Weirwolf Page 9

  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 ra
cing 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.

  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.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE BATTLE OF BEIJING

  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 brea
k-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.