Gold (13 page)

The email continued with offers of support and an assurance of a forceful appeal against the IOC’s rule change—complete with a warning against investing too much hope in that appeal.

“Oh God,” he said quietly, and he read the email again.

He sighed and let his head sink slowly down to the desk.

He’d met the girls on the same day, in 1999, when he was running the Elite Prospects Programme. He’d been running two Prospects classes a year back then, at Manchester Velodrome, and at each event he’d had exactly three days to screen a dozen kids for talent. It wasn’t much time. He’d developed a trick over the years: on the first day he sat behind the front desk of the velodrome and pretended to be the receptionist. That way he could talk to the new kids as they arrived and check out their attitude when they weren’t on their best behavior. You got a better insight when you saw them that way.

Zoe arrived first on day one, nineteen years old, tall and fierce in a black puffa jacket, with black eyeliner and a shaved head. She didn’t smile, but hey. Tom respected a kid who showed up early. If you arrived first, you claimed the space. On the track, the others would be waiting for your move in the sprint. They’d be looking for that little twitch in your leg muscles that showed you were starting to put down the power. And by the time they were able to react, you’d already be that tiniest fraction ahead. By arriving one hour early at the velodrome, a kid could gain one-tenth of a second on the track. These were the ratios that victory was made of.

Zoe walked right up to the reception desk and dumped her kit bag on it.

Tom said, “Morning, miss. What can we do you for?”

Zoe looked past him and through the turnstiles that divided the entrance hall from the velodrome proper. She said, “Elite Prospects Programme.”

Tom grinned. “We’re a prospect, are we?”

She wasn’t in the mood to play. “Zoe Castle. I’m on the list. The coach is Thomas Voss.”

“Voss? Not that old guy?”

She rolled her eyes. “Look. Could you please just check on the list?”

Tom looked around on the desktop, affecting perplexity.

She said, “They probably haven’t put it out yet. I’m early.”

“Early for what?”

She obviously couldn’t handle it anymore. “Look, I told you. I’m here for the—”

“Well, let’s just hope your riding’s as quick as your temper, Miss Zoe Castle.”

She gave him a dark look, and Tom buzzed her through. She managed to get the handles of her kit bag stuck in the turnstile and fought with it for a moment before she got them free. Her fuse was completely blown. Tom watched her with the shocked-but-thrilled expression of a child who’d banged on the glass of the reptile house and woken up something furious.

He gave her a minute, then followed her through into the velodrome. He liked to watch how an athlete reacted to this space. Twelve thousand seats rose all the way to the domed roof, so high that the light from the glass panes didn’t penetrate down as far as track level. Wide square bars of sunlight fell through the huge void and faded to a fossil gray that only just put a shine on the varnish of the track. It was a bright winter morning, but down at track level it was twilight. Tom watched Zoe reach trackside and drop her kit bag near the start line. The echo rolled through the empty space.

She took off her shoes and socks and stepped out onto the track, testing the angle beneath her bare feet. She walked a lap, anticlockwise. On the straights the angle was shallow, but on the turns the banking was so aggressive that her feet only just kept traction. She broke into a jog and then into a run, and Tom felt the hairs go up on his neck as she stretched out her arms and screamed into the echoing space.

Thirty minutes later, with Tom back at the reception desk, Kate
showed up. She was wrapped against the cold in two fleeces and a bobble hat, her blond hair sticking out from under it.

She smiled at Tom. “Sorry. I’m too early aren’t I? I didn’t know how long it would take to walk from the hotel. I mean I can come back later if it’s… you know.”

She stopped, halfway between the revolving entrance door and the reception desk. Tom tilted his head and watched her.

“I’m here for the Elite Prospects Programme?” she said. “It is today, right? I got the letter from this place. But maybe there are lots of different sessions? I’m sorry to mess you around.”

Tom put his elbows on the table, cupped his chin in his hands, and smiled at Kate. “Deep breath.”

