Gold (34 page)

She’d been the one who mostly looked after Sophie. Jack had been happy to take his shifts, but Kate had found it hard to leave Sophie alone when it was her turn to train. There was always something more she felt she could do. The longer she spent with Sophie, the more in tune she became with the subtle rhythms of her sleeping and feeding, and the more she learned to work with those rhythms to nurse her into health.

When they took Sophie home, they reaffirmed their commitment to equally divided childcare, but every time she saw Jack’s clumsy attempts to look after Sophie, she found a new reason to stay and help. She could do every part of this new routine except pick up her kit bag and walk away from her daughter, even for the space of five hours.

In the end, Jack had ended up training far better than she had. A month before the Athens Olympics, he had won his place in the squad
and Kate had missed out at the selection trials. She’d registered the fact with a dull shock that she buried under the routine of caring for Sophie. Then the double disappointment had come, when the pediatrician had told them that Sophie’s immune system was still too underdeveloped to permit travel. It was perfectly normal with premature babies—it was nothing that time might not reasonably be expected to fix, he told her—but in the meantime Kate was going to have to watch the Olympics on TV.

She’d made a deal with Jack, when his plane tickets arrived and the reality of her exclusion finally started to hurt. After Athens they would take equal turns to look after Sophie, and both of them would get to race in Beijing. That had been their agreement.

In the end, missing out hadn’t been as hard as she’d imagined. She and Jack had always planned to have children one day, once their track careers were over. If she let herself think of this like an ordinary accident—like a missed pill—then it was easier. She told herself that Sophie was no different from one in three kids: unplanned, but not unwanted. She was happy for Zoe’s successes, and the next day she felt no emotion more complex than joy as she watched Jack win gold himself. And then, when he proposed to her from the top step of the podium, she shouted
“Yes!”
out loud in their living room, two thousand miles away, alone with Sophie in front of their little TV. Twenty minutes later a dozen photographers were outside their house, and a camera crew let her talk to Jack live on air.

“Yes,” she said again, more quietly this time. “Yes, I will.”

On the doorstep Sophie smiled in her arms, and that was the photo on the front page of all the papers the next day. Someone had draped a Union flag around the pair of them to make the shot.

After Athens, a sponsorship deal came in for Jack. Nike were very generous. They could have moved to a bigger place somewhere quiet and nice, out in the southern suburbs, but they decided not to leave this ordinary street near the velodrome. They wanted to stay in real life.
They filled their little yard with a plastic sit-on tractor, a sandpit, a tiny trampoline. They celebrated Sophie’s first birthday in March 2005, not on the date of her birth but on the anniversary of the day they’d taken her home together from the hospital. Jack’s dad got drunk, pulled off the oxygen mask he was dependent on by then, and gasped to Kate, “Tae be honest, now that ye are family, it’s better tae have all that bike nonsense behind ye in any case. The only reason women’s cycling is even in the papers is because ae yer knockers in that Lycra, an we don’t want our granddaughter’s mum getting that kindae treatment.”

She laughed, and she was pleased that Robert had called her Sophie’s mum, but the next day she rode one hundred and forty miles. She left Sophie with Jack and headed out before dawn on her training bike. She turned right at the end of Barrington Street, rode seventy miles to Colwyn Bay, bought a bag of chips, and ate them looking out over the Irish Sea. She was the only one on the seafront, in the drizzle. Then she rode home, flat out. She had a shower, made Sophie’s tea, saw Jack’s parents onto the coach back to Edinburgh, then phoned Tom to tell him she was ready to train again.

Tom and Dave helped them divide the waking day into four blocks of four hours. Six till ten, ten till two, two till six, and six till ten. Each of them did two blocks of training and two blocks of parenting. Then they slept for eight hours, woke, and did it again, every day for three months without discussion.

