Weirwolf Read online

  These were happy times on the track and at home. Through all those dark winter months having Mason waiting for me at home gave me a real escape from all the pressures of training. And Emily was giving out such good vibes and making me feel really positive. It’s become such an important part of my life after all those early years of instability and broken relationships. The fact that she was expecting another baby always brought things back down to earth. Racing and winning in London was important but there were other things in life.

  As the clock ticked down we decided to take a little break as a family. So, around my 33rd birthday on 5 June, we all headed to Paris for four days to get away from it all. We went to a spa hotel, did a bit of shopping, went up the Eiffel Tower.

  We were having such a nice time – until I got a call to tell me one of my mates had committed suicide. Lewis Pinto was only twenty-four and a promising boxer. I am not sure what went on and I never asked. The family only lived around the corner from me. Whenever I did well he would always be the first one to come and congratulate me. He was a sportsman so he understood how hard you had to work to get to that sort of level. It rocked me for a bit. He was well loved in the community and the funeral was massive. A couple of hundred of us went up the Roundshaw Airfield and lit lanterns in his memory. I am sure he would have come to watch me in London.

  The Games were now just two months away. London was getting more and more excited. The Olympic Torch relay was working its way around the country and the coverage on the TV and in the newspapers was impossible to ignore. Everywhere you looked there were adverts or posters reminding you that the Games were coming. It was exactly the motivation I needed as I entered my last and most critical phase of training. Having spent so much of my career training in Richmond Park I know the roads like the back of my hand. For London I needed something different to try and take me to a new level and to give me the strength and endurance I needed to win three track events and, at the end of all that, a marathon.

  That’s when Jenny persuaded a small group of cyclists to help me with my golden mission. Alan Ephgrave is an amputee cyclist, also known as the one-legged wonder. He has been training in Richmond Park for as long as I have, if not longer. He was a top club cyclist in the 1980s before a crash meant he had to have one of his legs amputated. That hasn’t stopped him and I can tell you from bitter first-hand experience that he is still pretty quick. Jenny just went up and asked him one day if he would be up for helping me. He agreed immediately. What’s more, he said he would ring a few of his old cycling mates to get them to come along too. Before long, there I was, part of an exclusive little peloton whizzing around Richmond Park, training for Paralympic gold.

  They might have been in their sixties but their age hadn’t slowed them down that much. They could still shift and they helped me get the quality sessions I needed to build myself up for the Games. Alan and the cyclists just pushed me on every day. I thought I used to go fast but when you start training with other people you realise you can go much, much faster. They would sprint and I would have to catch them. Every day it felt like a race. It made me wish I had had them with me all the time.

  Of course, there is a limit to how fast you can go. The top cyclists on the tours can hit about 40mph on the flat whereas I can get to just over 23mph in a wheelchair. But what it did was set me targets all the time, pushing me to new limits and giving me not only speed but much more stamina and endurance. Mind you, I think the riders learned a lot from me. They were amazed and shocked at the way I push and can keep going. Even in the park since the Games I have had cyclists come up to me after a session and say it took them half a mile to catch me up because I was travelling so fast.

  As the weeks went on I was just getting faster and faster. I was shocking myself. Just before I left to join the team I did a marathon in Richmond Park. My time was 1 hour 28 minutes. That was extremely quick. But I felt so good that I still got up next morning and did another hard session. The cyclists just looked at me and said, ‘That’s it, Dave. You are ready. You are going to win four gold medals.’

  But I didn’t want to think like that. I still had to worry about Marcel or Kurt, or the Chinese. Who had they discovered?

  That’s why I didn’t want to go to Portugal with the British team for their pre-Games training camp in August. I didn’t want to break my flow, to change my rhythm. Besides, I had already been to Portugal twice that year, first in April to test the new chair and do a bit of training and again in July, to really hit out the hard miles in the blistering heat. Some days it reached 42 degrees and I dropped a lot of weight.

  Going off on my own like that had already upset the powers that be at UK Athletics. So I was determined to show them it wasn’t a holiday. Although Emily and Mason came with me, I stayed in another hotel away from them. I just met up with them when I wasn’t training – which wasn’t always easy as I trained twice a day most days.

  Come August, I felt another trip to Portugal would be pointless. I had done all my fine-tuning and my training was going so well. So I sent an email to UK Athletics explaining my decision. I urged them to trust in me and to understand that it was only because I was so determined to deliver for Great Britain that I didn’t want to risk anything going wrong so close to the Games. I was facing the biggest ten days of my life and I wanted to do it my way.

  My fear of flying also played a big part in my decision to snub the camp. I simply didn’t want to get on another plane a week before the Games. The problems I suffered in Beijing because of that extra flight were still fresh in my mind and I just didn’t want all the stress.

  I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s one of those things that will probably never change. I think it’s control. Even when I’m a passenger in a car I get anxious. When I was a kid I didn’t have a problem with flying. It’s just something that’s developed over time.

