by John Maclean
At the national tournament I met a young rower named Kathryn Ross, who was to become my partner in my quest for gold. Two people could not be more different than Kathryn and I, from our taste in music to the television shows we watched to the way we were brought up. However, once we were in the boat, Kathryn had what I call the giddyap factor. All her life she had been the girl in school who was always picked last for sporting teams, but she refused to let that hold her back. When the going gets tough, she gives it all she’s got. Together with Pedro as our coach, I felt we had a gold-medal team.
After nationals, Kathryn stayed with me in Penrith for ten days to train together at the regatta centre. In April of that year we made the Australian national team at the selection regatta. In May she moved to Penrith so that the two of us could train full-time. Obviously, when training becomes your full-time job, you still have to find a way to make ends meet. One of the local businesses stepped up with a sponsorship proposal that helped. Kathryn also received a disability grant from the Australian Sports Commission, which goes to athletes training for the Paralympic Games. I turned the grant down. Accepting it meant, to me, accepting the label disabled. I’m not disabled. Never have been. Never will be.
In August 2007 Kathryn and I headed off to Munich to compete in the World Rowing Championships. Unlike the Paralympic Games, which take place completely apart from the Olympics, the rowing championships were all-inclusive—that is, both para-athletes and conventional athletes were there. I loved it. I sought out the best rowers in the world and peppered them with questions about technique and strategy. By this point I had been rowing for just over six months. I knew I had a lot to learn and not much time to learn it.
Seeking out the best athletes and learning all I can from them has always been my approach, whether it be competing in the Ironman, swimming the Channel, or contemplating handcycling around the whole of Australia (which I wisely decided not to do). One of my favourite sayings is “Control the controllables”. In other words, focus on what you can do in life, not on what you can’t. One of the best ways I’ve found to do just that is to seek out those who have been there before me and learn everything I possibly can from them. Raw athletic ability will take you only so far, and when it came to rowing, my athleticism didn’t exactly fit the sport. Rowing is 70 per cent legs, 20 per cent lower back, and 10 per cent arms. Adaptive rowing Trunk and Arms removes the legs from the equation. The seat doesn’t slide, which means there is no push with the legs as in traditional rowing. Just to make sure the legs do not come into play, there is a strap that is secured across the legs just above the knee. Even if my legs had worked, I could not have used them. Instead I had to rely solely upon my lower back and arms. Given the nature of my injuries, my lower back is very weak. Therefore, I needed to learn techniques that would maximise what I could do. I was eager to soak up any advice anyone could give me.
Going into the world championships, Kathryn and I thought the American team would be our toughest competition. They had not lost since the sport was introduced in the para-athlete community. As it turned out, the Americans were not close to us in the finals. However, the Brazil team proved exceptionally strong. Kathryn and I finished second to the Brazilians by a boat length. Our silver medal secured our spot in Beijing. Now we had twelve months to get ready. I set my sights squarely on the Brazilian team. Next time, I vowed, they would not beat us. When we met again in Beijing, I was going to come home with a gold.
A couple of months after the world championships, I was relaxing at home on a warm spring evening. I turned up the music and sank down into my backyard spa, taking in life. Kathryn and I had stepped up our training. My dreams of winning a gold felt very reachable, especially since we had already proven ourselves to be one of the teams to beat the next year in Beijing. I’d dreamed of a gold since the day I won the national 1,500-metre racewalking championships as a twelve-year-old boy. What better way to end my career, I said to myself. After Beijing I would be able to tick a gold medal off my list of life’s goals and move on to whatever was going to come next
But what is next? I asked myself. Where do I go from there? I wasn’t thinking in terms of my next athletic challenge or what I might do for a living after retiring as a professional athlete. No, I wondered what was next that would make it worthwhile to get out of bed each morning. My talks with Maurie after my disappointment in the Sydney Games came back to me. The answers you are looking for aren’t going to be found in Hawaii or the English Channel or in the Olympic stadium. You’re going to have to find them inside yourself, he had told me. So what was the answer I was looking for? Maurie had asked me what I most wanted in life. I had answered simply, a family. Seven years later I was still alone.
