AFTER an Olympic women’s triathlon race won by Kate Allen, from Austria, in extraordinary circumstances yesterday, Jodie Swallow stood at the finish fighting back tears. Swallow had finished 34th, having won the silver medal in the test event on the same course in October last year. Now the Briton’s injuries and traumas from the past six months had taken their toll.
If Swallow was looking for sympathy, she did not get it from Andrea Whitcombe, who walked out of the Team GB training camp in Paphos, Cyprus, last week in high dudgeon. Michelle Dillon acquitted herself well in sixth place but Julie Dibens, the second Briton, finished thirtieth, seven minutes behind the winner, and Swallow was three minutes farther back.
Whitcombe, watching at home on television, was furious. She had left the camp claiming that neither Swallow nor Dibens was fit to race after injuries and that she, as the reserve, should replace one of them. Whitcombe had been adamant that neither would deliver a medal and indicated last night that she wanted nothing more to do with Graeme Maw, the performance director.
“Michelle had a solid race, but the other two were shocking,” Whitcombe said. “The shape I was in, I could have got a medal. I will never forgive Graeme Maw for this and I don’t want to work with him in future.” Whitcombe’s complaint stems from Maw saying that Swallow would need to prove her fitness after she was picked for the Games, having not raced this year while suffering a torn calf.
In her first race back, Swallow was toppled off her bike by a traffic cone knocked into her path by a television motorcycle. In her only other pre- Olympic race, at a World Cup event in Hungary, she finished fifteenth. But she remained in the team and her performance yesterday suggested she should not have. Swallow was dropped by the chasing pack halfway through the ride and was fourth slowest on the run.
Advertisement
“It was pretty awful, absolutely awful on the run for various reasons, but I toughed it out,” she said. Swallow would have watched Paula Radcliffe, her heroine, drop out of the marathon on Sunday. Had she been tempted to do the same? “It’s the Olympic Games, I’m not going to drop out,” she said. Swallow did not blame the heat or a brutal cycle course. “We have a lot of hot races,” she said. “Everyone’s hot. But it is not just the injuries, it is the traumas that have occurred. It has been an emotional rollercoaster.
“But I am not going to beat myself up about. It’s my first Olympics and I have to use the experience in a positive way. I qualified outright and nobody would forfeit their first Olympics to let somebody else race.” Having held back the tears, Swallow cheered up enough to manage a joke: “Kate Allen ran bloody well to win — it was quite nice to listen to on my last lap.”
Swallow had just set off on the last of her three run laps when Allen completed one of the sport’s great turnarounds. In 28th place after the 40km ride, Allen pulled back every runner ahead of her, overtaking Loretta Harrop, from Australia, to win in the last 100 metres. Harrop had begun the 10km run 2min 48sec ahead of Allen.
Raised in Australia, Allen was backpacking in Austria when she met her future husband, who introduced her to triathlon eight years ago, when she was 26. She surprised even herself yesterday, not to mention her parents, who live in Geelong, near Melbourne. “I told them it wasn’t worth coming over,” Allen said. “I told them to save their money for a holiday.”
Allen thanked Dibens for taking the pace on the bike, enabling her to sit in the pack and keep within striking distance come the run. Dibens’s sacrifice, though, had been intended to help Dillon, her British team-mate, who is a superior runner, and who she hoped to deliver to within reach of a medal after the ride.