WHO wants to be ordinary? I remember Bill Sweetenham, the performance director of British swimming, pointing the question like a loaded gun. The swimmers he addressed — cowed, inspired, defiant, each in his and her own way — drank in his words and worked out that the right answer was probably “not me”.
Kelly Holmes has always been ordinary. Or so we thought. Ordinary, that is to say, by the standards of elite runners. That is pretty extraordinary in itself, of course, a considerable achievement. All the same, it is not the sort of thing that thrills the pants off the nation. We want golden girls. Holmes made it clear from early on that she was a bronze girl. Statuesque and splendid, yes. We admired her and respected her, but we did not love her. For elite runners, true love is victory-dependent — ask Paula Radcliffe if you doubt me.
Holmes was a good egg. Absolutely first class; absolutely first class of the second class. She lacked, it seemed, what it takes to go one better — a touch more bounce in the legs, a touch more self-belief at the sharp end of the biggest races. She was always going to run into a minor medal. Good old Kelly, eh? Always there or thereabouts, meaning never quite there.
So she put together a small but choice collection of bronzes and silvers and it seemed it would ever be thus. Last year I watched her run in for a silver medal behind Maria Mutola and she was absolutely delighted. That is the level she had settled for, it seemed. And jolly good, too. When she retired, people would call her “a great servant of British athletics”.
It wasn’t clear then, not to anyone and least of all to herself, that when it came down to it, Holmes wasn’t the serving type. At heart she was more of a mistress. And over the course of the past week, she changed the habit of a sporting lifetime: she stopped serving and started ruling.
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She won the 800 metres a week ago today with an air of epic surprise, a race-plan that was clearly based on the idea that she would come from the back, run towards the front and see what happened. What happened was that she finished in front of everybody else. The mixture of astonishment and delight was one of the most glorious sights of the Games: amazing, Holmes.
On Saturday night she ran the 1,500 metres and her game-plan was to come from the back, run towards the front and win. Elementary. It worked triumphantly. At the age of 34, after a lifetime of effort, she was suddenly, in this week of all weeks, the best in the world. She brought off the middle-distance double to become one of the best there has ever been. Nothing less. Ask Sebastian Coe — he never managed it.
Holmes has always kept the faith. That is the heart of the matter. This is the first big championship for which she has had a preparation without injury. Her body, though fast, was like a temperamental Formula One car — if it wasn’t giving trouble here, it was breaking down there. The stresses of high-performance training found out her physical weaknesses again and again.
In Sydney four years ago, she had only six weeks’ training before the Games and got bronze; as fantastic in its way as everything she has achieved this time around, but rather less sexy. At the 1996 Games in Atlanta, she ran with a stress fracture and later spent seven weeks in plaster. She was favourite for the 1997 World Championships but tore a calf muscle shortly before the competition. She’s that kind of athlete. Or so it seemed.
But Holmes took up arms against a sea of groin strains. You’d have thought that a lifetime of injury and high- performance training would have worn out the body and wearied the soul, but no. She was at last given that thing she had always been denied, a sustained period without injuries. A time without anxieties that led inexorably to a time without excuses.
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And again, you might have thought her long bronze years would have dulled her edge when it came to the test. But not a bit of it. She ran as if this was the moment she had always been waiting for. The Olympic Games is the highest test in sport. It is about timing. It is not just about being the best, it is about being the best now. The Games offer the supreme moment and ask the ultimate question. And Holmes emerged from the dowdiness of her own past to embrace a glorious present.
I have visited the National Archaeological Museum here in Athens and admired the great heroic bronze figures. Holmes in victory reminded me of just such a thing: recast in gold.