by John Maclean
While I swam through the ink-black water in the early morning dark of Dover, David Knight was running between planes, hurrying to England. He called me from Bangkok before my swim. “I’m changing planes, but I will be there. I’ll hire a helicopter at Heathrow and have them drop me in the Channel next to you if I need to,” he said. Both of us knew that couldn’t happen, but David’s determination to be with me on this swim was as great, if not greater, than my determination to conquer the Channel.
He did not hire a helicopter when he reached England. Instead, he rushed up and down the docks at Dover, looking for a fishing boat willing to take him out to find me. Keep in mind, the Channel may look small on a map, but it is a big body of water. Trying to find a little fishing trawler like the Viking Princess puttering alongside a single man in the water is next to impossible. No one would take David until he finally found one boat with an equally reluctant crew. “I’ve got a mate and he’s in a wheelchair and he’s swimming the Channel and I have to find him!” They looked at him like he’d lost his mind. However, their mood changed when he pulled several hundred pounds out of his wallet. “You can buy a lot of fish with this,” he pleaded. The crew agreed. David had his boat.
I knew none of this as I splashed about in the cold waters of the English Channel. David Harvey and Wally shouted encouragement to me. “You’re making good time. Keep at it.” Time, however, was not on my side. Nor is it ever on the side of a Channel swimmer. If I was to make it to France, I had to make it across the current before it shifted in the late afternoon and swept me back toward England. David Harvey and Wally alternated swimming alongside me, an hour at a time. I was feeling the ocean, feeling the pain of a shoulder I had partially separated in the 1995 Ironman that had never fully healed, feeling just a bit out of gas, when for some reason I looked up at the Viking Princess for one of the first times that day. “Hello, mate,” David Knight said, looking down at me, a huge grin on his face.
I’ve got the best friends in the world, I thought to myself. I put my head down in the water and started swimming again. My shoulder no longer ached. My arms felt lighter. There was no way I would fail on this day.
Twelve hours and fifty-five minutes after my bum shuffle down into the water, I did another bum shuffle up the beach in France. With the current washing me down the Channel as I swam, I had covered over fifty kilometres in the water, not including the kilometres I swam on my first attempt two weeks earlier. Even after fifty kilometres, I had covered several more metres before my swim could be counted as official. According to the rules, I was not completely across the Channel until I completely cleared the water line. I scooted along on my bum, my friends standing to the side, cheering and clapping for me. I’d been told to make sure I picked up a souvenir of my journey, so I reached down and picked up a rock from the French shore and stuffed it into my Speedo. A little farther up the shore I found another and saved it as well. Closer to the water line I found another that looked appealing, so I shoved it down my Speedo with the other two. When I finally reached dry land, I fell over on my back.
Once I had made it above the water line, the film crew came over. “How do you feel?”
“Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose,” I said, “but I hope today I’ve won for all the boys and girls around the world in wheelchairs. If they need someone to look up to, hopefully they’ve got someone to look up to now.” I said this because I had a lot of time to think out in the water and I had figured out where I needed to invest the $20,000 Nike gave me.
A few months after I returned to Australia I started the John Maclean Foundation through the New South Wales Wheelchair Sports Association. At the time, I wanted the association to identify one boy or girl who was having trouble pursuing their sport because they couldn’t afford the specialised equipment they needed. Then, at an annual banquet, I would present them with a cheque. It was very low key and low maintenance. At the time, that seemed to be enough.
6
Some Dreams Don’t Need to Come True
* * *
Two years and one month after triumphantly bum-shuffling up the beach in Wissant, France, I found myself lying on the ground in front of 115,000 people, my racing chair on top of me. One wheel spun round and round in front of my face as if the race could still be won. A collective gasp had gone up when my chair flew over onto one side, spilling me out onto the track of the stadium at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The sound was quite a contrast from the deafening roar that had greeted me when I was introduced prior to the race. While few in attendance knew who I was, I represented Australia, and that was enough to make the home crowd go nuts. Now they stared at me in shocked silence while the other seven competitors charged towards the finish. Even the man with whom I had collided kept going without going down.
I wanted help to get my chair upright and finish the race, but the Olympic officials wouldn’t hear of it. “We need to get you off the track,” one said as he came over to me. I was partially on the track and partially on the infield, just up from the javelin competition. I guess the Olympic officials didn’t want to add insult to injury by taking the chance of an errant throw impaling me.
Not that I would have minded having a javelin rain down and put me out of my misery. This was, to put it mildly, one of the most humiliating moments of my life. My mind simply could not process what had just happened. Unlike my first failed attempt to cross the Channel, I could not wait two weeks for a second chance to get it right. This race was my one shot in the Olympics. This 1,500-metre wheelchair race was a demonstration sport for only the second time in the history of the games. When other Olympians fail, they can at least console themselves knowing they might get another shot four years later. I didn’t have that luxury. Yes, I had qualified for the Paralympics, which were to be held in the same stadium a couple of weeks later, but that was not the same. I was one of only sixteen wheelchair Olympians in these games, and I would have the distinction of being the only one with the letters DNF (did not finish) permanently inscribed next to my name. To make matters worse, the two athletes who trailed me at the time of my crash on the last lap went on to finish first and second.