She took one and laughed. “Sorry.”

“Let’s start at the beginning. Were you issued at birth with a name, honey?”

“Oh. Yes. Sorry. Yes. Catherine Meadows. Kate.”

Tom blinked at his clipboard.

“Catherine Anne Meadows, North of England Champion on road and track at under-twelve, under-fourteen, under-sixteen, and under-eighteen. Our file is showing a tidy set of results for you, but nothing for the last six months. Did we forget to keep winning?”

She blushed. “No.”

“So?”

“I haven’t raced.”

“Injured?”

She looked at the ground. “My dad died. Sorry.”

“And you thought screwing up your racing career might bring him back?”

She looked up at him again, shocked.

“We tell it like it is here, Kate. When you’re as good as you are, so long as your legs are still attached, you bloody well keep riding. Okay?”

She blushed even deeper. “Sorry.”

Tom smiled. “I’m sorry for your loss. Do you have all your kit with you?”

She came up to the reception desk and showed him her kit bag. “I think so. I mean I’ve just brought what I used to race in. I don’t know if I’ve got the right stuff.”

Tom looked at her. “You really don’t, do you?”

“Don’t what?”

“Know if you’ve got the right stuff.”

She stood there and let her arms drop to her sides. She was perfectly flustered now.

Tom leaned back in his chair. “You’re alright, Kate Meadows. We’ll get you back on track. Go through, and the coach will be with you at nine.”

He checked in the other kids as they arrived. At nine o’clock, when all of them except Jack Argall had showed up, he closed the reception desk and went through into the velodrome to observe how his new prospects interacted with each other in the half-light.

They were eleven altogether, six girls and five boys. The boys sat together high in the stands, slouching in the flip chairs and talking about Keats and fine bone china, or whatever it was that boys talked about when they were about to spend eight hours racing each other. They looked like standard athletic models with few moving parts. Zoe stood with her feet shoulder-width apart and watched them from the brightest place trackside, where everyone could see her. She laid out her kit across the best seats and moved as if she owned the place. Tom watched her watching the other girls warm up.

Four of them were friends from the English junior circuit: Clara, Penny, Jess, and Sam. Tom had been to watch all of them compete. They sat together on the floor in the technical area, laughing and helping each other with their stretches.

Tom watched Zoe analyzing their form. Clara was bulky, a weight lifter on a bike. She would be unbeatably powerful right up until the
moment when her muscles filed a polite request for oxygen. Tom could see Zoe dismissing her with her eyes. Penny was harder to call. She was helping Clara to stretch, one hand on the small of her back while Clara touched her toes. Penny’s arm on Clara’s back was skinny, scrawny even. She’d clearly been training for long distance; her body fat looked close to zero and her muscle mass was right down. She looked more like a triathlete than a track star. Her face was sharp, and when she laughed at something Clara said, her gums looked shrunken. It was a fine balance—one tiny fraction too much training could do it—between being acutely fit and chronically ill. Penny didn’t look as if she was getting it right. Zoe seemed to relax.

Jess and Sam were sitting face-to-face with the soles of their feet touching, gripping each other’s wrists for leverage and working together to stretch their backs alternately. Jess was pretty, her hair dyed with crimson streaks. She’d had a tattoo done on her lower back, a stylized sun with a face and a mane of sunbeams. Each time she stretched, the sun rose over the waistband of her track pants. She had a good back and she stretched like a gymnast, springy and resilient. But maybe she was too slight to impose her will, physically, on a contested situation. When a narrow window opened up just ahead of you on the track, you needed to have the power to go instantly to another level and leap through that gap before it closed. Jess looked as if she had good power, but maybe she didn’t have that jump. Studying her, Tom gave her fifty-fifty, and when he looked back at Zoe he could see she was curious too.

