by Steve Howell
***
We reached our hotel in the centre of Birmingham to find a posse of journalists on the doorstep. Luckily, Mimi saw them before they saw us and dragged me through a separate entrance taking us via a restaurant to the lifts. We headed straight for Mimi’s room where Team Meg – as we cosily called ourselves – was due to meet for its weekly run through her schedule and decide who was doing what. Jackie and Megan would be arriving in half an hour.
Mimi pulled a laptop from her suitcase and sat at the desk. I felt shell shocked and stood watching as she logged-in and waited for it to boot-up.
“Make yourself useful,” she said, nodding towards the kettle.
I turned my attention to the task of disentangling the lead and finding a socket. It was challenging, but better than the alternative of kicking the furniture around and berating myself for how little I knew about Megan’s personal life. I could not believe she hadn’t told me about something as sensitive in athletics as a connection with someone banned for steroids. I sensed Mimi watching me.
“You okay, Liam?” she asked.
“Never better,” I replied, surprising myself at the bitterness of my tone.
“It was shit, hearing that from him. How could she not know that an ex-boyfriend being done for drugs wouldn’t come out sooner or later? But, Liam, give her the benefit of the doubt for now. Let’s assume she was being naïve, that she didn’t think she needed to tell you, or that maybe she was scared how you might react.”
I shrugged, struggling to find any words that would be productive. The kettle was boiling and I made tea for both of us. Mimi turned back to the laptop and began clicking and scrolling through page after page of stories about Megan.
“How’s it looking?” I said.
“Put it this way, I don’t think those hacks downstairs will be losing interest in this any time soon.”
I put Mimi’s tea down on the desk and squinted at the screen. Mimi clicked back through the stories for my benefit. Everyone was running something – from the Sun’s ‘Meg legs it after scrap with snapper’ to the BBC’s ‘UK Athletics plays down controversy surrounding Olympic poster girl’. They all had photographs of Megan stepping over the floored photographer, and most mentioned her ‘no-show’ at the press conference. Some referred to the police inquiry and Meg’s connection with Matt and Will. But no one was carrying the story that Will had been banned from rugby for using steroids.
Mimi refreshed the search, and a new Argus story appeared at the top of the list. Mimi clicked onto it. As it came up on the screen, our gasps could probably have been heard in the next room. The headline read: ‘Drugs cheat is yesterday’s news, claims Meg spokesperson’.
I was speechless. Coaches like me live in dread of being tainted by a drugs scandal. Even if it’s an innocent mistake – an athlete missing a random test or using a dodgy supplement – it can wreck reputations and careers at a stroke. Seeing Meg’s name and the words ‘drugs cheat’ in the same headline brought home how perilous our situation was. Even if the connection with Will was naïve and in the past, people would talk and most of them would presume she must have known – or worse.
“The little shit,” said Mimi, sticking two fingers up at the screen. “The fucking creep stitched me up. He’s well and truly off the Christmas card list.”
Christmas felt a very long way away as I scrolled down the story, trying to keep calm:
A spokesman for Newport-born Megan Tomos says the Olympic gold medal hopeful should be more careful choosing her boyfriends.
In an exclusive interview with the Argus, Mimi Jacobs admitted Tomos had dated steroids cheat Will Driscoll, who police have been questioning in connection with the drug-related death of Matt Davies in Newport two years ago.
But she said the police interest in the 100m hurdles specialist was just ‘thoroughness’ and cast doubt on whether or not the athlete would be able to help the inquiry.
“I’m sure the police are just being thorough, but Megan has been living in London for the last two years,” Jacobs said. “Megan should be more careful choosing her boyfriends but she dumped Will and is engaged to her new partner. Will’s yesterday’s news as far as she’s concerned.”
The rest of the piece was mostly a rehash of what we already knew: Matt Davies had died of a drugs over-dose after a house party, Will had been banned from rugby for failing a drugs test, and Megan knew both of them.
Mimi was still shaking her head. “I can’t believe I fell for that one,” she said. “I should have known he’d run with any scraps I gave him. Sloppy. Really frigging sloppy.”
