Weirwolf (20 page)

I had a shot of beetroot juice just by my knees and although the plan was to have it at 16 miles to give me a late lift, I had to take it there and then. That was my last chance to get some energy in my body so I took it. I prayed it would work.

About 6 or 7 miles in, I felt like I was getting back to normal. But for a while it was really touch and go. I figured that as long as I kept it together, raced my normal race, then I would be in with a shout.

Up front Kurt was trying to make a break for it. But, unusually, I didn’t panic. Normally I chase them down
because I worry they might get too far ahead. This time I stayed calm. I just had this feeling I would be able to chase Kurt or anyone else down.

The race was still young but already I was going through a rollercoaster of emotions. At one point I was in a mess and almost pulling out, the next I was just relaxing and letting people get away from me.

As the race entered its final stages I noticed Marcel and Kurt were talking a lot. I wondered whether they were trying to come up with a plan to beat me by teaming up. I couldn’t be sure that was what was going on but it made me even more determined to win. It put some real fire in my belly.

As we raced past Tower Bridge for the last time, it was time to make my move. At this point – about 23 miles in – the course switches back on itself and heads back west, away from Docklands. The course also climbs slightly. This was the moment to push the field as hard as I could. I wanted to see if I could get about half a mile ahead. This late in the race I figured a real burst of speed could hurt the likes of Marcel and Kurt.

Then, after a while, I sat up and let them catch me, but I knew it had worked.

Kurt and Marcel were tiring and I was feeling stronger and stronger. The only question that remained now was whether I had the energy reserves to produce a big sprint finish.

As I approached that final bend by the palace I could
hear my friends and family screaming me on. I had always planned to be in front going into that bend, and I knew I had a higher top-end speed than the others. I also felt comfortable because it was very similar to the sprints I had been doing in Richmond Park. So I just imagined I was back there.

I hit that bend and went for it. Kurt and Marcel gave chase but I was too fast; I opened a lead of 300 metres as I approached the finishing line. And the remarkable thing is that my speed was going up and up. I was hitting 24mph. I couldn’t believe the speed I was doing. I just gritted my teeth. I couldn’t afford to ease up.

When I cross the line I usually celebrate and hold my arms in the air, but I didn’t do that during the Paralympics. Why? Well, there was no tape to break through, so I couldn’t be sure where the finishing line was. There was quite a long period where I didn’t know where the line was. I was disorientated, so I pushed for a good 10–20 metres extra, playing it safe. I was actually worried I hadn’t finished and that I might have to do another lap. It was only when the lead car pulled over that I knew we had finished.

I asked the organisers afterwards, where was the tape? They told me they couldn’t have any for the wheelchair races because of health and safety regulations. Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous? I have broken the tape in races hundreds of times and I am still here to tell the tale.

Afterwards Marcel and Kurt were great sportsmen and came up to me and told me I had been the greatest. Simply unbeatable. That was nice because you do everything to beat people and win. But I believe you can behave like gentlemen afterwards. I told Marcel, ‘Don’t worry – your time will come.’ If he gets it right in the next Games he will be unbeatable.

After they left me, I was sat there just talking to myself like a madman. I didn’t know whether to warm down or what. I was in another world. That’s when I started to cry a little bit. All week I had wanted to cry but I had just about held it together. Then I went back to the organisers’ tent afterwards and I saw the disability coordinator of the London Marathon, Michelle Weltman. She put her arms around me and I collapsed in tears. I kept muttering, ‘I can’t believe it. I’ve done it.’

I didn’t even get out of my chair. I couldn’t. I was just sat there crying. Exhausted. Elated.

Then Tanni came in and put her arms around me. She looked shell shocked. I told her about how the beetroot juice had kept me going during the early stages when I thought I might have to pull over and quit. Unfortunately, Boris Johnson, who was there to present the medals, heard all this and wandered over. He asked me to repeat what I had told Tanni about the beetroot juice. He couldn’t believe his ears. He kept saying, ‘Are you serious? Beetroot juice did that for you?’

I explained that for energy it was much better than
coffee, and healthier. But I told him on the basis that he would keep it a secret. Fat chance. He used it as one of his little jokes in his speech during the Heroes Parade around London the next day. All I can say to the Mayor of London is: ‘Thanks a lot, Boris!’

I eventually pulled myself together, got changed and got my phone out to try and track down Emily and the rest of my family. But first I had to get my fourth and final gold. The most precious of the lot.