I looked around my backyard and looked back on my life, at all I had accomplished and all I hoped to do in the future. So what’s missing? I asked myself. I knew the answer: someone to share this with. And why is that? I wondered. I could say I had not met the right person, and perhaps that was true, but I also knew that part of what plagued me when I met with Maurie was still all too present. As long as life was about John Maclean, that’s pretty much all I would have in my life: me and more of me. Yes, I had made changes in terms of my life as an athlete. Most of the challenges I had tackled and events I entered focused on raising money and awareness for my foundation, not on gaining glory for myself. At that point in time we had raised and given away over a million dollars to families of children in wheelchairs. I felt confident that I was now making a difference in the lives of others, giving back just as people had given to me right after my accident.
But making a difference in the lives of people I did not know was not enough. With respect to relationships, I had not grown beyond where I was when I met with Maurie. I’d had lots of relationships. But I never really gave myself fully to them. I had still held on to that part of myself Maurie had challenged me to turn loose of. If things are going to change, I must change first, I told myself. If relationships haven’t worked, perhaps the problem lies in the way I’ve approached them, in what I have tried to get out of them.
Introspection is never an enjoyable experience, especially when one gets completely transparent with oneself. But transparency and honesty are necessary if one is to ever grow. And I was ready to grow. I was ready to change. I was ready to stop living only for myself and find someone with whom I could share life, someone with whom I could be completely myself, and she with me. And when I began to think about who that person might be, there was only one answer.
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, when I met Amanda, it was not love at first sight for either of us. Becoming romantically involved with each other was the furthest thing from either of our minds when we worked together promoting my first book. Over the years the two of us had become dear friends. Isn’t that how it should be? I asked myself. Isn’t a close friendship the perfect way for a real, lasting relationship to begin? I knew what I had to do next.
I had a bottle of Dom Pérignon I’d been saving for a special occasion. I called Amanda. “Let’s have dinner,” I said. Given the state of our schedules, this was not an easy request to work out. However, we managed to find a date that worked for both of us. Amanda agreed to travel out to Penrith and cook dinner if I supplied the wine. She thought this was a simple dinner invitation. She did not yet know I had much longer-range goals in mind.
8
The Quest for Gold
* * *
The moment the Beijing Olympic Committee released the image of the gold medal for the upcoming Paralympic Games, I downloaded it onto my computer and printed out four copies. I stuck a copy onto my fridge and a copy onto the wall facing me in my office. I placed another copy in my gym and the last on my bedroom wall so that it would be the first thing I saw when I woke up.
Throughout my life in sports I have operated by a simple philosophy: See it. Believe it. Achieve it. I didn’t put up pictures of the gold medal to give myself a goal to aim for. In spite of wha
t my father told me long ago about how it doesn’t matter if I win or lose as long as I give it 100 per cent, I wasn’t going to Beijing to just give it my all and hope for the best. I was going to pick up the gold medal. The way I saw it, and believed it and planned to achieve it, the gold was mine. Any other result simply was not considered.
Of course, being just one of a two-person team, I had to get my partner to think in the same terms. In the months leading up to the games, that’s what I set out to do. When we drove in my car to the gym for our afternoon workouts, I cranked up Sting’s “Fields of Gold”. In the gym I pointed to the picture of the gold medal I’d put up and I said to Kathryn, “That’s ours. Believe it.” In one of our rowing sessions at the Sydney Olympic rowing centre in Penrith, I stopped the boat in front of the stadium seats and I said to her, “I want you to look up in the stadium. Imagine the stands filled with all our friends and family. See them standing and cheering as we cross the finish line and win the gold.” From there we went over to the podium where the medals were awarded in the Sydney Games. “Listen. Do you hear it? That’s the sound of our anthem being played as the flag goes up the pole after they place our gold medals around our necks.” Kathryn didn’t say a word. She just took it all in.
