Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon Read online

  “What, me? Do you reckon?”

  “Yes, no problem. When do you want to do it?”

  I explained that I had to visit the Calvert Trust the following day, and then back to Birmingham for work. But Easter was a possibility.

  “Aye, no problem. Leave us your address and we’ll sort something out.”

  The next day I went to the Calvert Trust and saw the accommodation block, some of the equipment they proposed to use, including kayaks, Canadian canoes and sailing dinghies, and the intended development of a local stables so that visitors to the Centre could also try horse-riding. The provision of Canadian canoes seemed to me particularly interesting. They were more difficult than a kayak for a single individual to control, though probably more stable. However, in the event of a capsize, there was no prospect of doing an Eskimo roll, which was a theoretical possibility with a kayak (though not for someone with my level of paralysis). On the other hand, with a Canadian, there was no chance of being trapped: you just fell out. Clearly, there were pros and cons of each type of canoe, though only the Canadian offered the possibility of taking a wheelchair with you – I couldn’t see how it would be practical to strap a wheelchair to the deck of a kayak and still keep the thing stable. And the carrying capacity of a Canadian was vastly greater than that of a kayak. All very interesting, but it was the chance meeting with Boyd Millen that stuck in the brain.

  Back to work, and in the evenings trying to flesh out remaining bits of my time in the USA. With the agreement of the director general of the WCMT I formally applied for the Outward Bound course. I was accepted, but the Trust felt it necessary to take out full insurance cover over and above that which was normal practice for Fellows going abroad. I don’t remember the cost of the course, but the director general of the Trust rang me up about the cost of the insurance to cover me on the MOBS course (which naturally reduced the availability of money to fund the rest of my time in the USA): £400 for the 10 days! Further developments: Bill Parkinson told me about someone he had met in the USA who was at the forefront of the Therapeutic Recreation movement. This had spread beyond a narrow academic focus into Parks and Recreation departments whose responsibilities included the provision of recreation facilities and activities for their local populations. A motto – “Recreation is part of being well, so why not make it a part of becoming well” – succinctly expressed the philosophy. There was a strong academic group in TR (as it was known) at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and one of the leaders was coming to the UK in the spring. One of his activities was to give a talk at a leisure centre in Birmingham. So I went to that, was introduced to the speaker, Jerry Hitzhusen, and Columbia became another stop on the summer’s programme.

  And then Easter came and it was back up to Keswick. On Easter Sunday I met Boyd outside the Moot Hall in spitting rain, so bad that I put my waterproofs on. And off we went, Boyd mostly in front with me following, except where there were steep downhill sections where I let the wheelchair go. The steepest climb was just after what was then the Swiss Lodore Hotel. It was a short stretch, barely 20 yards long, but was the most difficult section of the route – this way round.

  We crossed over the river at Grange, where I took my waterproofs off – it had both stopped raining and got considerably warmer – had a drink, and carried on up the climb to Manesty and the superb view from the south-west corner of the lake across to Skiddaw. Contouring along the road, we reached what I didn’t know of (though Boyd did): the steep zig-zag descent at Hawse End with a cattle grid across the road. I did a back-wheel balance, bounced across the grid and continued on to the junction where I’d first met Boyd. And then through Portinscale and back to Keswick. We had some food and a drink in a café, and then went our separate ways. A week or so later I had a letter from Boyd – well, it wasn’t a letter at all, just a small cutting from the local newspaper, “The Keswick Reminder”, which reported our trip round the lake as having taken 2 hours 23 minutes. And with the possible exception of his appearance the following year at an event to be described later on, that was the last I heard from him. But not of him: many years later in “The Cumberland News” it was reported that he had just completed a double Bob Graham round.

  It never occurred to me at the time that if we had gone round Derwentwater in the opposite direction, anti-clockwise – which, after all, was the direction I was taking when I first met Boyd – the circumnavigation would have ground to a halt after only 3 miles or so, at Hawse End. I’ve been across cattle grids since, lots of times, but it would have been quite impossible to do so on an uphill gradient, with the road either side being about 1 in 8 (or steeper, maybe 1 in 6). And I’m not sure that the pedestrian gate alongside the cattle grid could have been negotiated by a wheelchair, not independently anyway. Such are the vagaries of trying something like this for the first time.

