Weirwolf (9 page)

Of course, all this can lead to some pretty nasty crashes.
Perhaps the most infamous came in the women’s 5,000m in my classification – the T54 – during the Beijing 2008 Games. You can see the video on YouTube. It was really messy. With two laps to go everyone was really tightly bunched when, all of a sudden, the two Swiss athletes leading the pack clashed wheels. They hit the deck, causing nearly everyone just behind them to crash too. It was almost a total wipe-out. Officials then ran onto the track, impeding those athletes who did manage to avoid the crash. One of the athletes broke her collarbone and, although they awarded the medals, the race had to be rerun following an appeal.

It just shows how wheelchair racing is not for the
faint-hearted
. But I am not frightened of the dangers and what might happen on the track. I don’t even think about it. It’s all part of the sport.

After winning the 100m I went from strength to strength. The only event I didn’t win was the 200m, where I got a silver. I left Assen that September with four gold medals and that one silver. It was my big breakthrough. That season I was unbeatable.

Looking back on that period of my career, I find it quite difficult to believe what I achieved. Because, away from the track, my life was a mess. I have no idea how I broke those records and won those gold medals. Mentally, I just wasn’t
there. I couldn’t even train properly. Sometimes I would spend the first hour in Richmond Park just crying.

By the early part of 2006 my relationship with Kaylie had broken down. It had become impossible for us to live with each other. Maybe it was because her nan died around that time. Or maybe it was because we got together when she was too young. But whatever the reason, it became a living hell for me.

I was always grateful for what she had done for me seven years before. Without her I might not even be here to write this story. But we changed so much that there was no option but to end it and to go our separate ways.

I had experienced failing relationships in the past and I knew how painful they could be. But this was different. This time there was a child caught up in it all. For Ronie, who was almost three when it all came to a head, it was a terrible time. Kaylie and I were rowing all the time and I felt she was going out too much. I never knew where she was. That year I was on the road more than ever before. I was racing as much as I could and would spend long periods away. I was trying to succeed in the career she had encouraged me to go into and to make some money for the family. I just thought if I could break through and do well in the future maybe I would be able to look after everyone. And yet every time I left the country I was worrying about what might be going on back home.

Perhaps she felt she needed to get something out of her system. Maybe she got tied down with me too young and
wasn’t really ready to handle all my problems. All I do know is that that year was such a struggle for me at home. I just didn’t trust her.

At the time I was devastated. I felt it was me. I felt because I was devoting so much time to my career, it must be my fault. I was insecure because I was in a wheelchair. But in fairness to Kaylie my disability had never been an issue. She said it just didn’t bother her that I was in a wheelchair. It’s been like that with a lot of the girls I have had relationships with over the years. They just don’t see me in that way. They look past the chair. It never created any tension that we couldn’t always do the same things as other couples. There was never any sense of resentment. I think we just fell in love too young and that she wanted a different life. I remember ringing her all the time when I was in Holland for the World Championships and most of the time she wasn’t even in. That just drove me mad. It felt like my life was just falling apart.

I felt very alone. I couldn’t rely on my friends as they didn’t warm to Kaylie. And so it was Jenny I turned to. She was the only person I could really talk to about it. She told me her door was always open. She even offered to take care of Ronie if I needed her to.

In the back of my mind I kept thinking about those dark days. I didn’t want to go back there. I knew I was stronger now. I was enjoying the success of racing and I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise that ever again – even if it did mean breaking up with Kaylie. So I threw myself into my
sport, training harder and harder. Sometimes I would be up all night but I would go and train the next day as hard as I could. At first the breakdown had upset my training. But I had done my crying.

As for women, well, I didn’t like them much after that. I lost total respect for them. Not my mum or Jenny – they were strong women and I had been surrounded by strong women my whole life. But this really shook my confidence.

The end came shortly after I returned from Holland. Jenny gave me ten days off, so I was at home a lot. For the first time I could see with my own eyes what had really been happening. One night Kaylie told me she was going out to some bar or club. She told me not to expect her to be back until the small hours. When she eventually came back in the middle of the night, we had a massive argument. Ronie was crying her heart out. Kaylie just got up and left.

Unable to call my mum, the first person I rang was my dad. He was in Ireland so wasn’t really in a position to do much about it. But I just needed to talk to someone. I was so low. My dad told me the first thing I should do was to get my mum round and talk to her. So I lay in bed for a few hours before I plucked up the courage to ring her. It was the first time we had spoken in months and that was a very long time for us as we had always been so close.

I could accept that Kaylie might not want to be with me. But the thing that really killed me was the thought of
someone
else bringing up Ronie. Another man playing her dad. So I tried to make it work, tried to argue that we should
stay together. I wanted to protect Ronie. She was so little, way too young to understand what was happening to her mum and dad.

But Kaylie wanted to move on. So, in the autumn of 2006, we split for good.

The first four or five months were really tough. Kaylie stayed at our place and I went back to my mum’s with Alfie, my Staffordshire bull terrier. I have always been a dog lover and have three of them now. Alfie had to come with me, though my mum needed some convincing, not about me but about Alfie. Ironically, when things settled down and I moved out again, Alfie stayed with her.