I couldn’t wait to get on that podium by Buckingham Palace. It was such a great backdrop. Then, after the ceremony finished, all the photographers were asking me to pose for pictures and I had to ask them to wait a minute while I went to see my family. I still hadn’t seen them.

When I found them all – Emily, Mason, my mum and dad and friends – I gave everyone a massive hug and then Mason jumped on my lap. The photographers weren’t going to miss that. So they asked me to wheel out to the middle of the road with him on my knees to have our photo taken. I was a bit worried he might cry because he seemed to be under the weather and in fact after that he was ill for a few days. But he sat very still and calm for that photograph. The result is a picture that I will always treasure: Mason sat there in his Great Britain shorts, me holding a Union flag above our heads, the shiny gold medal around both our necks. I have had it put on a giant canvas in my front room and I have another, close-up, version on my stairs.

After hanging around in doping for ages the officials let
me take my gold medal back to the village and have my test there. It had been such a hot day and I was so dehydrated that I just couldn’t produce. And I was running out of time.

That evening I had to go straight over to GB House in Westfield to get ready for the closing ceremony. It had just been announced that Sarah Storey and I would be carrying the flag into the stadium. That was such an honour and, although it had only been a couple of days, I couldn’t wait to get back into that stadium one last time.

When I walked into the room it was packed with about 300 people from Paralympics GB and everyone gave me a massive cheer. That’s when I had my first beer in about fifteen months. As you might imagine, it tasted very, very sweet. Then I had to go back to where we were staying in the village for a team meeting. I was still in my racing gear, while the rest of the team were kitted out for the closing ceremony. After a few minutes I had to put my hand up and ask if I could go and have a shower and be on my own for five minutes.

Once I was alone I tried to take in everything that had just happened to me.

The only way I can describe it is that it felt like a story I was playing a part in. Even now I feel like someone is going to wake me up and tell me it’s time to race.

But it did happen. I did win those four gold medals. I did carry the Union flag into the stadium for the closing ceremony. And what made it really magical for me was the fact that I had won the very last gold medal of the London
Olympic and Paralympic party. That was something I had really wanted to do from the word go. In the future, when the question is asked, ‘Who did that?’, I will be able to say it was me. I had become part of British sporting history.

F
or so many years people were frightened to ask me why I was in a wheelchair. They always assumed I had been in an accident. Those who did pluck up the courage were often surprised to find out I had been born this way.

It’s early days but there is no question that the Paralympics has helped take away some of those fears people had. It’s removed the element of the unknown. The Games held disability up to the light and showed the extraordinary things disabled people can do. London told the world what I had always known – that we are
world-class
athletes in our own right.

Without a word of a lie, some people used to think that the wheelchair racers in the London Marathon had just got up that morning and decided to come along and race. It was so patronising. They didn’t think we had trained all our lives to get to that start line. They assumed anyone in a wheelchair could get into a racing chair and become the next Tanni Grey-Thompson. That’s like saying anyone can pull on a pair of running shoes and go out and beat Mo Farah. You have to have talent and you have to work extremely hard in training, day in, day out. A lot of those perceptions were changing. The coverage of our races in the London Marathon had started that process. What the Paralympics did was to put a rocket booster under all that.

I knew the Games had made a big breakthrough on the first night I raced, when I saw the Olympic Stadium sold out. And when it went on day after day and night after night with full house after full house, I just thought, ‘Wow. What we have achieved here is incredible.’

All right, so I am sure that some of the people who came just wanted to come to the Olympic Park because they might not have been able to get tickets for the Olympics. And the prices were obviously a bit cheaper than the Olympics. But the organisers weren’t giving them away. People still had to part with their hard-earned money to come and support us and I really appreciated that. Things are tough in the economy for people at the moment and I never took what they did lightly. And anyway, once they were there, the support they gave us was on a level I had
never seen or heard before. For the first time in my life Paralympians were being treated as equal to able-bodied athletes. We weren’t being watched out of pity or sympathy. We were being watched because we were the best at what we do. I never thought I would see that.

The day after I won my fourth gold medal I had to be up early again to get across the city to Guildhall and the start of the Heroes Parade. I know open-top bus parades with winning teams are pretty commonplace these days, but this one felt very different. More than 800 members of Team GB and Paralympics GB were involved. We were to be carried around on twenty-one floats in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people. The route started in the City and wound its way along to Fleet Street and the Strand, then into Trafalgar Square before ending up on the Mall. As we waited to get on board the giant trucks I was doing interview after interview with people asking me how I felt. It was such a whirlwind. Great Olympians like Sir Ben Ainslie and Sir Chris Hoy were coming up to me and congratulating me on what I had achieved. That had never happened before. For the first time we were all one big group, one team.

