Sport Inc. by Ed Warner

Author:Ed Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

9

OLYMPIAN OPPORTUNITY COST

The 800 metres final for women at the 20091 World Athletics Championships in Berlin was all about Caster Semenya. The South African’s sex was the subject of intense debate among coaches and athletes at the training track, spectators in the Olympic Stadium and global media chasing the story of an athlete who might not, biologically, be what she purported to be. Rising above the barrage of scrutiny, Semenya powered home to win the gold medal. Realising belatedly that they owed a duty of care to the young woman, the IAAF’s media officers spared her the ritual of a post-race press conference, and Britain’s Jenny Meadows, bronze medallist, found herself facing a press whose only interest was in her views of the absent winner’s eligibility to compete. Meadows’ medal was her first at global level. In the maelstrom she barely had time to reflect on the bonus she was due from her kit sponsor for her success, the princely sum of £750.

Jenny Meadows stands five foot one and a third inches tall. ‘I always thought I was five foot one and three quarters, but I’m not apparently. I’ve lost a little bit,’ she tells me, hinting at an attention to detail common among high-performing athletes, but also at an awareness of the adversity that was a motivator throughout her career. The Pocket Rocket regularly surprised by bursting out of packs of taller runners to take a race by the scruff. Hers was a career of consistent promise and medal success, forged in her own fashion often outside the system, blighted by drugs cheats and marked by a degree of lost financial opportunity that makes her equanimity on retirement all the more remarkable.

When we meet to reflect on the cost of pursuing an Olympic dream, Meadows is in what she planned to be her last season on the track, taking on the role of pacemaker to athletes still capable of chasing records. She had paced Britain’s Laura Muir to a European record and had back-to-back races in Doha and Shanghai, the first of them pacing for Caster Semenya. Any of the animus reported between the two athletes was clearly either a thing of the past or a figment of the press’s imagination. Meadows believes it very much to be the latter.

Pacemaking had come as a (pleasant) financial shock. When her race agent told Meadows the fees on offer, the scales fell from her eyes. She could earn more leading out a race and only partially completing it than she had often been paid as a regular entrant. ‘Let me get this right. I don’t run all of the way. When the race gets tough I stop. If that job exists, I’ll take it. Because if I don’t do it then somebody else will.’ Part of her motivation was financial – ‘I’m getting some really good money, it’s a joke’ – and part the natural desire to help the athletes in her slipstream. The hard work continued. It took five months of training to pace Muir in two races.

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