If we had been an ordinary team pushing a slow boat, all the photos of the gold medal and the pep talks on the podium at the Sydney rowing centre would have been exercises in futility. But we were not an ordinary team. Our times were fast and getting better. Rowing is a physically punishing sport that taxes every muscle in the body, especially the legs and lower back. In adaptive rowing, the upper body, shoulders and arms have to make up for what the legs cannot do. That meant spending as much time in the gym as we did on the water. We trained six days a week, sometimes three times a day. On a typical day I was up early, wolfed down breakfast, then arrived at the Penrith Lakes by six. At noon I returned home for lunch, took a one- or two-hour nap, then was back out the door for the gym. In addition to working out, we had a long regimen of recovery exercises.
Strength alone was not enough. Pedro worked with us on strategy as much as technique. We needed his insight because with just over a year of rowing behind me, I did not have a great deal of experience. I listened closely to everything Pedro said. He put together a plan to go out at forty-two strokes a minute for our first ten strokes, then ease back to thirty-six a minute for the rest of the race. We broke the 1,000-metre race into quarters. If we could average 1:02 per 250 metres, we would better Brazil’s world-championship winning time by three seconds. Pedro, Kathryn and I agreed that 4:08 should bring home gold. Because Beijing in September is much warmer and more humid than Sydney, we worked out in the New South Wales Institute of Sport’s heat chamber, which we set to thirty degrees with 75 per cent humidity.
In the midst of all my rigorous training, I was also doing my best to build a new, romantic relationship with Amanda. Things progressed quickly after the weekend where I surprised her with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. Thankfully, our feelings for each other were mutual. From the start, I had only one goal for our relationship: I wanted to marry her and for us to spend the rest of our lives together. However, training six days a week, two and three times a day, left little time for anything else. Through the week, we hardly saw each other. Amanda lived and worked in Sydney, while I lived and trained about an hour away, depending on traffic, in Penrith. On the odd weekday night where I managed to slip into the city, I had to get up very early the next morning to make it back to Penrith Lakes to train. On weekends Amanda came out and stayed with me in Penrith.
In spite of the scant amount of time we had together, or perhaps because of it, Amanda and I made the most of what we had. We did not go out at night or socialise with a lot of people. Instead we were happy just to be together and spend time alone. Because of the depth of our friendship, this seemed like a natural next step. We had already gone out in a variety of social settings. Now we were just happy spending quality time together.
The more time we spent together, the more convinced I was that she was the one. Some years earlier I had been left a sum of money by my grandparents in Scotland. Rather than take the inheritance in money, I wanted a family keepsake. My uncle Colin was in the jewellery business in Scotland, so I asked him to use my inheritance money to find a beautiful diamond and make me an earring. I thought I would wear it forever as a memento of my grandparents and my Scottish heritage. A few months later a 1.1-carat princess-cut diamond set in platinum arrived at my Penrith home. It was beautiful but far more ostentatious than I had anticipated. I only wore it a couple of times. Now that I found the one with whom I wanted to spend my life, I knew exactly what to do with the diamond.
I managed to get a night away from training in May 2008. Of course, I had to get approval from the coach and do a double session before I left, but it was worth it. Amanda and I went away to the Kings Tableland in the Blue Mountains, one of my favourite places in the world. We managed to get out onto a ledge not far from the parking lot that offered a breathtaking view of the mountains. The two of us sat there, taking it all in, when I turned to Amanda and said, “They say you know when you know, and I know. Will you marry me?”
Without hesitating Amanda said yes, and I opened the jewellery box that contained my family diamond made into a beautiful ring. Tears filled her eyes and mine. Afterwards we drove over to a resort in Katoomba where I’d booked a suite. A chilled bottle of Dom Pérignon waited for us in our room. It was a magical night away. At long last I’d found the one, and I planned to never, ever, let her get away. We started making wedding plans and set the date for January 2009. I planned to go to Beijing, pick up my gold, then return to Australia and start working on having a gold-medal marriage.