When Jack’s father died, it broke the routine for a week. At the graveside they stood hand in hand under an umbrella and watched the coffin being lowered. An arrangement of white carnations spelled
DAD.
The undertakers had removed it from the coffin lid and laid it on the artificial grass, collecting rain. Kate wondered if they were supposed to take it home with them to Manchester. There was no useful anagram of the wreath, no obvious peacetime application. Were you meant to pixelate it, removing the carnations one by one and putting them in a vase? Or were you supposed to keep the arrangement intact, on the
window ledge in the kitchen, until the earliest moment it could decently be slipped into the bin? When Kate’s own father had died, it hadn’t occurred to her to spell anything out in flowers, and now she wondered if that meant she’d loved him too much or not enough.

She squeezed Jack’s hand and said, “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know. Ask me after Beijing.”

“That’s three years away.”

He sniffed. “It’s three years and two months. Let’s talk about it when we’ve both got gold medals round our necks.”

They cranked up their training until the momentum was unstoppable. The fridge was racked with sports recovery drinks and Tupperware pots of kiddie food. The routine was endless. The floor of the shower was never dry. Childcare, training, shower, childcare, training, shower. Sleep. Repeat. Sunday was a recovery day. They laundered the Lycra. They froze pasta sauce in freezer bags labeled with the days of the week.

Her comeback event was the British Nationals in the autumn of 2005. The logistics were harder than the racing. She and Jack had to juggle heats, warm-downs, hydration, nutrition, finals, medal ceremonies, and Sophie. The British Cycling staff were amazing. One of the girls took Sophie for the last day, when the intensity of the competition peaked. She walked around the technical area of the velodrome with Sophie on her hip, and Kate laughed and told the newspapers that her daughter was the only toddler in Britain who’d been assigned a personal trainer. She kissed Jack. She was perfectly happy.

She won the individual pursuit, the 500-meter time trial, and the sprint. She beat Zoe in the finals of all of them. Jack won all his events too, but it was Kate on the front of the papers the next day.
KATE’S GOLDEN COMEBACK,
with a photo of her on the podium. Flowers in one arm, Sophie in the other. Sophie blinked at the camera flashes like a fruit bat woken from sleep. She wanted Kate’s gold medals for herself. She put them around her own neck. She laughed, and the cameras
loved her, and Kate became the face of Mothercare. They paid off the mortgage on the house, and they put Jack’s mother in a nice new-build bungalow in the community she insisted on staying in.

As Sophie grew up, Tom fitted Kate’s training blocks around Sophie’s nursery hours. Sophie’s first word was
bye-bye!

Her speech was slow to develop, but they didn’t think much about it. She was happy and beautiful. Her second word was
mutain
, which meant “Mum is training.” She slept in between them on the bed. Kate loved its being the three of them, under the warm duvet, with Sophie’s closed eyes twitching. She hadn’t breast-fed her, but she felt she could feed her daughter with sleep. In the daytime she helped her line up her stuffed animals. Sophie told them off, mimicking Tom. She said, “Iger or tain!” which meant, “Tiger, you’re overtraining!”

In 2006, Kate and Jack cleaned up at the World Championships. In 2007, on her third birthday, Sophie was still smaller than she should have been. Kate marked her measurements on the height-and-weight chart. Sophie was slipping down the percentiles. Kate was worried, but Jack said, “You know what the problem is? The girl’s half-English.” They were still making a joke of it at the end of that year. It was easy: they were still winning.

Manchester was great, and Jack and Kate agreed they were there to stay. Kids from the nursery came around for playdates, and Kate did her stretches while they tumbled together. Sophie liked playing with boys; she wrestled and fought and kicked, and she usually won. Kate and Jack could have done without the coughs and colds they brought, but it was nice to have that stream of tiny visitors. Sophie was the only one of the family with a social life.

Sophie blew out the candles on her fourth birthday cake weighing the same as she had a year before. She was taller, but you could see every one of her ribs. And yet you could see every one of Kate’s ribs too, and she was the face of healthy motherhood. Jack reassured her. They agreed that the average height-and-weight curves included a lot of kids
who ate a lot of crisps. That made them dangerously fat but it didn’t make Sophie dangerously thin.

