel more comfortable.

I wondered whether having kids would make me less nervous. But I am now more worried than ever about getting on a plane with my family. I have not done it yet. I’m too afraid to. When I went to Portugal with Emily and the kids before London, I made sure they went on another plane. I don’t think I could get on the plane with all of them in case it went down with all of us on it. I would rather I went and not them. They are so young; they haven’t had their lives yet. It’s a sad way to think but I also don’t want them to see me scared. I might pass my fears onto them. It’s mad – people might think of me as this tough guy, the Weirwolf from London. But here I am reduced to jelly by a plane. It’s totally irrational. Driving to races in Switzerland
is probably more dangerous than flying there. Sometimes I pass these lorries on the motorway and I see them swaying and I know any moment there could be a bad crash. But at least I’ve got control. And I am not up in the air. I know a lot of my teammates must think my fear of flying is
ridiculous
. I think it’s ridiculous. And actually, if it wasn’t for that I probably would have gone to Portugal to be part of the team. But my performance had to come first. So I told UKA I would be waiting for them when they got back to Gatwick Airport, fully decked out in my Paralympics GB kit, ready to make that long-awaited journey to the Olympic village.

By that point London had of course already been infected with Olympic fever. The Games opened on 27 July and although I was still very focused on my training and being ready for the Paralympics, the Olympics was impossible to ignore. I was totally caught up in it.

From the moment the opening ceremony started I was convinced we were going to pull it off. For years there had been loads of negative publicity, that it was going to be a disaster, that it was going to be rubbish. But after about ten minutes of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, I felt like crying. I was so happy and proud. I normally don’t pay too much attention to these ceremonies. But this one exceeded my expectations. They are normally really cheesy or
downright
tedious. All right, so a lot of people watching around
the world might have found some of it confusing but I loved the way he focused on our rich past, zoning in on parts of our history which involved ordinary people – the marches, the NHS, the industrial revolution. I always loved history but didn’t get the chance to study it enough. This ceremony was as much an education as it was a show. I was also really struck by the decision not to use a load of professional dancers. A lot of the people in it were general members of the public and I loved that.

The show was spectacular, especially the giant rings hovering above the stadium. But I couldn’t wait for the athletes’ parade. I know a lot of people switch off at this point but it’s always a special part of the ceremony for me. By this point Emily had fallen asleep in front of the TV. When she stirred about an hour or so later she said, ‘Are we near the end yet?’ I replied, ‘Afraid not … we are only at E.’ It was getting later and later. But I couldn’t go to bed and when Chris Hoy came in with the GB flag and I heard all the noise, I just thought, ‘Wow, look at this. We’ve done it.’

We hadn’t even raced yet. But I knew we would do well. It was a home Games, we had invested a lot of money, we had a lot of top coaches and I was sure we would win lots of medals and be up near the top of the table.

Once the Games were off and running I was glued to the BBC. I would go off training in Richmond Park in the morning and then come back and watch as much as I could. I am the sort of person who will get into any sport, especially if there’s a British competitor in it.

As the drama unfolded I just kept thinking it would soon be my turn. Watching Usain Bolt winning three gold medals again. David Rudisha smashing the world record in the 800m.

And then there was Super Saturday. For Team GB to win three golds that night was incredible. I always thought Jessica Ennis would do it but I couldn’t believe the
pressure
she was under. She was the poster girl of the Games. Her face was everywhere. But I could see she was in perfect shape. To deliver with the whole country expecting you to win is something I can identify with, albeit on a smaller scale. I actually think the heptathletes should get a medal for every one of their seven events they win – it is such a gruelling event. It’s like me only getting one gold at the end of the Paralympics for winning four races. I was so happy for Jess; she is just a lovely and down-to-earth person. She has not changed and I don’t think she ever will.

All night I was just screaming at the TV. Emily kept
telling
me to calm down. But how could you with Mo Farah charging down that home straight in the 10,000m? With that race I was watching the crowd more than anything. There wasn’t a single person sitting in their seats, and there was just a sea of British flags. And the noise. That sonic boom as he came round that last bend. It was phenomenal, and you could see it lifted him. I couldn’t wait to get there myself and I kept thinking, ‘I’ve got that in a couple of weeks.’ It drove me on even more in training.