“Well, yes,” I said, finding myself beyond anger now. “Maybe Meg would have preferred announcing her engagement to Tom in a different way. And possibly she’d like to have done it herself. But that’s likely to be the least of her worries right now.” My irony didn’t get any reaction from Mimi. “Look”, I continued. “The Argus is several steps ahead of us. We need to take control somehow. For a start, we need to find out more about Will, about his drugs test, Matt’s death, what’s going on between him and Meg, if there is anything going on... It feels like we’re completely in the dark and someone’s throwing shit at us.”
A double rap on the door came somewhere between ‘dark’ and ‘shit’. I wanted to talk to Mimi about how we should approach Meg and the meeting, but it was too late. Mimi clicked minimise and jumped up to open the door. Unusually, Meg, Tom and Jackie had arrived on time and together.
“Hi guys – so it looks like our Meg has booked her plane ticket to Rio,” Jackie said, a tad too breezily to sound natural.
Sports agents are normally either marketing people or lawyers. Jackie was a marketeer but not of the fluffy variety. Her hair – a steely grey – seemed to epitomise her style. She was about my age and oozed a confidence and worldliness I found daunting. You felt she’d been through more than a few battles and won most of them. And it showed in the way she assumed command in any room she was in.
Mimi was still hovering by the door and I could hardly believe it when she peered out and checked the corridor in both directions. It didn’t go unnoticed.
“Paranoia creeping in?” Jackie said.
Mimi flushed. “You can’t be too careful. We were nobbled in the car park,” she said, nodding towards me.
“And?” Jackie said.
“The Argus door-stepping us, with more on the…” Jackie stopped her with wave of a hand. “We’ll come back to all that later,” she said, sitting down in one of two armchairs. Meg took the other; I claimed the desk chair and Mimi perched on the edge of the bed. Poor Tom chose his natural home and sat cross-legged at Meg’s feet.
“Let’s get down to business everyone,” said Jackie. “I know it’s been a tough day, but we’ve got an even tougher week ahead and we need to stay focused. Mimi, do you want to talk us through the schedule?”
Mimi looked at me as if to say ‘business as usual – is she serious?’ But she had the sense not to test the point straight away. Pulling a notebook from her bag, she reeled off Meg’s appointments from Monday morning’s photo-shoot for a fashion magazine to Friday’s Diamond League meeting at Crystal Palace, when Megan was due to face her main rivals from the US and Europe. Jackie interjected with some name-dropping and a few practicalities, and I managed to fend-off sponsor demands on Megan’s time to ensure I had a slot with her on Tuesday afternoon to work on her start. But Megan herself sat sullenly fiddling with her smart phone, hardly looking up as we talked around, across and about her.
“Thursday is tricky,” said Mimi, looking at Megan. “You’ve got this honorary degree ceremony in Newport. I’ll have to talk to the comms people at the uni, and brief them on how to handle the Argus. How are we going to handle the Argus?”
That did it. Business-as-usual had hit the buffers. Jackie seemed to sense Megan was about to erupt. She was good at spotting early signs of volcanic activity.
“Meg,” she said, reaching out to pat the hand of our golden girl. “You ne
ed to tell everyone what we were talking about earlier.”
Megan raised herself from her hunched, ‘truculent teenager’ pose, straightened her back and looked earnestly towards Mimi and me.
“I realise I owe you both an apology,” she said, surprising me with a nervous quiver in her voice. “I’m sorry about, you know, walking off the track like that and what happened with the photographer. He was just getting too close to me. I know it must have looked dreadful but, honestly, I didn’t touch him. It was just the camera. It was in my face and my hand caught it. It happened so fast, I didn’t think…”
“Or stop,” Mimi said. “Stopping would have helped.”
Jackie raised a hand and nodded at Meg. “Go on,” she said.
“I know, Mimi – I’ve seen the photographs. I’ll apologise, whatever’s best.”
“Let’s think about it,” Mimi said. “But what about Will and this police inquiry?”