At the time it was nice to move back; I couldn’t stay in our house. Even when Kaylie moved back to her mum’s house, I couldn’t go back there for months. It just had so many bad memories. I only moved back after my mate Leon said he would come and stay with me for two or three nights a week, to make sure I was OK. I needed
someone
with me all the time at that stage because that house felt quite lonely. Even Alfie wouldn’t come back with me. Even now I can still feel the bad times in that place. It’s especially bad for Emily, who has to share a house with my past. We are desperate to move on and find a place we can really call our own. A place not haunted by that fractured relationship.

As I threw myself into my racing and training, my friends tried to tell me not to worry: ‘You’ll get over it,’ they kept saying.

I didn’t believe them. And then one day, around Christmas time, it just happened. Someone mentioned her name and it suddenly didn’t bother me. That’s when I knew I had moved on. It made me smile inside. In the past I would have been upset about it and cut up. It was quicker than I expected but I was ready to start again.

Even now, Kaylie and I still do not have a good
relationship
. For Ronie I think the whole set-up, with me in one place with another partner and her mum in another place living with someone else, has robbed her of a big part of her childhood. I see Ronie two or three times a week and she comes and stays with me, mostly during the week.

The whole situation with Kaylie hadn’t been made any easier by the fact that my parents also broke up that year. It was very sad but it didn’t have too much of an impact on me. Maybe I was too preoccupied with my own break-up. Maybe I was too old to be affected by it. By this stage I was big enough and ugly enough to know that if my mum and dad weren’t getting on then they should move on. They were still friends but they had just grown apart. They wanted to have different lives.

My dad went back to Northern Ireland but there were no arguments and it wasn’t a horrible
environment
. It was peaceful. My brothers were a bit gutted as he had brought them up as if they were his own sons. He had also been my mum’s rock. They tried to tell her not to let him go. But no one could make them stay together. We were all old enough to deal with it, all over twenty. It
was such a shame, though. They had been together for over thirty years.

At that stage my dad wasn’t really part of my racing career. Out of habit he would always ring to check up on me and ask if I had been training. It was a habit.

‘Yes, Dad, I am training,’ I would tell him. It was as if I was still ten years old. But I love him for that.

As 2007 dawned I was ready to make a fresh start. Just after the New Year I headed to Australia for some
warm-weather
training. I had a phone but I didn’t use it. I wanted to just concentrate on my training and getting fit for the new season. It was going to be a big year. The 2008 Beijing Games were just around the corner and I knew I had to be on top of my game one year out to ensure I got all the qualifying times under my belt.

I also had an appointment with a certain world record. Having set the new standard in the 200m and 400m the previous year, I now wanted that 1,500m mark. That was the one I really wanted. Even though I had trained for it from the start of the year, all through the winter months and into the spring, I always thought it was an impossible target. It had been broken at a Diamond League
meeting
in Zurich in early 2000. A kilo of gold was up for grabs then, so some of the top guys got together to break the record and then split the money. That would have
been a decent purse for Paralympic athletes so it was a big incentive.

When my chance came to break it there was no purse of gold involved, or field of big guns with a pacemaker, all put together to beat the clock. And of all the places to break this treasured record it turned out to be in Atlanta, the city which had left me feeling so disenchanted with the sport all those years ago. I had already raced in one meeting up on the east coast of the States, in Long Island. Then I headed south for my date with destiny. It was late June and when I got off the plane in Atlanta it was absolutely red-hot. It was a tiny little venue – it’s not even there now – and it was a world away from the Olympic Stadium used for the 1996 Games. But it had a very fast track.

Because of the heat we had to wait until late in the
evening
to race. About ten minutes before the start, I could sense the conditions would be perfect. No wind, a bit of light rain, but really steamy and warm. Everything felt just right. So I decided there and then: I was going to go for the world record.

I told Josh George, an American athlete, to stay behind me because I was going for a good time. I went from the gun and I did lap after lap from the front of the field. In the middle stage I slowed up a bit. I started to panic. I thought I had blown my chance. So, on the final lap I really went for it. As I crossed the line I could hear the American commentator going absolutely crazy. It was a total blur but when I looked at the clock I realised what I had done.

2 minutes 55.25 seconds – a new world record.

I was so thrilled at what I had done. It was the record I had always wanted. And I had done it without it all being set up for me. That was important to me. I wanted to prove you could break records on your own. It was probably one of my best-ever races – if not
the
best. To do that on your own and drive your way through and set a world record – it was an unbelievable feeling.

There was no crowd there really. It was a small
meeting
for disabled athletes and part of the wheelchair racing world series. I used to travel the world to get points and for the winner at the end of the season there was a bit of prize money. But it was only about $3,000 – hardly life changing. By the time you had bought flights to get to all these meetings and paid for your hotels and food you were well out of pocket. But I didn’t worry about that then. I was just so into my racing. It was great to race around the world, and to break that record made me so proud. I couldn’t wait to tell people.