  Every flight is different. Sometimes I will think about it days before, other times it won’t hit me until I arrive at the airport. But once I am there I hate every minute of it, the whole build-up. I will do it because I have to but so much stress goes through my body. Sometimes I can be physically frozen to the spot, paralysed by fear. Other times I can’t stop moving, jigging around nervously. I have tried hypnotherapy and talking to people about it. I have even thought about going on flying courses. But in the end I don’t want to sit next to people who are nervous themselves because that might make me worse.

  I can’t even blame it on having had a terrible experience on a flight. You hear of planes dropping a hundred feet or of emergency landings. I have never had anything like that. I did have a bad flight from Switzerland to Italy once. The sky was black and it didn’t look like it would ever stop raining. We were delayed and delayed and then, suddenly, air traffic control spotted a break in the weather and decided to go for it. This pilot must have made five or six attempts at landing before he gave up and decided to divert back to Zurich, where we had come from. I was with Jenny and although she tried to reassure me once we landed back in Zurich I had made up my mind. I booked a flight straight back to London. I called my dad and told him to collect me from the airport at this time from this flight and then said I would explain when I got home. I was so scared I just wanted to get back. I know this must sound insane and totally irrational because I had to get on another plane to get home, but that was just how I dealt with it.

  Whenever I go away I can’t ever really relax. I will be sitting in my hotel or I’ll be training and all of a sudden, it’s back. That feeling of dread. That thunderclap of a heartbeat, a fluttering in your guts.

  ‘Only another two days to go until I have to get back on the plane.’

  It can become a huge distraction and I don’t want anything to affect my racing. That’s why I now drive to Switzerland for race meetings. I know it takes so much longer and is tiring but once I knew I could do it and got used to driving on the wrong side of the road, it was a no-brainer for me. These days sport is so international, it’s a fact
of life that you have to travel to compete and to make money. But as an Arsenal fan I do take some reassurance from the fact that Dennis Bergkamp used to get the train or go by road to Champions League matches because of his fear of flying. I am not the only one but there is no question it is something that has held me back in my career and created an extra set of problems to deal with. When I know it’s a long haul and it’s a bigger plane, I do feel safer. If I am lucky I sometimes get upgraded, and that makes me feel more comfortable.

  I wondered whether having kids would make me less nervous. But I am now more worried than ever about getting on a plane with my family. I have not done it yet. I’m too afraid to. When I went to Portugal with Emily and the kids before London, I made sure they went on another plane. I don’t think I could get on the plane with all of them in case it went down with all of us on it. I would rather I went and not them. They are so young; they haven’t had their lives yet. It’s a sad way to think but I also don’t want them to see me scared. I might pass my fears onto them. It’s mad – people might think of me as this tough guy, the Weirwolf from London. But here I am reduced to jelly by a plane. It’s totally irrational. Driving to races in Switzerland is probably more dangerous than flying there. Sometimes I pass these lorries on the motorway and I see them swaying and I know any moment there could be a bad crash. But at least I’ve got control. And I am not up in the air. I know a lot of my teammates must think my fear of flying is ridiculous. I think it’s ridiculous. And actually, if it wasn’t for that I probably would have gone to Portugal to be part of the team. But my performance had to come first. So I told UKA I would be waiting for them when they got back to Gatwick Airport, fully decked out in my Paralympics GB kit, ready to make that long-awaited journey to the Olympic village.

  By that point London had of course already been infected with Olympic fever. The Games opened on 27 July and although I was still very focused on my training and being ready for the Paralympics, the Olympics was impossible to ignore. I was totally caught up in it.

  From the moment the opening ceremony started I was convinced we were going to pull it off. For years there had been loads of negative publicity, that it was going to be a disaster, that it was going to be rubbish. But after about ten minutes of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, I felt like crying. I was so happy and proud. I normally don’t pay too much attention to these ceremonies. But this one exceeded my expectations. They are normally really cheesy or downright tedious. All right, so a lot of people watching around the world might have found some of it confusing but I loved the way he focused on our rich past, zoning in on parts of our history which involved ordinary people – the marches, the NHS, the industrial revolution. I always loved history but didn’t get the chance to study it enough. This ceremony was as much an education as it was a show. I was also really struck by the decision not to use a load of professional dancers. A lot of the people in it were general members of the public and I loved that.

  The show was spectacular, especially the giant rings hovering above the stadium. But I couldn’t wait for the athletes’ parade. I know a lot of people switch off at this point but it’s always a special part of the ceremony for me. By this point Emily had fallen asleep in front of the TV. When she stirred about an hour or so later she said, ‘Are we near the end yet?’ I replied, ‘Afraid not … we are only at E.’ It was getting later and later. But I couldn’t go to bed and when Chris Hoy came in with the GB flag and I heard all the noise, I just thought, ‘Wow, look at this. We’ve done it.’

  We hadn’t even raced yet. But I knew we would do well. It was a home Games, we had invested a lot of money, we had a lot of top coaches and I was sure we would win lots of medals and be up near the top of the table.