As I lay on the track, a strong sense of déjà vu came over me. I couldn’t help but think that I was meant to crash and spoil my Olympic dreams, as if lying on the track in disgrace was my destiny. A slight unbelieving smile came over my face. Wow, this is really happening, I thought to myself.
Race officials helped me up and ushered me off the track. A reporter came rushing over, microphone in hand. “How are you feeling, John, after the crash?”
I didn’t feel like being honest. I did not want to blurt out all my frustration in front of an audience of hundreds of millions around the world. So I fell back on a few well-worn clichés used by failing athletes throughout time. I imagine that the first guy to trip and fall in the original Olympics in ancient Greece probably said about the same thing when asked how he felt. “It’s not the result I was looking for, but these things are part of the sport,” I said. Then I added, “Now I’m just looking forward to the Paralympic Games and doing the best I can.”
The sour taste of failure had not faded when the Paralympics rolled around. I had qualified in the 1,500 metres, 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres, the marathon and the 4 × 400 metre relay, all of which would be run in the span of just a few days. Between heats, semifinals and finals, I raced at least once a day, every day for a week. A couple of days in I knew I was in serious trouble. Not only did I not feel like getting back out on the track after my embarrassment in the Olympic race, but racing so often in the Paralympics meant I was already exhausted before the starter’s pistol even fired. My inexperience as a wheelchair racer was showing. Looking back, I should have focused on one or two events, but I thought qualifying for so many guaranteed my spot on the team and gave me that many more chances to win a medal. The closest I came to the podium was a tenth-place finish in the marathon. The low point of the Paralympic Games came in the 5,000-metre semifin
als where I not only crashed again, but the judges reviewed the tape and disqualified me. DNF next to my name was bad enough. DQ was the ultimate humiliation.
That I had even qualified for the Olympic and Paralympic teams should have been accomplishment enough. Most athletes not only focus on one or two specific events in their sport and work to be the best in those, but they also normally pick a single sport to which they devote all their time and energy. Not me. To me, sports are a bit like walking up to an ice-cream stand. No one wants to go to a place that serves only vanilla. Even thirty-one flavours is a little tame for my taste. While I certainly have my favourite—rum raisin, of course—I cannot imagine a world where it’s all rum raisin all the time. Nor could I ever see confining myself to one sport. I’m always drawn to whatever door may open, and once I walk through I push myself to see how far I can go.
The dream of finding a way to compete in the Sydney Games came to me as soon as I heard that the Olympic and Paralympic Games would be held right in my backyard. And I do mean right in my backyard. I watched the Olympic stadium go up as I travelled up and down the M4 between my Penrith home and the city. As I mentioned earlier, the rowing centre was even closer, perhaps two kilometres from my front door. I trained there for the Channel swim while they constructed the grandstands at the finish line. These were to be the first games held in Australia since the Melbourne Games of 1956, and the entire country was quite excited by it all, especially Sydneysiders. I, too, found myself caught up in the excitement. However, unlike most of my compatriots, I didn’t just want to go watch the games. I wanted to be a part of them.
I first toyed with the idea of qualifying for the Paralympics in 1995 when I took up the sport of wheelchair basketball. I was chosen for the train-on squad for the 1996 Atlanta Games, but I gave up the sport when I realised I had unfinished Ironman business in Kona to which I needed to attend. The idea of representing Australia in the Paralympics never really went away, nor did the desire for a gold medal. I won my first gold at the age of twelve in the 1,500-metre racewalking national championships. All the accolades lit a fire inside me, one that only grew as I did. The thought of going for the gold again on a much bigger stage very much appealed to me.
Unfortunately, Paralympians have far fewer sports from which to choose than do prospective Olympians. The triathlon, which is an Olympic event but not yet Paralympic, would have been my obvious choice if it were available. However, since it was not, wheelchair racing seemed the logical move. I had spent a lot of time in my wheelchair competing in triathlons around the world, and I thought I could adapt to focusing on only the one discipline pretty quickly. I met a coach named Jenni Banks who agreed to train me. “You face an uphill battle,” she warned. “The approach and strategy is completely different from what you are used to. Most of the people against which you will compete have been at this a long time. I’m not sure you can get up to speed with them in such a short time.”
“I think I’m up to the challenge,” I replied. I didn’t mean it in a boastful way. I simply knew myself and what I had done in the past. I’d never tried a swim longer than the 3.8-kilometre Ironman swim before setting my sights on the English Channel. Eight months later I swam over fifty kilometres of open ocean. I was still riding the high of making it to France. I figured if I could turn myself into a long-distance swimmer, I could build on the skills I’d honed in triathlons and learn to compete in wheelchair racing.
Jenni was less confident than I was. “The Oz Day 10K is in a couple of weeks at the Rocks. If you can do that in under twenty-seven minutes, give me a call.”
