We look at her. The body that has let her down in numerous stadiums — here at the World Games seven years ago, in Atlanta at the Olympics in 1996 — now so thoroughly honed, so powerful and so enduring: small wonder that her first words after the triumph were to thank Alison Rose, the Sheffield physiotherapist who over the past two months had treated her body, but also listened to her mental anguish.
“When I was in South Africa, at my wit’s end about a calf injury I couldn’t get properly diagnosed, Ali was on the phone for me day after day. She’s helped to keep me in one piece, and I’ve told Ali more than I told anybody else about what’s inside me.”
An amazing tribute to the usually unseen, unheard members of the physic team without whom few athletes would function, any more than that Ferrari would run without a mechanic.
But consider what Holmes has achieved in the past nine days. When she knelt on the track after the finish of the 1500m, her head cradled in her hands, the whole body throbbing with emotion and possibly fatigue, she was the only British athlete to win a gold medal on the track at these Games.
An hour later, the men’s 4x100m relay team, surely inspired by her, delivered. But Holmes, draped in two Union flags, one for each of her triumphs, was the first British female ever to win two track titles at one Olympics. She equalled two of the most renowned middle-distance runners in history, Svetlana Masterkova in 1996 and Tatayana Kazankina in 1976, who had pulled off this double.
Advertisement
Holmes had joined a small elite of six other British women who had won one Olympic gold, and in a week doubled it. Last night she said: “I keep thinking somebody is going to come and wake me up — that it’s a dream and I still have the final to run.”
Having spent almost three hours with her on the eve of this Olympiad, I know how she yearned to win a medal. Not necessarily a gold, she said, but a medal to prove to her what a 100% passion and years of hard work could achieve.
She was talking as a “clean” athlete, before a Games that was to expose more contaminated drug cheats than any other. Yet when she cruised around the finalists yesterday, there was an eerie lack of camaraderie, an initial lack of human response to her.
It was a little shocking. Later, Tatanya Tomashova, the Russian silver medallist, said that she had relied on her sprint, but with Holmes it was good enough only for second place. Maria Cioncan, the Romanian who won bronze, admitted: “I tried to stay behind Kelly Holmes for as long as possible, but I couldn’t follow her pace.”
Nobody at these Olympics could. Her triumph runs contrary to the British team’s travails. Her story is not one of being a minority, the only child in a family of five who is black, the recipient of genes from a Jamaican father and an English mother. Nor is it specifically about being one of the few mixed-race children growing up on a council estate in Kent. But it is a fusion of those things, and a response in life to being a more driven individual than her siblings, and a remarkable obsession to push herself towards that podium.
Advertisement
The look of startled surprise, tantamount to an out-of-body experience, which overwhelmed her after last Monday’s 800m, was replaced with sheer relief last night. “The hardest thing,” she said, “was just to keep my focus. ‘One more,’ I kept saying to myself, ‘one more’. I’ve had an injury-free year and look what’s happened. I’m blown away.”
The lady doth protest too much. Between the 1500m semi-final and the final her attitude was one of cold, calculated determination. Tiredness was the enemy, and as much as Reebok, her shoe sponsor, wanted to exploit her status among Olympians, she pulled out of four pre-arranged interviews to keep the mind concentrated, the body fresh.
She was told that Ann Packer, one of only six British women to previously bring home an Olympic track gold, told her on the BBC (where 8.3m viewers watched last Monday): “Kelly, you’ve lifted the country. You could have asked no more of yourself, physically or tactically.”
But Holmes could not afford to be softened by praise or satisfied by the gold beside her bed at the Olympic Village. She needed to shut out the acclaim, to summon the hunger that she had before the 800m.
She is a mature athlete, with time in her 34th year moving in the wrong direction. The UK Athletics team management, by now desperate for Holmes’s value to their campaign, advised a complete shut-out of all extraneous influences.
Advertisement
Why change a winning formula? Why open yourself up to distractions? Stay with the commitment, keep the energy levels high, try to repeat the hunger, the longing for that first medal.
Like the good solider she used to be, serving the British Army for 10 years, Holmes followed orders. And though the Olympic Games are supposed to be about the taking part, correct me if you are not exceedingly grateful for the winning that singles out Holmes from the rest.
She had dreamed of this since, at 14, she saw on television Sebastian Coe winning the 1500m at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
She had been beset, a month ago, by indecision and self-doubt. “You’re looking at me as if I’m a drama queen,” she said. “One minute I’m full of confidence, the next I’m almost creating injuries in my own mind. I’m ignoring people who have always been there for me. I’m struggling with it, and it’s very close to a crisis of confidence.”
