Weirwolf (10 page)

But I wasn’t finished yet. Later that night I had to go again, this time in the 5,000m. There were quite a few big racers in the field so, with qualifying times for Beijing on our minds, we agreed to get together and help each other. I was sharing the workload with my Australian rival Kurt Fearnley, taking it in turns to push on the pace. But the track in Atlanta, while fast, was also very tight and I was wheel-spinning a lot. As the race wore on I dropped back to fifth place. At that stage Kurt was way out in front and
I only had 300 metres to go. I had to go right out to lane four, halfway across this track, just to get through all the traffic. I thought I had left it too late but I was in such good shape, moving so fast. As I came off the final bend I was just gaining and gaining on him and when I crossed the line I thought, ‘I’ve got this.’

It was so tight the officials had to call for a photo finish. But deep down I knew I had got the win – and another world record.

9 minutes 53.15 seconds. I was the first man to go under ten minutes.

The record had stood for about a decade – back to the time when the great Mexican Saúl Mendoza was on top of his game. I had broken two world records in one night. And I hadn’t even been racing in the 5,000m for very long. That was what made me realise that I had to move up to the longer distances and leave sprinting behind. Beijing was now just a year away and, for all the problems I had
experienced
with Kaylie, my racing had never been better – I was the best in the world, unbeatable. For the first time in my life I felt like things were really starting to go my way.

I
was always scared of going to China. I had heard all the stories. The way the Chinese treated people in
wheelchairs
. How some disabled people ended up as slaves. How they lived and died in terrible poverty, ignored by the rest of society. Could China really host a Paralympic Games? A celebration of the kind of people the country seemed to want to hide from public view?

My first visit there in May, just four months before the Games, confirmed my fears. It was a Paralympic test event, a warm-up for the real act to come later in the year. But for me it wasn’t just about getting a sneak preview of the Bird’s Nest (the Beijing National Stadium), the track or the Olympic Park. I wanted to get a feel for what China and Beijing were all about.

As I travelled around that week, I kept an eye out for other disabled people. You did see older people in
wheelchairs
but apart from that I didn’t see a single disabled
person. People looked at you as if you were something from another planet. It was actually quite frightening.

Then there was the pollution. A thick smog hung over Beijing and I was getting nosebleeds. I had travelled over to China with Kathryn Periac. Once I told her about the nosebleeds she told me not to worry about training or the race. Just see it as a fact-finding mission. The day after I won my test event race in the magnificent Bird’s Nest I went back on day two to watch some of the athletics and I saw what looked like a trail of little footprints on the track. But it was nowhere near the sand pits for the jumps. Where was it coming from? Then I realised. It was the smog lying on the track.

‘Oh my God,’ I thought. ‘I am killing myself being here.’

Once you got out of the city it was a different story. One morning we drove out to see the Great Wall of China. I knew once the Games were on in September I wouldn’t get a chance. I wouldn’t want the distraction. So I took my opportunity to see the sights then – the Wall, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square. As we drove up towards the section of the Great Wall we had chosen, the thick fog lifted, the sky turned blue and I could breathe clean, fresh air. Some other things didn’t change so quickly, though. Once there, it was almost impossible to get up onto the Wall in a wheelchair. We had to go up on these little cable cars which didn’t look like the safest thing in the world. And of course I didn’t see another soul in a wheelchair.

That experience definitely opened my mind to China a
bit more, gave me a much better understanding. But I still found it an intimidating place.

‘When the Paralympics starts,’ I thought to myself, ‘there will be almost 4,000 disabled athletes here, people with limbs missing, people who can’t talk properly, athletes on blades. What are they going to be like? How will the Chinese public react?’

I spoke to other Paralympians, who shared my concerns. They were a bit frightened by the smog and worried about the attitudes they might encounter. We just didn’t know what to expect. It might have been the language barrier or the lack of openness, but China never really communicated to us what it was going to be like. From the moment I left Athens I had been wondering, ‘Would the crowds turn up? Would it be well organised? Would they really care about the Paralympics?’