They barely had time to discuss it in any case. They had a five-minute handover between training blocks, plus a quick chat at the end of each day if they could keep their eyes open. Every morning the alarm went at six and Sophie jumped on them, already dressed in her jeans and T-shirt and baseball cap. She tickled them till they couldn’t pretend to be asleep anymore. She yelled, “Mum! Dad! Time to get
quicker
!”

Tom stepped up Kate’s training again for the final push to Beijing. In head-to-head races, two times out of three, she was beating Zoe. Sometimes she won by a wheel-length, and sometimes there were only millimeters in it. She worked at a dangerous intensity. It could have made her ill. Tom paced every training session and monitored her blood counts to keep her just the right side of overtraining. Physios came to the house to work on her aches. A nutritionist planned her meals. British Cycling paid for someone to do the washing and cleaning. No British athletes had ever had the kind of monitoring and support that Kate and Jack had in the run-up to Beijing. Kate gave everything. She started beating Zoe three times out of four. She went to the edge of what was humanly possible and then, when all the hard work was done, they flew to China for the formality of picking up medals. Zoe flew out a month early, realistically looking at silver in the sprint and the individual pursuit but hoping that an extra week’s training in the Beijing humidity might give her back the edge. Kate and Jack flew out as late as they could, since their family schedule was harder to translate to a new setup. They topped off their training with one final superhuman blast in Manchester, then headed to Beijing to taper off and recover before the racing.

The flight was eleven hours. The cabin crew treated them like rock stars. Sophie had a cold, so Kate and Jack sat with their heads turned away from her, breathing shallowly, as if the germs couldn’t find their lungs that way. Sophie sat between them, watching cartoons. Kate looked across her at Jack. This was the longest time awake that she’d spent with her husband in months, and she realized he was more beautiful now than
when they had met. He was stronger, stripped down to the minimum musculature that would achieve his purpose. He was quiet and calm, in a sky-blue hoodie. His hair was just turning gray at the temples. He smiled. It made her shiver. She reached across and held his hand.

When the flight attendants brought a meal, Kate and Jack refused it. They were on their own eating schedule, and Sophie wasn’t hungry either. When she fell asleep with her head on the fold-down table, Kate noticed she had a bruise on the back of her neck: a big bruise, purple-black and angry. She asked Jack how it had happened, but Jack didn’t know. It was typical, really; it wasn’t the kind of thing he noticed.

There were screens on the seat backs, with a tiny picture of their plane tracking across the map. Here they were. She leaned across Sophie and kissed Jack, 35,000 feet above the central Asian steppe. Sophie had drawn a picture before she fell asleep; the stewardess had given her crayons. Kate eased the picture out from under her head because Sophie was dribbling on it. She used the backs of her fingers so as not to get the germs. It was a nice picture. On the high branch of a tree, a baby owl was nestling between its owl parents. The daddy owl was blue, the mummy owl was pink, and the baby owl was carrying a lightsaber. Kate hardly saw the picture. She was visualizing the Beijing velodrome. Tom had shown her videos of the inside. He’d given her this exercise to do on the plane: visualize victory. Picture every nuance. Own every inch of the venue.

Sophie slept all the way to Beijing. Kate hadn’t expected that. She’d brought games, toys, and books, and if those failed, she was going to bribe the girl quiet with Jelly Tots. She had six packets in her bag. But Sophie just slept. When they landed, Kate had to wake her up. She awoke confused and angry, like a little animal at the vet coming round from anaesthetic. On her forehead there was a new bruise from where she’d fallen asleep on a crayon, but Kate wasn’t seeing the bruise. She was visualizing victory.

She couldn’t believe they were finally in China. Beijing was like landing on Mars. Sophie’s new bruise didn’t fade, all through immigration
and customs, but Kate thought,
It’s just a bruise.
Sophie fell asleep again in her arms, and she held her so her breath went the other way. You didn’t train for twenty years just to catch a cold right before your big event.

A car was waiting for them, and it drove them across the city. Sophie fell asleep on Kate’s lap. They arrived at the hotel that the British Cycling squad was using, and Jack lifted Sophie out of the car. His fingers left bruises on her arms. Kate and Jack finally started to notice.