Some drama; and now some queen. The town of Tonbridge and the neighbourhood of Hildenborough in Kent, where she was born and raised, have already engaged an open-top bus for the homecoming on Wednesday. The government has apparently ordered a London omnibus to parade the best of British — and as someone once said, you wait and wait for one, and two come along at the same time.
Advertisement
For Holmes, the agonies of waiting have been so long, often so painful, it has felt like the nation sharing her tearing of tendons and sinews. There have been injuries at major televised events, and those have been aired in our living rooms via television. The girl has got guts, we would say, and the perseverance is the true grit of the British in times of adversity.
We could turn the TV on or off, and leave her to the drawn-out consequences of pushing on beyond the pain. She had begun her Army career in nursing and switched to being a PTI, a sergeant ordering strapping 6ft soldiers through the rigours she was determined to show by example.
“It wasn’t until I came out of the Army six years ago that I realised how big I had become in the arms and upper body,” she reflects. “It was a different kind of fitness.” It was bulk, achieved in part by heavy weight lifting, and the raised veins in her arms is a legacy, even after she trimmed down the biceps.
Some of this conflict, the Army career she opted for at 18 and enjoyed as, among other things, the British Army judo champion, was resolved when, at 28, she decided to pursue her Olympian dreams. She was a talent made in England, of a Caribbean father who drifted apart from her teenaged mother when Kelly was two years old. There was a stepfather throughout her childhood, a growing family who more often than not let her be “the boss” and get her way because no game was ever allowed to finish if Kelly was losing.
There has been a reconciliation with her father, who goes to her events in Britain, and who takes care of the two crossbred dogs, Whitney and Barney, that Kelly took from rescue kennels. “They’re mongrels, characters — like me.“
Advertisement
Leaving them, the family, her friends to train and compete abroad is the one hardship she admits to.
Since 2002, she had wintered in South Africa, just south of Johannesburg where she lived at the nine-bedroom home of her greatest rival, and until this summer the most successful 800m runner in the world, Maria Mutola.
Nobody knows Mutola like Holmes does, and when she stalked her former training partner around the track, coming out of her shadow to pass her on the way to the gold, there was barely a glance between the two.
The 800m crown passed from Mutola to Holmes without a handshake, and though they have shared the same American coach, trained together on routines sent by Margo Jennings by fax or email for two years, they seem distant now.
However, Mutola, fit again after recent hamstring injury, but having lost vital training and conditioning, commented later: “Kelly knows my weaknesses . . . Kelly deserved her gold medal.”
From Tonbridge, Dave Arnold, the coach who shaped the running of Holmes when she was 12, observed: “It was clear from the start that she was a tremendous talent. She never missed a training session, that’s why she is the Olympic champion.”
To those of us who questioned how Holmes might react to revisiting Athens — where her Achilles tendon ruptured during the 1997 World Championships — the answer was writ large on the scoreboard beneath the Olympic flame.
Following that injury, a specialist suggested her career was over because of accumulated wear and tear. It was like telling a dog not to bark. Holmes found other doctors who would manage her injury, and give her hope to continue. But, surely there was a mental scar associated with Athens? “I was never scared of coming back to Athens,“ she replied. “I was more afraid of screwing up, getting my tactics wrong.”
The look in the dark eyes told you that she would strive beyond doubt, as she often has beyond pain. We have to ask now if Holmes is not our greatest female athlete, and that includes poor Paula Radcliffe, whose task her was as unrealistic as it was pre publicised.
We will take from this weekend the memory of Holmes’s courage, her breathtaking leg speed, her conviction, her open mouthed joy.
Back in the Olympic village, sticking to her ice baths and her diet of fish or chicken with veg and rice she finally pulled it all together in mind, body and soul.
Those who understand it best are Mary Rand (long jump, 1964 Tokyo), Packer (800m Tokyo), Mary Peters (pentathlon Munich 1972), Tesa Sanderson (javelin, Los Angeles, 1984), Sally Gunnell (400 metres, Barcelona 1992) and Denise Lewis (heptathlon, Sydney, 2000).
They are our first ladies of the Olympics, our precious few female champions. What we do now is allow Holmes to take her place with that elite, and pray that nothing in these discredited Olympic times comes to cloud the achievement.