Everything else was amazing: on first inspection the stadiums and facilities were perfect, the best I had ever seen. And their Paralympic team was obviously full of
fantastic
athletes. Well, with a population of more than eighty million disabled people you would expect a bit of strength on their side. But would any of that make a difference?

Throughout 2006 and the early part of 2007 the road to Beijing had been extremely smooth. In fact, it had been the best period of my career. I had smashed two world records
in Atlanta and I was looking forward to competing in the World Athletics Championships in the Japanese port city of Osaka in August 2007.

But then everything had gone wrong. After I had come back from the States, I felt very light-headed. Really funny and weird. It just wasn’t right. I told Jenny and she gave me a week off. After eight days I still felt jet-lagged. That doesn’t normally happen.

So I did a couple of training sessions and I said to Jen, ‘I feel absolutely shattered.’ I was sweating a lot and I couldn’t get up to speed. She told me to go to my local GP and have a blood test. About a week later the results came back and they seemed OK. But I wasn’t convinced. One of my glands was up, and I wondered if I just had a bad cold.

I went to see the Team GB doctors at St Mary’s. I explained how I felt – tired, lethargic all the time. They did another blood test. The next day they came back and told me I had glandular fever. I panicked.

‘Is there a pill to fix it?’ I asked them.

‘Afraid not, Dave,’ they told me. ‘There’s no cure. All you can do is rest and after a few months you will feel better, although it can stay in your system for three years.’

‘Three years?’ I said. ‘Are you serious? I’ve got Beijing next year. What am I going to do?’ At that point I thought my chances of winning gold in Beijing had gone.

A week after that diagnosis I was supposed to be racing at Crystal Palace in the annual Diamond League meeting. It’s always a big event for me. It’s my local track and the
fans know I come from round the corner. Now I had a big decision to make. I told Jenny I was going to race.

‘Please let me race at Palace,’ I said to Jenny. ‘For my own peace of mind, let me do it.’

I raced there and I won. So I started to wonder whether I could go to Osaka after all. Maybe it wasn’t that serious. That was when Jenny put her foot down. ‘You can’t go to Japan,’ she said. ‘You are going to seriously hurt yourself. You have got Beijing next year and just think about what you have got to do. What’s the priority? Beijing could be a big year for you.’

That upset me. And then it just got worse. All I could do was take loads of vitamins and iron as there were no
medicines
or pills I could take to make it better. The doctors said it could have been caused by the stress I had been through the year before – all the ups and downs with Kaylie and the break-up. I then realised how badly I had been treating my body – not eating properly, all that travelling around the world chasing qualifying times and world records, all those stressful, scary flights. I was an emotional wreck. My body just blew up. It couldn’t do it any more.

At the time I thought I was doing all the right things. I was so focused on doing well. I went out to the pub with my mates but I didn’t drink alcohol. I would just go out to socialise and wouldn’t stay out late – I would be home by 11 p.m. because I knew I had to get up for training. But during the split with Kaylie I couldn’t just sit indoors on my own. It was too hard. I hadn’t done that for years.

Now, though, my body was telling me another story. Some days I went to bed early and would sleep all the way through but when I woke up it felt like I hadn’t slept a wink. I tried to train but in the end I had to pack it in. Through the crucial winter months of 2007–8 I didn’t train at all.

UKA were very worried. Kathryn Periac, Tim Jones and the doctors were all monitoring me. They were doing lots of tests on me, blood and urine, and keeping all sorts of charts and records, trying to assess where my fitness was heading. They just told me rest was the best thing, to see if I could get it out of my system. My first target in 2008 was the London Marathon. Incredibly, despite the illness, I won. But it took a lot out of me and I was really ill afterwards. Whenever I peaked I really paid a heavy price. I would be wiped out for weeks. Add to that the fact that I couldn’t eat properly: I would miss meals, get up and train. Just have a Red Bull and then go.

Diet is such an important part of being an elite athlete. But you can’t eat properly all the time. It drives you mad. It’s expensive too. Fresh fruit costs you a fortune, supplements are dear. When you aren’t making that much money you cut corners on the things that can make such an enormous difference to your performance.

