When Pat Cash, the Wimbledon champion, telephoned John Aldridge at 3am from the other side of the world, he knew he would be obtaining the best possible medical advice on his troublesome knee injury. The first medical officer to have been appointed by British Gymnastics did not object to being woken from his reverie; indeed, he often was. Any number of leading sportsmen and women would seek his guidance at all hours and his telephone was never turned off.
Aldridge was chief medical officer of British Gymnastics for nearly 30 years – never charging a penny, although it often interrupted his work as an orthopaedic surgeon. Aldridge operated on David Moorcroft’s troublesome calf the year before he broke the world 5,000 metres record and in gratitude Moorcroft would open fetes in Aldridge’s home town of Rugby. The Atherton twins, Andrew and Kevin, gymnasts turned Cirque du Soleil artistes, said: “Everything we’ve achieved and everything we are today is in part because of this amazing man. He fixed us when we were broken.” Footballers from Coventry City, whose ground was near his home, were treated in the run-up to the 1987 FA Cup final.
Of Moorcroft, Aldridge said: “He had suffered with posterior calf pain that was difficult to diagnose, but really seemed like a compartment syndrome — no pressure measurements were available then. The season before I had watched him run, run well and win races, so I was prepared to accept his word that he would be able to do better still if we solved his problem, Of course I was prepared to decompress his calf.”
Cash had lost track of time when ringing from Australia. Aldridge was able to give him sufficiently sound advice to enable him to resume his successful career. There was never any difficulty in getting hold of Aldridge as his landline number was in the telephone directory and, although a technophobe who would be confused when gymnasts playfully changed the ring tune, his mobile phone would be left on when away from the operating theatre at Coventry and Warwick Hospital.
Aldridge was there one day in 1979 when John Atkinson, the national coach of British Gymnastics, wandered into his clinic in search of orthopaedic advice. Forced to leave owing to Aldridge being busy, he was surprised to open the front door of his home that evening and find Aldridge checking to see what he had wanted. A friendship was forged for life. “John only had one diary and that was ‘life.’ Where there was a need there was John, and he got by on not much sleep,” Atkinson said.
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So began an association with British Gymnastics which, pre-lottery funding, lacked the finance to treat athletes, who were expected to go to the back of the NHS queue even before significant events. Aldridge travelled all over the world with Atkinson, attending six Olympic Games. Soon gymnasts were permitted to go to the front of queues in Accident and Emergency in return for a payment, not to the specialists, but to the hospital. “My father’s big problem was that he could not say no,” said Aldridge’s son James, “but he became more and more interested in sports medicine.”
Aldridge and Atkinson pressed for the introduction of a minimum age in elite events after evidence emerged, particularly in women’s gymnastics, that over-training of youngsters was creating musculo-skeletal problems in later age, and delaying the natural onset of puberty. He also worked closely with the Fédération Internationale Gymnastique medical commission to drive through changes to the scoring systems to ensure that what was rewarded was a difficult move, not a dangerous one.
His involvement with British Gymnastics took him into the wider field of sports medicine. Aldridge was instrumental in establishing this as a speciality in its own right; he also had a considerable input into the British Association of Sports and Exercise Medicine, of which he was president — and, in 2013, the recipient of the organisation’s Sir Roger Bannister Medal — and the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Medicine, both of which have done much to improve the way in which sportsmen and women are treated at every level.
Michael John Aldridge grew up in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, the son of a factory manager. He attended The Becket School in Nottingham and was the first member of his family to go to university. He read medicine at Birmingham and, as part of his degree course, spent three months in Rhodesia where he met his wife-to-be, Eva Nicholson, who was a trainee midwife. They were married in 1970. Qualifying as a surgeon, he was appointed a consultant at Coventry and Warwick Hospital. Their home was close to Rugby School, where he became a governor.
Aldridge had also applied for, and been turned down by, St Mary’s, Paddington. He always assumed that he had been rejected because he had struck the interviewer as a philistine when he had been asked: “What are you reading at the moment?” and had answered, “A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.” The interviewer had replied: “I don’t think that’s by him . . . ”
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His son James said: “Whatever that may tell us about the quality of examiners in medicine at the time, maybe that put him off reading for life. Or maybe it was symptomatic of how busy his days were, but either way for as long as anyone can remember he always had a book by his bedside, but never got beyond the first page before falling asleep. He would then start all over again the following night.”
When Aldridge was appointed a consultant in 1978, he was one of four orthopaedic surgeons in his hospital. By the time he retired there were 32 covering the same geographical area. He and his fellow original gang of four would joke that this proved either they had each been doing the work of eight people, or that the 32 were clearly not pulling their weight. Being constantly on-call left him with a particular skill — the ability to sleep anywhere and at any time: in between operations in the tea room, upright on a train or in the midst of simulated nuclear attack when on exercises for the Territorial Army Medical Corps.
Consultations were not confined to the clinic or indeed his home. His son James recalls him diagnosing — by hand — a meniscus tear of a friend’s knee in the Glassblower pub near Piccadilly Circus before going to see a musical. His wife tells of the time that, delayed on a flight back from Hong Kong, he set up an impromptu clinic on the floor of the airport after a chance meeting with the England sevens rugby team.
He was bolstered by his strong Catholic faith — he was appointed a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, was a great believer in serving others and had travelled to Lourdes as a teenager. He was a keen cook and, befitting a man of his training, was adept at carving meat — albeit not with a surgeon’s scalpel. He also enjoyed playing cricket in his youth, captaining his school first XI and playing at village level until he was put off by a team-mate with an interest in flying who ferried him to a match in his bi-plane. The only navigational aid was a road map and a decision to “follow the M1, then the M6 and then turn right at Cannock services.” All four of his sons, James, who became a QC, Gregory and Nicholas, who went into financial management, and Stephen, who also became an orthopaedic surgeon, won scholarships to Rugby and went on to Cambridge University.
“John was always late — I recall the boy racer in the white Peugeot 205 GTI, but it did not matter. He would always find time to talk. A patient bedside manner worthy of a gold medal,” said Eddie van Hoof, the head national coach of British Gymnastics.
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Although Aldridge never regarded himself as any kind of surgeon to the stars, he said, towards the end of his life, that the moment of which he would most proud of in sport was “the podium when Beth Tweddle won the first gold medal by a female athlete in gymnastics for Great Britain. Beth epitomises the single-mindedness athletes have to have to achieve their goals. I hope I have played some small part in her success.”
John Aldridge, surgeon, was born on December 1, 1942. He died of Alzheimer’s on September 15, 2016, aged 73