Unfortunately, romance had to take a back seat to the harsh realities of training at an elite level. Maurie told me years earlier that my life could not revolve around John Maclean, and I took his words to heart. Unfortunately, in the quest for gold, my life did have to revolve around the goal I was chasing. I could not split my time evenly between training and Amanda or anything else. Even taking one day or night off could add tenths of a second to our time in Beijing, and the difference between gold, silver, bronze and not winning a medal at all can come down to a tenth of a second. That statement may sound a bit extreme, but it is the reality of sports played at an elite level.
Kathryn and I finally left for Beijing on the first of September, five days before the opening ceremony. I did a television interview with the Today show before getting on the plane. Friends blew up my phone with messages of encouragement. A large contingent of friends and family came to Beijing to support me. Of course, Amanda was there, as were Johnno and his wife, Gail, and David Knight. My brother Don and his wife, Kelly, also flew over from Canada, while my brother Marc and his wife, Anne, came up from New Zealand. My good friend and mentor, Marc Robinson, and his wife, Lori, flew in from the United States. Not that I could see Marc or Amanda or anyone else. I stayed in the Olympic Village—something I had not done in Sydney. Unlike Sydney, I did not get caught up in all the excitement and pageantry of the games. During the days leading up to our first heat, Kathryn and I trained and went over last-minute strategic planning with Pedro. As I said in the beginning of the chapter, I fully expected to take home the gold medal. This was to be the crowning achievement of my athletic career.
Our journey to gold did not begin the way I had envisioned. We finished second in our heat to China by nearly four seconds. Only the winner went straight to the finals. I always assumed that would be us. If we had won, we would have had a day off before the final. Instead we had to race in the repechage on the second day of competition. We faced off against Great Britain, the United States, Israel and Canada. The top two boats went on to the finals the next day. In the repechage, Kathryn and I started off strong and continued to pull away throughout the race. We finished eleven seconds ahead of second-place Great Britain to make the finals comfortably. However, rowing hard on what I had
counted on as a rest day worried me. We had to face well-rested teams from Brazil and China. And China was the wild card. Four months earlier in the world championships, they had not come close to securing a medal. Now they were the biggest obstacle between us and gold.
On the day of the finals, eighteen months of training and putting everything else in life on hold came down to a little more than four minutes on the water. Over the course of those four minutes either we would secure a place for ourselves for life as gold-medal winners, or all those months of work would be wasted. To me, those were the only two options.
When Kathryn and I climbed into our boat, we could hear our supporters screaming for us. The noise grew in intensity as we paddled to the start line. Up in the stands were sixty local Chinese people I had never met, all decked out in John Maclean T-shirts. They worked for Dimension Data’s Shanghai office. I am currently Brand Ambassador for Dimension Data, and at the time of Beijing I was consulting for them, travelling to Dimension Data offices worldwide, speaking to their employees. Seeing their support in Beijing gave me an extra lift. I remember Drew Ginn, one of the accomplished Olympian rowers to whom I went for advice, telling me that when my body started hurting at the 750-metre mark and I wanted to give in to the pain I should instead use the crowd to get me over the finish line. Hearing the chants of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi!” and nonstop whistling, I now knew what he meant.
We lined up at the start. The siren sounded. Eighteen months of training kicked in. After 250 metres Brazil had an early lead with us in second. At the halfway point China overtook us while Brazil maintained its lead. Kathryn yelled, “Now!” and we kicked into a different gear, increasing our stroke rate to forty-two strokes a minute. Brazil slid behind us. With 250 metres to go China had a clear lead, but we were closing fast. From the corner of my eye I saw us drawing even. I dug deeper and pushed harder than I ever thought possible. My chest and arms burned. The cheers of the crowd pushed me to ignore the pain. I knew the finish line was just up ahead. I threw myself into the last few strokes. A loud beep sounded as we crossed the finish line. The crowd held its breath for a moment, the finish between China and us having been so close. Deep down I already knew the result. Kathryn threw her arm in the air. I slumped down in my seat. Finally it was official. China won the gold by 0.89 seconds. Given how quickly Kathryn and I were gaining on them, another ten metres and we would have won. But the race was 1,000 metres, not 1,010. I gave Kathryn a high five. She was elated.