In some ways I don’t know why everyone was so
surprised by the crowd. British sports fans travel
everywhere
to watch sport so it was always likely they would be even more enthusiastic in this country, at a home Games. The whole country seemed high on it, everyone smiling and talking to each other. It was great to be in London at that time. There were so many fantastic Olympic moments that it’s almost unfair to single any one of them out. Sir Chris Hoy, the boxers, Andy Murray and then, of course, Sir Bradley Wiggins. What he achieved in winning the Tour de France and then coming to London and winning the time trial was phenomenal. That really took some guts. But I love his character too: the sideburns, the rock and roll. It breaks the ‘serious’ mould you get with most people in sport. He’s exactly what Britain’s about.

It was a dizzying sixteen days and I loved being a
spectator
, watching Team GB do so well and get third place in the medal table. So many heroes and so many great
memories
. But I couldn’t be too distracted. My time was fast approaching and I had to be ready.

I
was driving across a railway crossing on my way to training in Richmond Park when I saw it for the first time. There, in giant letters, was the Channel 4 slogan which would come to define the spirit of the London 2012 Paralympic Games:

It really made me laugh. And made me excited, too. Not only because the Games were so close now, but because it was so bold, so confident and so totally unapologetic. For the first time I didn’t feel that people were going to come and watch athletes like me out of sympathy. Everyone wanted to be a part of it. There might have been a
seventeen-day
break between the Olympics and the Paralympics but it didn’t really stop. People couldn’t wait to get going again. It was just the second half of the same show.

For years I had been dreaming about my home Games.
Ever since Jacques Rogge opened that envelope in Singapore in 2005 and read out London’s name my life had been building towards this moment, ten days to define my career in sport.

I wanted to drink it all in, absorb every moment. Even the opening ceremony, which usually I would duck because I was too focused on my first race. This time I was
desperate
to be there, to march round that track in front of that crowd. Maybe even to carry the Union flag into the Olympic Stadium.

I never got the chance.

The UKA head coach, Peter Eriksson, banned all the track and field athletes from going. I was gutted – a little bit of my heart was ripped out. Peter said it was too close to competition. But I wasn’t racing for two days – and we could have been sneaked off or just gone for the athletes’ parade. Why couldn’t we just do that? Maybe if you had competition the next day, then fair enough.

Yet we had absolutely no say in it, that’s what I didn’t like. In Beijing we had the option and I was competing the next day and I was feeling rough. On that occasion it made sense for me not to do it. For the home Games, though, we should have had the choice. We could have jumped on a bus or one of the official cars and it would have taken two minutes.

I’m sure I would have had a good shot at carrying the flag as it was voted on by all the members of Paralympics GB. The wheelchair rugby team put my name down even
though I wasn’t going. In the end, the tennis player Peter Norfolk got the honour and I was delighted for him. He is such a nice bloke, a great athlete, and he really deserved it. And besides I shouldn’t moan too much. I got my little bit of glory during the closing ceremony when I brought the GB flag into the stadium.

Although I watched the ceremony on TV with a few of the other lads from the athletics team, I am slightly
embarrassed
to say I can’t remember too much about it now. Stephen Hawking’s appearance was inspiring and Seb Coe’s speech was very powerful. But once I knew I wasn’t going I switched off a bit and just focused on the task at hand. The ceremony was a distraction. I had a mission: something I had never done before in any major championships, never mind a home Paralympics – to deliver four gold medals in just ten days.

Usually I am quite relaxed about heats. I might get a few butterflies in big championships but I always expect to qualify. London was also much more straightforward because I only had to go through two rounds, not three. It would have been much harder to consider going for four golds if there had been more qualifying rounds to come through.

Despite that I was still feeling nervous as hell before that first heat, waiting on the concourse under the stadium for our race to be called. Ours was the third race on and I knew
some of my big rivals, Marcel, Kurt and Prawat, were in the first two heats and had done well. The one who really worried me was Julien Casoli. He seemed to be flying. As far as my race was concerned, apart from a Chinese racer called Liu Chengming and a South Korean, Hong Suk-Man, it was pretty straightforward – on paper.