Equals.

I was pretty late getting onto the back of my float because I was constantly being stopped by people asking for autographs. That was another new one for me. At one stage I had about thirty people queuing up and people
passing
things up for me to sign. I was on the same float as
Jessica Ennis. That was a real buzz. That’s when she told me that I was her mum’s second favourite athlete in the whole Games. When we finally set off and saw the scale of the crowds, it just blew me away. People hanging out of windows, standing on the top of bus shelters, howling like werewolves (a few even had the masks). It went on for about two and a half hours – it was so slow because there were so many people and so many trucks. I just thought, ‘Look at what we have done to this country. This proves how powerful sport can be.’

Throughout the entire Games I hadn’t heard one negative comment from a foreign athlete. Usually you hear someone moaning about something. I have done it myself when I have gone to other Games. But in London I didn’t hear a single bad word. That made me so proud of my country.

But for the first time I was also really proud of the Paralympic movement and the way Seb Coe and the
organising
committee always made us feel part of the entire show. We weren’t an afterthought. We were a main event in our own right. We had put ourselves on the world map as great sportspeople.

I think C4’s coverage helped us turn that corner. The BBC had always done a great job for the Paralympics but showing our Games on a different channel made a massive difference. It was all C4 had to focus on whereas the BBC had to cover the Olympics. No matter what they said it might have left us feeling like the bridesmaid. That couldn’t
happen with C4. They were free to concentrate solely on us and they did a fantastic job in promoting and projecting our sports.

I loved the attitude. Their use of Public Enemy’s ‘Harder Than You Think’ as their theme music was a stroke of genius. It totally summed it up. And the film that went with it was brilliant. It really challenged people’s perceptions from the start. The film highlighted the everyday nature of being disabled – it can happen to anyone. A car crash, a misfortune of birth. It was very powerful. It was like I had always thought – that people shouldn’t be afraid to ask difficult questions. This was the truth, why hide it? This is what it is.

It was the same with their use of humour. I loved
The Last Leg
, hosted by Adam Hills, although I have to admit I didn’t watch it much until after the Games. The only time I actually watched it during the Paralympics was the night before the marathon because the hotel we were staying in had TVs in the bedroom. I know Adam and the team got a lot of bad comments at the beginning but slowly people warmed up to it and realised disabled people do take the piss out of each other. We are like everyone else. It’s what we do. I also liked the fact that some of the reporters out at the events were disabled. Sometimes when you watch some shows you see disabled reporters and it feels like they are only there because of their condition. It wasn’t like that in the Paralympics.

C4 also understood that the Paralympic athletes needed
to be introduced over a longer period of time than the Olympians. Jess Ennis, Bradley Wiggins and so on – they were household names already. But we needed publicity. We needed commercials and programmes to explain the classifications and the different sports. No one had really heard of blind football, goalball and boccia but C4 put them in the spotlight. They used an ex-wheelchair athlete to really explain to the audience how the racing chair worked and how athletes used different styles and techniques for various different distances and disciplines. Without that the Paralympics could have been bewildering. There are so many classifications and sports. So C4 introduced LEXI, a really simple system which explained each event and
classification
to people. They used illustrations which showed exactly which areas of the body were impaired and how severely. For example, my classification, the T54, is for athletes with moderate or severe impairment of the lower limbs. So it covers a wide range – from people like me who can’t move their legs to those who have lost one or both legs. C4 used colour coding which was really clear and they did a great job of making the Paralympics more accessible. After all, it’s not like running, where you can put on a pair of running shoes and off you go.

Inevitably, as time has gone on, I have started to question whether the Paralympics has made the difference everyone said it did. The truth is it’s probably too early to judge.

Some experts argue that the Paralympics might have had a negative impact on people with disability in Britain. A lot
of disabled people are facing cuts to welfare benefits and being told to stop scrounging and find a job. So the image of all these super-fit, gold-medal-winning athletes maybe undermined those people who genuinely need support. Maybe the critics have a point. Not everyone can be Jonnie Peacock and if people are on benefits they are on benefits for a reason.

But I can also see the other point of view. When I was younger I needed benefits. It was harder to get a job back then. People never looked beyond the wheelchair. Now, with the Equality Act, there’s a big difference. The disabled person stands a chance in the workplace. If people can’t work then they need to explain it.

