Paralympic Games: It’s no longer a marathon but a sprint for Richard Whitehead

Double amputee is favourite for 200m gold after he was denied the chance to race over his preferred distance
29 August 2012

Imagine Paula Radcliffe deciding one day to give up the marathon and take on the Olympic champion Allyson Felix and the rest of world’s best over the 200 metres.

To even consider such a thing would be utterly absurd and, fit or otherwise, it is understandably something that Radcliffe has never even bothered to entertain.

For Richard Whitehead, who is trained by Radcliffe’s former running partner Liz Yelling, that is exactly the switch he has made.

In 2009, he became the first leg amputee to run under the three-hour mark for the marathon.

His best time of two hours and 42.54 minutes was an astonishing achievement for a doubleabove-the-knee amputee, who opted to switch disciplines on hearing the news that his T42 classification would not be eligible for the marathon at the ­Paralympics.

So, with his coach, he quite rationally made the decision to turn his focus to the 200m last year, for which he is the world record holder with a time of 24.93seconds and the favourite to win gold in London.

A look at the 36-year-old’s sporting life reveals why Whitehead has made such an extraordinary move seem commonplace. A former swimmer, gymnast and cricketer, he even represented Britain in ice sledge hockey at the 2006 Winter Paralympics.

“The news about the marathon was a blow but I had enough time to sit down and work out what my skill set was best suited to on the track,” explains Whitehead. “The answer was the 200m.

“As an ageing athlete, I had the knowledge that there are going to be guys younger and quicker than me but if I’m smarter than them I can beat them and be successful. That’s what my coach was telling me.”

Oscar Pistorius, the South African known as ‘Blade runner’, has said that Whitehead is the athlete he is most excited about seeing compete in London because of the success of the switch he has made.

Trying to get to the bottom of what exactly drives Whitehead is not completely straightforward, with a number of threads combining to push him forward. The first inkling comes from his initial sporting foray in swimming.

“I was four years old and I was taken to the pool,” he recalls. “And I hated it and cried my eyes out.”

But tellingly, he stuck at it and became an accomplished swimmer before packing in the sport 15 years ago.

Whitehead’s parents decided to take him to an all-boys’ gymnastics club at the age of 12 where he excelled alongside his able-bodied peers on the rings and parallel bars.

He made the decision that “impairment or a disability isn’t going to stop me” and his coach told Whitehead that when his time comes, he’d be successful in sport.

His running ambitions were inspired at the age of 11 by watching Terry Fox, who had lost a leg to cancer, attempt to run the breadth of Canada only for secondary cancer to halt his journey.

Closer to home and more recently, a cricketing friend, Simon Mellows, lost his life to sarcoma, which inspired him to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Relief and Sarcoma UK by running the New York Marathon.

At the time, he did not have the carbon fibre prosthetics he uses today but manufacturer Össur stepped in to supply them, enabling Whitehead to realise his ambition both in New York and ever since.

“Simon’s widow and two children will be in the stadium for my race in London,” says Whitehead, a poignant reminder of the beginning of his successful running career. “These are the people that push me and I will think about Simon on the startline. I’ll be saying to myself, ‘Richard, it’s your time to step up to the plate’.”

Whatever happens in the race, he says the expected noise in the Olympic Stadium “will be something to put in the memory banks forever”.

Although his aim is to win, he insists it is much more than that.

“I aim to touch people but it’s really important that my story isn’t about being disabled but being an athlete that just had challenges in their way and overcame them,” he says. “Everyone in life has a challenge, a barrier or whatever. It’s been a long journey to this point but mine’s been about overcoming that barrier.

“I don’t want people to think there’s that double amputee but there’s an athlete and if you’re positive you can make positive things happen.”

Whitehead oozes positivity from every pore. Yelling, who coaches him remotely, talks of him being the perfect athlete to work with as he is so driven and upbeat in his outlook to training, however relentless.

On his forearm is quite simply the message “Cometh the hour, cometh the man”. For Whitehead at the Paralympics, it will be more aptly about 25 seconds of the track at the precise time of 11.23am on Saturday.

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