Kelly's a hero

Athletes are regularly told to believe in themselves, their abilities, their training. Without total belief, they will win nothing, they are told.

Athens from hell, and back
 
Yet on Monday night, down in the bowels of Athens’ Olympic Stadium, Kelly Holmes still could not believe what had happened. After a decade of more agonies than ecstasies, it was taking some getting use to being an overnight sensation.
 
“I thought I’d won,” she told the 200-or-so journalists gathered to hear her early reactions to becoming the Olympic 800 metres gold medallist. “But then I thought, ‘No, this can’t be real’.”
 
A belated victory in a global championships for Holmes, at 34 the oldest woman ever to win the Olympic 800m title, was achieved in the stadium where she had plumb the depths of pain and despair just seven years earlier. It is a vignette that says much about Holmes’s whole career.

Career beginnings
 
But let’s go back to the start. As a 12-year-old schoolgirl in Kent, her teacher had sent her off to Tonbridge, where there was an athletics club with a reputation for bringing on talented young runners. Within a year, she was an English Schools’ 1,500m champion. Here was a rare, raw talent. She would watch on television as Britons ruled the world in the middle distances, seeing Coe, Ovett and Cram setting world records and winning Olympic medals in her event. When she grew up, Holmes dreamed, she wanted to show that British women could do the same.

Drawn to the Army 
 
In a tale with common themes about disillusioned teenaged athletes, injuries and new outlooks, by the time she was 18, Holmes sought new challenges and became what she calls “Army barmy”, taking a career in the forces, where she developed a reputation as a pocket physical training instructor who would bully men twice her size on the judo mat, or glavanise the Army volleyball team, and who would always be first in line when it came to abseiling down sheer cliffs or rafting own fierce rapids, despite her own fears.

"I could be doing that"
 
Running had slid a long way down Holmes’ priority list when she was in khaki. But then watching the Olympics one day in 1992, she saw Lisa York racing in a British vest. “I know her,” Holmes said to one of her mates in the sergeants’ mess. “I used to beat her when I was a kid.”
 
She recalls that time now. “I thought, ‘Wow, I could be doing that’. If she could do it, I was sure I could. It gave me back the dream I had as a kid of running at the Games.” On such whimsies are lives changed and Olympic dreams born.

European silver, World medal double
 
Holmes was back on track seriously, again consulting her first coach, Dave Arnold, for advice. Within a year, she was racing into the semi-finals of the World Championship 800m in Stuttgart. A year later, by now 24 years old, Holmes won her first international medal, a silver, in the European 1500m. And in 1995 at the IAAF World Championships in Goteborg, Holmes was emulating one of those heroes she had watched on television as a kid when she managed to win medals at both 800 and 1500m.

Lording it in Athens
 
So, 20 years on from watching on television as Sebastian Coe won a silver and gold at the Los Angeles Olympics, on Monday night Holmes leant forward from the top of the Olympic podium to embrace the now ennobled member of the IAAF council as he placed the gold medal around her neck.
 
“I still can’t believe it,” she said, choking back the tears of joy. “I’ve dreamt of this moment since I was 12. That’s a long time. There were times when I got close, but never close enough.” Until now.

Training harder but injured more than ever
 
Because after 1995, maybe Holmes started to want to win just too much. The runner trained harder than ever before, but she was injured so often, there was a growing theory within the inner circles of British athletics that Holmes, alone, was responsible for the increasing debts of the National Health Service.
 
Her doctors' notes is such a heavy tome, it could be used at the Olympic weightlifting: before the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, she suffered a stress fracture but got back to finish fourth at 800; much of the 1998 season was disrupted with injury and illness, but she managed a silver medal at 1500m at the Commonwealth Games; in 2000, she ruptured her calf muscle and had just six weeks to prepare for the Sydney Games, where she won bronze at 800; even at the World Indoor Championships in Budapest earlier this year, a fall in the final of the 1500m denied what she believed was one of her best chances of gold.