The Oz Day was not just any 10K. Every year it helped mark the Australia Day celebrations. Elite wheelchair racers came from all over the world to compete in it. Kicking off my racing career against such a field was going to be a real baptism by fire. I had hoped to compete in the race as just another wheelie without drawing attention to myself, but the sporting profile I had developed after the Hawaiian Ironman and the Channel swim caught the attention of the press and reporters were keen to talk to me. When word got out that John Maclean, the first paraplegic to conquer the Hawaiian Ironman and swim the English Channel, had taken up wheelchair racing, it was a somewhat newsworthy event.
I didn’t care about generating publicity one way or another. All the publicity in the world wouldn’t help me finish the Oz 10K in under twenty-seven minutes, and that’s what I had to do if I had any shot at all of qualifying for Sydney the next year. On the day of the race, I poured everything I had into those ten kilometres and finished with a time just a tick under twenty-six minutes. Overall, I finished tenth out of a field of fifty. I thought that wasn’t too bad for a first effort. However, my race drew even more attention than I anticipated, all because of something that happened at the finish. Coming down the home stretch, I was so intent on holding off a Canadian competitor rushing up beside me that I did not notice the rapidly approaching finish line. I lowered my head, putting all my strength into every push down on the wheels. As I flew across the finish line, I looked up just in time to see the barrier just beyond the line. My chair crashed into it at full speed, crushing the front forks and snapping off the front wheel. I, however, was completely unharmed. I never imagined my first race might be an omen of what was to come.
Over the next eighteen months I trained for the games full-time. I travelled all over the world trying to establish qualifying times in as many events as I could. My entry into the sport and the interest surrounding me did not endear me to others in the wheelchair racing community. Most of these guys had devoted their sporting lives to this sport. Many viewed me as an interloper. I was taken aback by some of the criticism I received, as well as the cold shoulders from some. In triathlons, the camaraderie between athletes feels like family, win or lose. That wasn’t the case in the world of wheelchair racing. Nevertheless, many of the top racers became my good friends. I trained together with a few and sought advice from those with much more experience than me. The work paid off. By the end of April 2000, I had qualifying times in the 1,500 metres, 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres, marathon and the 4 × 400 metre relay.
That’s when I received a phone call from Chris Nunn, the coach of the Australian athletics team, telling me about the 1,500-metre Olympic demonstration event. “Are you interested?” he asked.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “Of course I am!”
“I have to choose one athlete to represent Australia. It’s between you, Paul Nunnari and Kurt Fearnley.”
Paul, a young wheelchair racer at the time, and I trained together and had formed a close friendship. I knew Kurt to be an up-and-comer in the world of wheelchair racing. (He later went on to win the Paralympic gold in 2004 and 2008.) “Whatever method you choose to select the spot I’m sure will be fair,” I told Chris. I felt honoured to even be in the conversation after such a short time in the sport.
A few months later it was announced that the meet in Delémont, Switzerland, was chosen as the qualification race for the Olympic 1,500 metres. There were four heats and two semifinals. The top three semifinalists from each race, along with the next two fastest times, would go on to compete against one another in Sydney. Paul, Kurt and I all took part. I didn’t want to take the chance of having to sweat out whether or not I was one of the next two fastest. I had to finish in the top three to punch my ticket to Sydney. Kurt and I both made it out of our heats into the semis, but Paul did not. Racing is like that. Some days are just not your day.
Fortunately, this was my day. In my semifinal race I broke out to an early lead. I knew I didn’t have the kick most of the others had. Getting out front and staying there was my only chance to finish in the top three. I led after the first lap. And the second. And the third. I held on to the lead through the halfway point of the last lap. My head down, pushing hard, someone flew around me. Twenty metres later, my head still down, pushing with all I had left, another chair flew past. I rounded the last turn, one hundred metres to go, still holding on to third place.
I heard breathing behind me. I pushed that much harder. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the chair pull up nearly even as the finish line closed in on us. I gave my wheels one final push as I crossed the line. I looked around at the officials, but no signal came as to whom had taken third. Five minutes passed before the judges came down and rendered the official results. I had placed third by a whopping one hundredth of a second. I was going to Sydney.
After qualifying for the games, I kept training. However, I did not want to miss out on the national celebration of the games. My Olympic party started when I carried the Olympic torch through Penrith as part of the torch relay leading up to the games. I have to tell you, the elation of that moment felt like a victory lap before the races had even been run. Then I did television commercials for Nike and General Motors in Australia, both of which sponsored me at the time. The games themselves opened with the giant party that was the opening ceremonies. I was just happy to be a part of it all. Having qualified for the Olympics by the narrowest of margins, just being there felt like my gold medal.
Then came my race.
And the crash.
That split-second disaster came to define both my Olympic and Paralympic experience. Prior to the crash I was John Maclean, the first wheelie to complete the Hawaiian Ironman, the first to swim the English Channel, one of the top eight wheelchair racers in the world. Afterwards, as I made my way through the Olympic Village, I saw people point and stare. I was simply that guy who crashed.