Once I was on the track I was fine. The crowd was
amazing
, it was exactly what I had hoped for. I looked around, trying to spot an empty seat. I couldn’t see one anywhere in the stadium. It was just a mass of faces and bodies. The roar almost split my eardrums. It was like a plane taking off. I felt so good, so strong. I was never in any trouble and booked my place in the final on Sunday night with a winning time of 11:28.88. I was on my way.

I felt very good when I got up on the Saturday morning. It was quite a late heat so I hadn’t really eaten properly the night before, just loads of bananas, as I knew I would have to load up on rest days. I didn’t read any of the papers. I wanted to wait for that. I called Emily and my mum and dad on the phone and had a bit of a chat. The heat was the only race that Emily came up for. I didn’t want her coming all the way over to Stratford in her condition. She was really starting to show by now and with Mason as well it was all very tiring. The thing was, I never even got a chance to see her on the night of the race. I had failed to spot her in the crowd when I came out onto the track and then
afterwards I was whisked straight back to the village. It was weird to think she had been in the stadium with all those people and then I was having to talk to her on the phone the next day. She helped keep me calm because already my mind was starting to turn to the final on the Sunday night. My first shot at gold.

From the moment I opened my eyes at 8 a.m. I was nervous. I had major butterflies. This was it. I only had about twelve hours before my first final at London 2012. I was absolutely buzzing, bouncing off the walls in the afternoon. I just didn’t want it to go wrong.

I spoke to Jenny. She tried to make me chill out. She told me I was in the best shape she had ever seen. But I was still worrying about Kurt, Marcel, Prawat and the Frenchman Julien Casoli. What sort of shape would they be in? Had I done enough?

It was a very late race. I had a light lunch then I tried to have an early dinner but it didn’t happen. I was too anxious to eat. As race time approached I tried not to show what I was feeling inside. It didn’t help that everything was running about ten minutes late – it meant I had more time to fret. When we finally got on the track, that was the first time I felt really emotional. I was really struggling to hold it together. By that point it was almost 10.30 p.m. As I did my warm-up laps on the back straight I spotted my mates, Tarick, Ricky and Leon. But I had to look away because I
felt they were going to cry. I have never felt that before. I got to the start line and thought, I have to do this for all the people who have come, all those people who have stayed late into the evening to support me.

The race was a bit of a blur. I just tried to stay in a good position in second or third place. I didn’t take the front once. When the field started to bunch up I made sure I was in lane two so I could get out.

There were a couple of times when Marcel tried to make a bit of a break and he stretched the field a bit. On lap seven he came around me, trying to send me a message. I just thought, ‘What are you doing? I am just going to sit on your wheel and let you take me home.’

This was the fastest man over 5,000m in the world. He totally played into my hands. I sat there for the whole race, just waiting to pounce. I hit the front with about 150 metres to go. I knew I had the sprint finish to beat him. What I didn’t know was who was behind me. Who might come and pip me on the line. But there was no one. And as Marcel ran out of steam, I cruised through to win easily in a time of 11:07.65.

As I crossed the line I shouted so much my throat was sore.

It was relief. Sheer relief. Instantly the pressure had disappeared. I had done it – a gold in my home Games. Now I could relax in all the other races and do my job properly. The other racers were worried then. I beat them by a chair’s length. That was massive.

Jenny described the race afterwards as perfect. She told
me I had got it right on the biggest night of my life. And she told me that I could now just go and enjoy the rest of the Games.

Unfortunately, my mum and dad weren’t in the stadium to see me win that night. UK Athletics messed up all the tickets. I was supposed to get three tickets a day for each of my finals and five for my heats. Because of that, none of my family entered the public ballot. Then, closer to the Games, we were told UKA couldn’t get the ticket allocation. They still sorted some tickets out for us but I was angry at not getting the amount we had been promised. It’s normal for families of Olympic athletes to miss out on tickets to see their relatives perform. Demand will always be greater than supply. But it was a new problem for Paralympians. Because it was in London everyone wanted to go, so I had already had to disappoint loads of people. To then have to
disappoint
the people closest to me, the ones who had supported me along the way, really pissed me off.