On a more personal level I have to admit I have felt a bit let down by the way things have gone since the Paralympic flame went out. I don’t want anyone to think I am hard done by. Let’s be clear – London 2012 was first and
foremost
about winning. It wasn’t about getting rich. And in the year since the Games I have done well from sponsorship deals with companies like BMW and GlaxoSmithKline.

BMW have been a great supporter. Not only have they provided me with a car, they have adapted it so I can drive it. It’s actually much simpler than you think. It’s an
automatic
car with a special lever installed which connects to the accelerator and the brake. If I want to accelerate I push in one direction. If I want to brake, then I pull it towards me. Simple as that. It’s a great piece of technology which has transformed my life – especially with wheelchair racing.
You have to get your day chair and your racing chair around and there is so much other kit to carry. I currently have an X5 but I will soon be getting an X6. We need a bit of extra room with all the children now too.

I can also count on the support of the billionaire Topshop owner, Sir Philip Green. He has been helping me since 2009 through personal donations. It must be one of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me. It all started about five or six years ago. I was training in Richmond Park when a bloke walking his dog came up to me. He was called Randall and he explained that he used to work on the Stock Exchange but had since retired. He said he had a wealthy friend who might be interested in helping me. I gave him my number and never expected to hear another word. But sure enough Randall called back a couple of weeks later and told me about his connection to Sir Philip. He told me he was going to have a word with him.

Again, I didn’t expect anything to come of it but a few weeks later Randall said Sir Philip and his wife had agreed to help me. They didn’t want any publicity from it. They just wanted to help. And so, a few years later, Sir Philip started giving me an annual donation to help with my training. And to think I hadn’t even met him at that point. After the Games I was inundated with requests from journalists. Because the Games had been so busy I hadn’t had much of a chance to really open up and tell my side of the story. It had all been quick clips and press
conferences
. I wanted to do something once it had all died down
but didn’t know where to do it. So Sir Philip kindly agreed to step in and lend me one of his offices to hold a big media day.

The money from Sir Philip and my other deals has made me more comfortable than ever before. I no longer need to rely on National Lottery funding, and for a Paralympian that is quite a breakthrough. It’s changed my life.

But people shouldn’t imagine that I am now some
high-rolling
millionaire. People see me on the TV at this or that event and think I am now minted. But I still rent the same two-bedroom house from Sutton Council that I have lived in for more than a decade. In fact, as I write this, I am involved in a row with them about trying to swap my place for a bigger house with an extra bedroom. Once, a reporter from the
Daily Mail
phoned up to arrange an interview with Emily and when she told them roughly where we lived the journalist immediately assumed we lived in one of the big houses up in Purley. They were shocked when she told them to meet her at the Phoenix Leisure Centre on the Roundshaw Estate. My ambition is to eventually buy whichever council house we end up with so I can at least have a bit of an investment for my family. Something to build on.

In common with quite a few Olympians and Paralympians, my success in London didn’t lead to a new kit sponsor. No Nike or Adidas came knocking on my door – despite winning four gold medals. You have to wonder what you have to do. My agent, Jamie Baulch, has been
working his heart out to try and get me a kit deal and there are people out there saying they will give me free kit. But I am worth more than that. Maybe it’s the wheelchair – because other Paralympians like Jonnie Peacock have managed to get deals. Maybe, at thirty-four, I’m simply too old.

The other thing that hasn’t changed is the appearance and prize money from racing. When it comes to that, we are still a long way from being equal with the able-bodied athletes. I got double what I was paid for the marathon in 2012. But Mo Farah got at least ten times the amount I received for running half the race. I am not criticising the London Marathon guys. They have always been so
supportive
. I am simply pointing out the massive gap which exists.

The Anniversary Games in London is another good example. I was offered $7,000 to compete. Again, it’s nice money and I wouldn’t miss the chance to go back to that stadium for the world. But that fee was the same regardless of who you were or how many Paralympic gold medals you had won. I bet Jessica Ennis wasn’t getting that amount.

I guess you have to accept it will never change. I thought what we did in the Games might have made a difference when it came to money. But it hasn’t. I know some people might think I sound bitter. I’m not. I am doing very nicely and I can now look after my family in a way I couldn’t have possibly imagined when I started competing all those years ago. I am simply saying that we shouldn’t just
swallow
it when people say it changed everything. Yes, it shifted
people’s perceptions about the disabled. But we are a long way from being sporting equals.