  Once the Games were off and running I was glued to the BBC. I would go off training in Richmond Park in the morning and then come back and watch as much as I could. I am the sort of person who will get into any sport, especially if there’s a British competitor in it.

  As the drama unfolded I just kept thinking it would soon be my turn. Watching Usain Bolt winning three gold medals again. David Rudisha smashing the world record in the 800m.

  And then there was Super Saturday. For Team GB to win three golds that night was incredible. I always thought Jessica Ennis would do it but I couldn’t believe the pressure she was under. She was the poster girl of the Games. Her face was everywhere. But I could see she was in perfect shape. To deliver with the whole country expecting you to win is something I can identify with, albeit on a smaller scale. I actually think the heptathletes should get a medal for every one of their seven events they win – it is such a gruelling event. It’s like me only getting one gold at the end of the Paralympics for winning four races. I was so happy for Jess; she is just a lovely and down-to-earth person. She has not changed and I don’t think she ever will.

  All night I was just screaming at the TV. Emily kept telling me to calm down. But how could you with Mo Farah charging down that home straight in the 10,000m? With that race I was watching the crowd more than anything. There wasn’t a single person sitting in their seats, and there was just a sea of British flags. And the noise. That sonic boom as he came round that last bend. It was phenomenal, and you could see it lifted him. I couldn’t wait to get there myself and I kept thinking, ‘I’ve got that in a couple of weeks.’ It drove me on even more in training.

  In some ways I don’t know why everyone was so surprised by the crowd. British sports fans travel everywhere to watch sport so it was always likely they would be even more enthusiastic in this country, at a home Games. The whole country seemed high on it, everyone smiling and talking to each other. It was great to be in London at that time. There were so many fantastic Olympic moments that it’s almost unfair to single any one of them out. Sir Chris Hoy, the boxers, Andy Murray and then, of course, Sir Bradley Wiggins. What he achieved in winning the Tour de France and then coming to London and winning the time trial was phenomenal. That really took some guts. But I love his character too: the sideburns, the rock and roll. It breaks the ‘serious’ mould you get with most people in sport. He’s exactly what Britain’s about.

  It was a dizzying sixteen days and I loved being a spectator, watching Team GB do so well and get third place in the medal table. So many heroes and so many great memories. But I couldn’t be too distracted. My time was fast approaching and I had to be ready.

  CHAPTER 11

  TEN DAYS, FOUR GOLDS

  I was driving across a railway crossing on my way to training in Richmond Park when I saw it for the first time. There, in giant letters, was the Channel 4 slogan which would come to define the spirit of the London 2012 Paralympic Games:

  ‘THANKS FOR THE WARM-UP.’

  It really made me laugh. And made me excited, too. Not only because the Games were so close now, but because it was so bold, so confident and so totally unapologetic. For the first time I didn’t feel that people were going to come and watch athletes like me out of sympathy. Everyone wanted to be a part of it. There might have been a seventeen-day break between the Olympics and the Paralympics but it didn’t really stop. People couldn’t wait to get going again. It was just the second half of the same show.

  For years I had been dreaming about my home Games. Ever since Jacques Rogge opened that envelope in Singapore in 2005 and read out London’s name my life had been building towards this moment, ten days to define my career in sport.

  I wanted to drink it all in, absorb every moment. Even the opening ceremony, which usually I would duck because I was too focused on my first race. This time I was desperate to be there, to march round that track in front of that crowd. Maybe even to carry the Union flag into the Olympic Stadium.

  I never got the chance.

  The UKA head coach, Peter Eriksson, banned all the track and field athletes from going. I was gutted – a little bit of my heart was ripped out. Peter said it was too close to competition. But I wasn’t racing for two days – and we could have been sneaked off
or just gone for the athletes’ parade. Why couldn’t we just do that? Maybe if you had competition the next day, then fair enough.

  Yet we had absolutely no say in it, that’s what I didn’t like. In Beijing we had the option and I was competing the next day and I was feeling rough. On that occasion it made sense for me not to do it. For the home Games, though, we should have had the choice. We could have jumped on a bus or one of the official cars and it would have taken two minutes.

  I’m sure I would have had a good shot at carrying the flag as it was voted on by all the members of Paralympics GB. The wheelchair rugby team put my name down even though I wasn’t going. In the end, the tennis player Peter Norfolk got the honour and I was delighted for him. He is such a nice bloke, a great athlete, and he really deserved it. And besides I shouldn’t moan too much. I got my little bit of glory during the closing ceremony when I brought the GB flag into the stadium.

  Although I watched the ceremony on TV with a few of the other lads from the athletics team, I am slightly embarrassed to say I can’t remember too much about it now. Stephen Hawking’s appearance was inspiring and Seb Coe’s speech was very powerful. But once I knew I wasn’t going I switched off a bit and just focused on the task at hand. The ceremony was a distraction. I had a mission: something I had never done before in any major championships, never mind a home Paralympics – to deliver four gold medals in just ten days.