“Look, I’m in bits about all this,” Meg said, fiddling with her phone again and avoiding eye contact with us, “and I know this Argus thing is causing you bother – but, to be honest, you should just accept it’s personal. I’ll sort it out. It’s my business, no one else’s.”
“Not when it’s on…” Mimi began, but Jackie held her hand up again, and Mimi was surprisingly compliant, looking worn down and defeated.
“Yes, we know Mimi,” Jackie said. “Not when it’s on every website – we’ve seen them, and Meg’s assured me there’s nothing in it, and she’ll clear things up. And I think we should leave it there.”
It was an unwritten rule in these meetings that I didn’t step on Jackie’s turf and she didn’t step on mine. The trouble was, there was an ugly patch of ground between us that definitely needed weeding.
“Meg,” I said, having decided I didn’t care whose turf I was on. “This has all come out of the blue for us. Until a few days ago, we’d never heard of Will or Matt, or Matt dying…” I paused abruptly, not for effect but because those words brought it home to me that someone – someone’s son – had died. I thought of my own son and, suddenly, I felt ashamed that all our calculations had been about the impact of this on Megan and ourselves – our reputations and careers. “Megan, look,” I said, “you and I have worked together for two years. Two-and-a-half years.” I corrected myself, precision about the timeline now seemed important. “We’ve been through a lot. But we’ve never talked about your past or why you left Newport. If there’s anything we need to know, you should level with us. If there’s anything we can do to help, just say so. Talk to us…”
“We can’t help you if we keep getting taken by surprise,” Mimi chipped in, slightly off key.
Megan didn’t react. She was looking at her feet now. She’d changed into jeans and a white blouse with thin grey stripes. She was wearing mascara and wine coloured lipstick. I rarely saw Megan out of a tracksuit and didn’t think of her as an attractive young woman with a life outside athletics. It was as if I was seeing everything through a new lens.
The room was silent apart from the hum of the air conditioning.
“I’ll sort it out, Liam,” Megan said finally, lifting her head towards me again. “There’s nothing to worry about. If the police want to speak to me, that’s fine. It’s my problem.”
“And what about Will?” I said.
Megan straightened her back again, tensing. “What about him?”
“He’s bad news,” I said, feeling this was definitely my turf. “I’m not talking about Matt’s death. I don’t know what happened, and it’s not for me to judge. But Will – he’s failed a drugs test. That’s over the line. He’s a cheat, and you don’t need me to tell you how it looks if you have anything to do with him.”
Megan was rigid and staring past me at a blank wall. “Okay, I know,” she said finally, “but it’s complicated.”
I looked at her, half of me wanting to leave it to her judgement – wanting to believe in her – and the other half of me mulling over whether or not to ask why it was so complicated.
An athlete and their coach go through so much together. To reach the level that Megan’s reached, the coach drives the athlete well beyond anything they would do if left to their own devices, testing their limits again and again. That’s the whole point. If people could do it alone, they would. But an athlete needs the right coach and has to trust the coach – through all the long months of training – to deliver them to the start line in perfect shape to achieve their goal. And, on the way, the coach has to bear the brunt of all the athlete’s pain, anger, doubt and frustration. Megan had put her trust in me. And, at that moment, what could I do but hope my trust in her wasn’t misplaced?
***
Once back in my own hotel room however, the adrenalin that had kept me going all day drained away and my resilience to dark thoughts plummeted to zero. I sat in a deflated heap on a chair at the desk, looking into the mirror above it at the flecks of grey in my brown hair and the puffy dark skin around my bloodshot eyes. I felt exhausted. All day I had been suppressing memories of the sickening foolishness I’d felt the first time my trust had been betrayed over steroids, but now I couldn’t fight them anymore.
My mind drifted back to an autumn evening at Copthall 28 years ago. I remembered it like I was there, feeling the cool breeze and watching the sun descending behind the main stand, casting long shadows across the infield. There were six of us in my training group, all in our late teens, overdosing on self-belief.