The one blessing from putting myself and my body under such strain in 2007 was that I had already got the
qualifying
times for all the distances I was considering going for in Beijing – the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1,500m, 5,000m
and marathon! Having that range made me feel a bit better, because I could choose shorter distances if I wasn’t feeling great.

After a short break in Ireland with my dad when I took Ronie over to meet my nan, her great-grandmother, for the first time, I worked out a training schedule which allowed for my glandular fever. I wasn’t about to give up on Beijing, having spent the last two and a half years on top of the world. I knew this was the peak of my career, the time when I should have been at my strongest, and I couldn’t
guarantee
that four years on in London I could still compete with the best.

I worked out I had about ten weeks when I could push it. I locked down the distances I was going to compete in, five events: the 400m, 800m, 1,500m, 5,000m and the
marathon
. It was a mad challenge at the best of times … but when you are ill? Completely insane. But that was me. I had to do it. Of course, I didn’t think I was going to win five gold medals. My theory was that if it went wrong in one I had got another opportunity. It was an insurance policy and I used the same approach in London.

But while the strategy was supposed to give me a better chance of winning a gold medal, it was also a massive risk because the schedule was so demanding. Fortunately, as the Games got nearer my training was going quite well. As the Olympics exploded into life in China, I began to feel quietly confident. I was glued to the TV whenever I wasn’t training. The opening ceremony was such an awesome
display of power, I will never forget it. And then
watching
Usain Bolt take over the event, make it his own. That was amazing. His performance in the 100m final was from another planet – seeing him nearly running backwards through the line, waving to the crowd and breaking that world record. He is a phenomenal athlete. I remember a drug tester knocking on my door early one morning and I wasn’t ready to pee so we sat there in my kitchen watching the live coverage and drinking tea. It was quite surreal.

Before the Olympics were over it was time to pack and head to China myself. The British team was supposed to be flying to a holding camp on the island of Macau but at the last minute it was changed to Hong Kong because the track was supposed to be better for wheelchair racers. But we still had to go to Beijing and then get a connection down to Hong Kong and back. Because of my fear of flying I asked if I could cut out the extra flight and go straight to Beijing. I knew my stress levels would go through the roof and I might get ill again. They said they would look into it. But it turned out the facilities in Beijing weren’t open until much later and there would be no back-up or medical staff around to help me. So I had to go to Hong Kong. Not because they made me – there was no alternative.

On the flight from London, UKA refused to tell me which airline was handling the connection from Beijing. I was dreading it so much and they probably knew I would get stressed out. When I found out it was an airline called Dragon Air I just went mad. ‘Who are Dragon Air?’ I thought.

I was sitting on the plane at Hong Kong listening to the brakes all squeaking and the engines cranking up, thinking, I have got another three and a half hours of this. When we took off I swapped with a teammate who had a whole row to himself. I tried to pull myself together and eventually we arrived at the camp. It was such a relief. I had got myself so worked up about it and I felt slightly ridiculous. But I just couldn’t help it. It is just the way I am.

Hong Kong at that time of year is extremely hot. The humidity is also terribly high. Add to that the problems I had adapting to the time difference and you had a recipe for disaster. Even after we got to Beijing, three weeks into the trip, I was still having problems. I couldn’t sleep so I took some sleeping pills. That really worried me. Would they affect my training?

When we got to Beijing I found a city transformed from the place I had left in May. Blue skies and sunshine. No cars on the road, loads of people on bikes. Where had the smog gone? It was amazing. The Olympic village was one of the best I had ever seen. Everything was built on such a massive scale and was so well organised. It was really impressive.

My worries about the attitudes of the Chinese people hadn’t gone away completely. On the face of it they seemed to be saying and doing all the right things – but then, there was a lot at stake for them. The whole world was watching them to see how they staged the Olympics and Paralympics. All I know is that the stadiums went on to be packed and that as athletes we only ever encountered people being nice
and helpful. The question is whether the promises made during the Beijing Paralympics will be kept in ten years’ time. If it genuinely leads to a change in the way disabled people are treated then that will have been a great
achievement
. I guess it’s just too soon to judge.