  The fellowship was beginning to fill out. The annual meeting of the American Spinal Cord Injury Foundation would be followed by a visit to the American equivalent of Naidex, the National Aids for the Disabled Exhibition, which by then had been running in Britain for about five years. Then to Columbia, Missouri, followed immediately by the MOBS course. Any recovery needed would be spent at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (though recovery wasn’t the primary purpose of the visit), but after that was a blank, except for a planned visit to a highly developed centre for disabled people in San Francisco, and a day visiting a high school in Sacramento where, according to “Sports ’n Spokes”, they had an integrated sports and recreation programme for physically disabled and non-disabled children. I hoped to be able to fill in the blank 10 days using contacts made at the meeting in Chicago.

  The Internationals 1978

  Earlier that year I’d won the silver medal in table-tennis in my class at the Nationals, and was asked if I’d like to go to the Internationals. Five years earlier I would have jumped at the chance but now, with bigger fish to fry, I didn’t exhibit much enthusiasm at the prospect, and accordingly (and rightly) wasn’t selected. But I went to Stoke anyway, to see if there were any useful contacts to be made. That aspect of the visit wasn’t successful, but there were a couple of features about wheelchairs which presaged developments in the near future.

  At that time the fundamental rule was that you used the same wheelchair for your sport as you used in everyday life. That is, racing, basketball, table-tennis … the wheelchair was all the same. (By analogy, it would be like using your everyday shoes also for playing football, or skiing!) It is easy to see that this would curtail the costs, but at the same time it prevented the development of chairs specifically designed to address the biomechanical requirements of individual sports: what you need for racing is quite different from what you need for basketball or tennis (though wheelchair tennis was as yet unknown in Britain). The first new development I noticed was in wheelchair basketball. There were few regulations about the chairs, but the backrest had to be at least a prescribed minimum height (to avoid people with good balance sitting on top of the backrest and thereby gaining a huge advantage in height); and the footplates had to be exactly 4 inches from the ground, so you didn’t run into an opponent’s shins. But one of the remaining problems was getting your fingers trapped when in a melee with other chairs: squashed fingers was a well-known side-effect of the sport. Now, someone produced a simple bit of gear which reduced the risk.

  The cross-bars of a wheelchair, which enable the chair to be folded, were held together by a bolt through the middle of each bar. Now, someone produced a gadget which was fitted to the cross-bars, so that when the chair was unfolded, the main wheels became splayed, outwards at the bottom and inwards at the top. The camber to the main wheels simultaneously made the chair more stable when turning quickly (highly desirable in basketball), lighter to push and turn, and also meant that you could grip the handrim of your chair without the risk of getting your fingers squashed. And you were still using the same chair as in everyday life.

  The other development was in ra
cing. At that time Stoke didn’t have a race-track, but used a strip of tarmac 6 lanes wide. It ran from some metal railings across one end along a gently rising, undulating track for about 130 yards. Individual races were started at the bottom and went uphill; any downhill leg in relay races had to allow 10 yards at the bottom end so that the wheelchairs could stop before piling into the metal railings. (If this sounds extraordinarily amateurish for an event claiming to be the highest level of wheelchair sports in the world, it should be noted that it was largely built, and run, on charitable donations, and many of the staff were volunteers.)

  The standard adult wheelchair had 24” wheels. Now, the Australians turned up with 26” wheels. How much more difficult it was to transfer out of, and into, the chair, when you had to lift yourself over a wheel 2” higher than normal I never found out; but the difference when racing was obvious. Slow at the start, they soon caught up the 24”-wheeled chairs everyone else used, and powered on to finish yards ahead, evidence of the mechanical advantage given by using larger wheels. And the Australians presumably managed to persuade the powers that be that their chairs were indeed the same ones that they used in everyday life.