1997 disaster
 
But it was in 1997 that the bitterest blow happened. It was World Championship year, with the event staged in Athens. “I don‘t remember much about the stadium, or the city,” Holmes says now. “I wasn’t here very long.
 
“It was the first race, on the first morning of the championships. I was there for, what, all of four minutes, five minutes?
 
“If ever I had a major chance, that was it. I had set my British 1,500m record 3:58.07 earlier in the season and was five seconds faster than anyone else going into those championships. I was really in the shape of my life. To not actually carry that through was heartbreaking.
 
“The lasting memory for me is of limping down the home straight. It was at the 200m point on the track that it happened. I just remember trying to somehow get round the bend and into the home straight with what felt like a golf ball exploding in my calf. Then I was whisked off to Zurich for treatment. Those were my memories of Athens, so they're not very fond ones.”
 
Holmes’s Achilles tendon had ruptured so badly that when the surgeons examined it with a view to repair, they told her that the mass of scar tissue would make it impossible for her to run seriously again, and that she might walk with a permanent limp.

Pinching herself with disbelief
 
So it becomes more understandable, when returning to Athens and winning the ultimate sporting prize, that Holmes can hardly believe her luck. “I have to keep pinching myself. I’ve been in this sort of position before, so I was waiting for something to go wrong, even after I crossed the finishing line. That’s why I was so surprised.
 
“That was probably the best field assembled in a women’s 800 metres for a very long time,” said Holmes. “Any of the girls out there tonight could have won it. I was lucky enough to hang on and win the gold. It is a dream come true.”

A turning point

Were you to analyse Holmes’s career closely, that cruellest of injuries in 1997 was something of a turning point. She now attributes her gratitude to two physical therapists, Gerard Hartmann and Alison Rose, and her coach, the American Margo Jennings, and training partner, Maria Mutola, for resurrecting her career.
 
First Hartmann and, more recently Rose, pummelled and massaged Holmes’s broken down body back into working order. Holmes admits she needs almost constant attention, “Alison has kept my body in one piece.”
 
Then, in November 2002, Holmes decided to pack up her home in London and make one last effort to win Olympic gold by moving to Potchefstroom, near Johannesburg, to live and train at altitude, sharing Mutola’s eight-bedroom house there, receiving training schedules from Jennings by fax and e-mail.
 
“Maria has been the world No.1 for years. Training together with her has been beneficial for both of us.” She handled the question with dignity, but there has been signs of a rift between Mutola an Holmes of late, ever since the Mozambican tripped over her training partner and fell to the track at an indoor race in Birmingham in March.
 
Since then, they have gone their separate ways, Mutola to St Moritz, Holmes to the 1860m altitude of a Spanish ski resort in the Sierra de Guadarrama, between Segovia and Madrid. Holmes explained: “I’ve been concentrating on the 1500, Maria on the 800, we’ve had different race plans entirely.
 
“I based myself where it as more convenient for me and I was able to concentrate on myself.”

Strengths and weaknesses
 
But if track rivalries are one thing, rivalries within training groups can be quite another, especially if both runners have realistic ambitions of the same, single gold medal. Mutola’s anguish at being beaten, her reign as Olympic champion ended, made her bitter after the 800m final.
 
Vulnerable after getting a hamstring injury in July, Mutola put it bluntly: “Kelly and I train together, so she knows my weaknesses.”
 
Mutola, too, must also be aware of Holmes’s strengths, of which guts and perseverance rate very high. The Briton opted to race the 800 as well as the 1500m in Athens only a week before he Games. “It was a risk either way. I had been running really well at 800, but it came before the 1500, so it might have affected that.
 
“But it was also a risk if I just ran the 1500 and missed out on the 800.” In the final, Holmes ran the best tactical race of the eight women to win with a late surge with her best time for nine years, 1:56.38. “I knew I just had to use my head to win,” Holmes said, “but it was my heart that got me to the line first.
 
“I’ve never given up,” she said, in tears as she pinched herself one more time to check that her greatest dream had at last been fulfilled. “But for all the downs I have had, this erases them all.”

Steven Downes for the IAAF