Still, at least I had my mates in the crowd that night and as I did my lap of honour they came down to the front row to congratulate me. The noise as I went round was amazing. It was just the same as Mo Farah’s races. The wave just followed you around. It was like nothing I had ever
experienced
before. Seb Coe said afterwards that my win in the 5,000m was one of the highlights of the whole of London 2012. I felt so honoured when he said that: coming from a legend of the track like him, it really meant so much.

Because it was the last race of the night, I was stuck in
doping until the early hours of Monday morning. I was so dehydrated that it took me until 2 a.m. to produce a sample. But even though I had to be up again for the 1,500m heats, I didn’t care. I knew adrenalin would get me through. By the time I emerged from a deserted stadium, it was too late to get a bus. I had to get a car to take me back to the village. It was about 3 a.m. by the time I walked into the food hall to grab anything I could. I was starving. I hadn’t eaten for almost twelve hours. It wasn’t exactly textbook diet stuff, a couple of bits of pizza. What a way to celebrate winning gold at your home Games!

When I got back to my room I couldn’t sleep. I had so many text messages. I tried to reply to as many as possible and I obviously rang Jenny and Emily. I watched my Twitter feed go crazy. I could sense I had been at the centre of something extraordinary but when you are racing you don’t realise the impact. I knew how I felt, though. My adrenalin was flowing, my heart was pumping and I had the biggest smile on my face.

I put on some film or other, I can’t remember what it was, and I finally crashed out at about 4 a.m.

I didn’t get much sleep that night. With my heat off at 10 a.m. I had to be up at 7 a.m. So it wasn’t exactly the best preparation. I had that buzz you get when you haven’t had enough sleep. It felt good but I knew I would have to crash out at some point.

In that state there was only one thing for it. I went to the flat above me and had a coffee with Chantal Petitclerc, the UKA team mentor. By the time I got to the warm-up I felt like a new man again.

It was only when I started to see some of the media coverage and talk to people down at the warm-up track that I realised how big my win had been. I also didn’t have a clue that the Duchess of Cambridge had been in the crowd cheering me on. When I looked back at the TV coverage I saw how Seb Coe, next to her in the VIP section, had pointed me out and suggested she keep an eye on me during the race. Apparently she hadn’t seen a gold medal all day and she has since spoken to me about how I made her night because I delivered the gold medal she had been
hunting
for. And in the very last race of the night. That really made me very proud.

I also didn’t realise until the next morning that, big though my performance was, it had been totally
overshadowed
by Oscar Pistorius’s defeat by the young Brazilian Alan Oliveira in the T43/44 200m. It was the upset of the Games so far: Pistorius, the biggest name of the Games, beaten by this kid in the last 20 metres of the race. That morning people kept coming up to me saying, ‘So I see Oscar’s stolen your limelight again.’

I honestly didn’t know too much about it. I had been so focused, thinking about my final, that I had missed the row that was brewing a few yards away from me. After Oscar lost he came into the mixed zone, where journalists
can grab the athletes for interview, and told the TV cameras that the International Paralympic Committee should check the length of Oliveira’s prosthetic legs. He told reporters, ‘I’m not taking away from Alan’s performance, he’s a great athlete, but these guys are a lot taller and you can’t compete with the stride length. You saw how far he came back. We aren’t racing a fair race.’

Once again the Paralympics was becoming the stage for the Oscar Pistorius story. During the Olympics, whenever British athletes won they got on the front and back pages. I thought I was going to get the same treatment that
morning
. But Oscar blew all that.

I don’t know Oscar well at all. Our paths have crossed occasionally and we would always say hello to each other, but not much more beyond that. I’ve always thought he seems a nice bloke and obviously an amazingly gifted athlete.

What’s gone on since the Games is as astonishing to me as it is the rest of the world. But I just don’t know him well enough to judge. When the story broke that he had shot his girlfriend the media kept calling me up and asking me to comment. But what could I say? I didn’t have a clue what had gone on and didn’t know him.

But when it comes to his quest – successfully fulfilled to such acclaim in London – to become the first male Paralympian to run in the Olympics, well, I do have an opinion. On one level I can understand where he’s coming from – he wants to compete and be the best he can be. He
thinks he can run against able-bodied athletes. If I was in his situation I would probably want to do the same thing.