I was already in the British junior team. I’d even trained with the seniors, rubbed shoulders with big names who were, that very week, at the Olympics. The group was normally boisterous. We always had plenty to say for ourselves, and we should have been talking that night about how, three days earlier in Seoul, Ben Johnson had lowered the world record to 9.79 seconds in ‘the greatest 100m final ever’. But we weren’t. Johnson had failed a drugs test – and we all felt sick. We’d all believed Johnson’s denials. We’d all disliked the arrogance of his accusers. But now we were left feeling stupid and betrayed. Johnson was stripped of his medal but still claimed someone had put a pill in his beer. For days, I watched everything, read everything, all the reports, like I had been bereaved and needed to know every morbid detail.
Then the following week I missed training, giving a hamstring niggle as an excuse. And missing training became a habit. My interest turned to other things. I’d been going to the track week in week out since I was eleven. But then, as my eighteenth birthday approached, it suddenly seemed too much effort. Why would you want to train until you vomit when there were girls, pubs, football, so many other ways to spend your time?
At first, my coach would phone me about my hamstring, offer to arrange a physio. In desperation, he even came round to my house to speak to my parents. But it was hopeless. I was written off – another teenager who’d lost the plot.
And in the background, the Johnson case trundled on. My memory of the details was hazy now. The Canadians set up an inquiry. It turned out Johnson had been on steroids for years. He’d used a drug intended for horses. His doctor was a vet.
Johnson’s coach came out of it as the main villain, the ‘bad apple’. It was a view I found comforting, but then it became obvious Johnson wasn’t an isolated case, and I began to wonder about the system and the money and the manipulation of a sport built on honest endeavour.
But time mellowed me and I thought athletics was building its resilience to those forces, and I then began to wonder how things were down at the track.
It was the Barcelona Olympics that won me back. I had just graduated and had plenty of time to watch it on TV. And, when I finally went down to Copthall again, I found the world hadn’t stopped. The place was buzzing: new faces, old faces, kids messing around in the long-jump pit, a group of young sprinters every bit as cocky as we’d been.
I smiled at the memory of all that, but sitting in the darkness of my hotel room, I couldn’t escape the thought that everything was at risk now. I believed Megan was
innocent but feared that ‘guilt by association’ could irreparably damage her reputation. The sponsors would run a mile, and my coaching career would be over.
5
Doing A Runner
“So, Liam, what did you make of last night – the new, humble Meg?” Mimi asked me whilst tucking into a mound of steaming scrambled eggs on toast. I couldn’t help but admire her ability to multi-task and, for someone so petite, her remarkable appetite.
I stared at my plate of rubbery fried eggs and stuck-together bacon wondering why I kept doing this to my body. At my age, I needed to start thinking about muesli and fruit.
“Humble is good - I like humble,” I said.
“Yep, but there’s talking humble, and there’s being humble,” she said, lifting her head to check I appreciated the emphasis. “And I’m not sure which we were getting.”
I poked my fork into a shiny piece of egg white, shook the grease off it and decided not to put it in my mouth.
“There is that,” I said, “but talking humble might be a step in the right direction.”
Mimi didn’t reply. We seemed to have exhausted the ‘humble’ topic, and she obviously had more appetite for her eggs than I did for mine. I watched her polish them off, mulling over if I cared whether or not Megan had much humility as long as I could believe her.
“Right, Liam darling,” Mimi said, swallowing the last lump of egg and wiping her mouth with a napkin. “Much as I love it here, I need to get back to London. Are you catching the train or hitching a ride with me?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer that one because Tom had turned up at the table looking even more like a dog who’d been kicked than usual.
“What’s up?” I forced myself to say fairly cheerfully. “It’s Meg,” he mumbled, barely moving his lips as if struggling to keep a grip on himself. I frowned and reached across the table for his shirtsleeve, tugging gently to signal he needed to sit down. The restaurant was full of familiar faces – athletes, officials, supporters, and a table full of journalists I recognised from the press conference, sitting too close to earshot for comfort. Tom slumped into the empty seat next to Mimi.