He saw her attention shift onto Sam, but it was obvious that Sam didn’t have it. She had a stiffness in her back when she stretched and a brittleness in the way she held her shoulders that made Tom wonder if she was carrying an injury. She wasn’t smiling, and Tom could tell she was feeling the superior force flowing through Jess’s body as they stretched together. Perhaps she was suddenly wondering what she was doing there.

That only left Kate. Tom watched Zoe homing in on her. While the other girls were wearing their club warm-up kits or their champion’s colors, Kate wore a plain yellow tracksuit, a hooded civilian number from Adidas. It had oversized draw-cords around the waist and the hood. She looked around the velodrome, as excited as Zoe had been but without the sense to hide it. Everything about her body language was giving away a psychological advantage to anyone who could be bothered to watch.

Tom saw Zoe stand as Kate approached her.

Kate smiled, stopped, and left a space for Zoe to come the rest of the way if she wanted to. Some people left those careful empty spaces for others, just the right shape to accommodate them. These people, Tom knew, were rarely champions.

He watched as Zoe smiled back, coldly, then cut Kate down with her eyes and turned away.

Tom wished she wasn’t right, but he couldn’t argue with her conclusion. Kate’s results were the best of any of the girls on the program, but the fact was that she was the kind of girl who would stop training when her dad died. Zoe was different. She struck Tom as the kind of girl who, if her family ever got in between her and training, would kill them herself.

It didn’t matter if Kate beat her this week. Bit by bit, race by race, year by year, a girl like Zoe would stay afloat in the sport while Kate slowly sank under the weight of real life. Tom had seen it a hundred times.

It was ten past nine, and Tom was about to go trackside and introduce himself to the prospects when a boy jumped the turnstiles and headed for the track. He was six foot. He was all muscle. He wore a T-shirt that said
The Exploited
. He had blue jeans, wild black curly hair, and headphones hanging round his neck.

Also, the kid looked quick. He looked wind tunnel–tested. He ran down the steps from the entrance like a rock star running into a stadium. He shouted, “Hello! Hello!” He dropped his kit bag. He stood
on the track in the middle of the start line, clapped his hands, and all the kids went quiet.

Tom hung back, fascinated.

“All right, everyone! Gather round! My name’s Jack Argall and I’m the assistant coach. Thomas Voss is indisposed, and he’s asked me to take charge. I will be taking you through various warm-up exercises and assessing your suitability for each of the track disciplines. Right, so if I could have the lads in a line here… that’s right… and the lasses in a line here… thanks, that’s lovely… and if I could have you all jogging on the spot for two minutes, just to get the circulation going.”

Tom watched openmouthed as the kid marshaled the riders into lines, chivvying them in a thick Scotch accent.

The riders all jogged on the spot. Even Zoe stalked out onto the track and warmed up. Jack applauded.

“That’s very nice, very nice indeed! Okay, so now if I could have the lads jogging around the track in an anticlockwise fashion… thanks… that’s very nice… and if I could have the lasses do some upper-body stretches for me, hands clasped behind your backs and extend your chests forwards… thanks, that’s very good. A really good stretch now, ladies. The ones of you who are most flexible will be given the quickest bikes.”

The girls laughed but they pushed their arms back and their chests out. Kate strained till her veins bulged. The boys jogged back round to the start line.

“Right, lads!” Jack said. “You can give me another lap, but this time jogging backwards. And lasses, I want you to stand with your feet a shoulder-width apart and touch your toes. Ah yes, that’s very nice. Show me how low you can go.”

Watching from high in the stands, Tom couldn’t help laughing. The boys were struggling to run backwards on the track, with the angle of it. They stumbled. There was swearing. The girls had their bums in the air and their hands on the ground.

“Right, gentlemen,” Jack shouted. “I want you to carry on jogging backwards, only now I want you to slap your thigh with the palm of the opposite hand on every second step, and on every eighth step I want you to slap the back of your neck with both hands. The one who’s best at it, I will be reporting to the coach that he has the best coordination.”