  The lessons taught by these two developments didn’t go unheeded, and at some stage the generic regulations on the use of wheelchairs were abolished, with each sport being allowed to develop its own equipment as the biomechanical requirements dictated – within whatever regulations were deemed appropriate for each sport. In addition to basketball, cambered wheels are seen now in racing (slightly), and most markedly in tennis and wheelchair rugby, whilst racing allows main wheels up to 27” in diameter.

  Chicago

  And so to the Fellowship. The flight to Chicago was in very early August, on a jumbo. Unusually (I thought), there was tarmac loading, not through a jetway. But not being a seasoned international traveller, I couldn’t really say whether this was normal or not. We were taken downstairs to a departure lounge which looked out across to where a jumbo was parked; ours, we were told. Airport staff came and ushered people onto low floor coaches which drove off towards the plane parked a few hundred yards away. I was told to wait, someone would be along. Not having anywhere else to go, I waited. And waited. And waited … After about 45 minutes someone came down and said “Oh! What are you doing here?” “Waiting to get on the Chicago plane.” “Oh God…” and disappeared. There was a flurry of activity which ended with my being put on the platform of a fork lift truck and driven across the tarmac to the plane. I was lifted up to a gaping hole in the side of the plane, much wider than a single door’s width, and “guarded” with an orange tape across the gap, and two powder-blue-suited air hostesses either side, laughing their socks off. The first approach was at too sharp an angle, leaving a gap of about 18” between the platform and the plane, so the driver backed off and had another go. This time he got it right, and after a bit of adjustment for height, I pushed on board and off we went.

  And that, I supposed, was that. Get to Chicago, unload, meet a man from the local chapter of the American Spinal Cord Injury Association who was coming to welcome me to his city, and the conference – I was possibly the only Brit going to the conference, and therefore something of a curiosity – and off to the hotel where the conference was being held. The best-laid plans…

  O’Hare airport in Chicago was utterly chaotic. The usual rule for wheelchair users when flying was, I came to discover, first on, last off, so by the time I reached the arrival lounge the chaos was in full flight, so to speak. The poor British Airways rep. was trying to cope (and not very successfully, it seemed) with a plane-load of passengers, one-third of whom had had had their baggage left behind in London; including my wheelchair. This looked as though it might be a problem: the airport authorities put me in an airport chair, but wouldn’t allow me to take it outside the terminal building. Once through immigration and customs, though, I was able to meet the man from the conference – what a lucky break that was! – and he rushed off home to bring me his spare chair, which I used for two days before my own chair reappeared, just left in the hotel room with no explanation or apology.

  The next morning I was at the front desk of the hotel waiting to ask about changing some travellers’ cheques when someone slapped me on the back from behind. “Hiya, you one of our guys?”

  Marathons

  At my grammar school in the 1950s we were taught Latin, but not Greek, which I don’t think was available to anyone (interestingly, Russian was, though only as a 6th form option). And though I remember absolutely nothing about the History syllabus in the first 3 years, the O-level syllabus was on Modern European History from the French Revolution onwards; nothing about Greek or Roman history at all. So what little I knew about Greek history was picked up from…who knows where? Wasn’t there something of a dust-up between Athens and Sparta at some time? And weren’t the Greeks always being threatened by the Persians? Wasn’t there a battle between them somewhere, sometime? Oh yes, that was the battle of Marathon, wasn’t it? When someone ran to Athens bringing news of a great victory for the Greeks, against overwhelming odds, and then died? Bit of a short straw, really.

  The wars between Greece and Persia went on for almost two generations, 492 to 449 BC. In fact, the Persians had already occupied a number of Greek islands as well as Greek cities on the mainland of Asia Minor, or what we now call Turkey. Of course, this wasn’t Greece as we understand it today, a single political entity, but, rather, a collection of separate self-governing city-states which had cultural connections through, amongst other matters, the language, participation in the ancient Olympic Games – and resistance to incursion by a foreign power, namely Persia.

  What is clear is that the first Persian invasion of the Greek mainland took place in 490 BC, and in effect it ended with the defeat of the Persians at the Battle of Marathon. There are various versions of what happened, both before and after: that Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta (140 miles!) to seek military help; that he ran from Marathon to Athens carrying news of the victory; that after the battle the Greek army marched the 25 miles to Athens to see the Persian fleet sailing away; and so on. Whatever the exact truth of these (and other) accounts, what matters for our purposes is the legend which has come down to us: someone, whom history has named Pheidippides, did run from the battle of Marathon to Athens carrying news of the victory, uttered the words “We were victorious” and then died, presumably from exhaustion.

  The relevance of this is that when the newly-formed International Olympic Committee was looking for events to include in the first Olympic Games of the modern era, at Athens in 1896, someone suggested recreating the heroic run of Pheidippides and having a race from Marathon to Athens. Because of the starting point, the race was called a marathon. There were only 15 runners, but as luck would have it (for the organisers) the race was won by a Greek shepherd, Spyridon Louis, simultaneously establishing the event per se, and its popularity.

  There is nothing much to be said about either the Paris Games in 1900 – held there to honour Pierre de Coubertin, who had had the idea for the Olympic Games in the first place – or those in St Louis in 1904; but the London Games in 1908 have come to be remembered for two matters. The Games were held at the White City stadium in West London, and although the marathon distance had been set at 26 miles, it was due to finish as the runners entered the stadium. At the request of Queen Alexandra, the finishing line was extended by 385 yards so that the finish of the race would be in front of the royal box. The length of the race was finally standardised in 1921 at the London distance, 26 miles 385 yards. The second matter for which the London race is remembered is, of course, the Italian Dorando Pietri, who was staggering towards the finish line but was wobbling off the course. He was helped across the finish line by concerned officials, but was subsequently disqualified precisely for having been given external assistance.

  In 1894, the civic leaders in the two New England states of Massachusetts and Maine decided to institute a public holiday, to be ca
lled Patriot’s Day, to commemorate the War of Independence battles at Lexington and Concord in 1775. They wanted some event to mark this day, and two years later, noting the success of the Athens marathon, decided to hold a marathon of their own, in Boston. The first race was in 1897, over a distance of 24.5 miles, on April 19th, which date was used for the next 72 years until Patriot’s Day was moved in 1969 to the third Monday in April; the race has remained there ever since. The race was extended to 26 miles 385 yards in 1924, to fit in with the IAAF rules standardising the distance in 1921. The extension of the distance also made it possible to position the finishing line in downtown Boston.

  The IAAF was founded in 1912, but at that time dealt only with athletics for men. The Federation Sportive Feminine International (FSFI) existed between 1921 and 1936, at which point it merged with the IAAF, which then accepted the records of the FSFI. Athletics events for women (and men) were organised at local, that is to say, national, level. An 800 metre world record for women was recognised as early as 1922, in which year the first British title (over 880 yards, or half a mile) was awarded; but the USA didn’t award its first title at this distance until 1927, only a year before the metric distance appeared in the Olympic Games for the first time. 1928 was the first year women were allowed to race at the Olympics at all, with 100 metres being the other distance contested. Curiously, the 800 metre didn’t reappear until Rome in 1960, whilst the first women’s Olympic marathon was in 1984 at Los Angeles.

  This, however, is getting ahead of things. Following the announcement in 1896 of the intention to hold a marathon race as part of the Olympic Games, in March of that year Stavatis Rovithi (a woman) ran the length of the proposed course; and a month later, another woman, Melpomene, presented herself at the start of the Olympic race but was prevented from starting. So she ran anyway, running along the side of the course and finishing in about 4½ hours, 90 minutes behind Spiridon Louis. In 1918 Marie-Louise Ledrun completed the Paris marathon in 5h 40 m. However, the IAAF recognises Violet Percy as the first, properly-timed, female marathon runner, in 3h 40m 22s, in 1926.