Double glory for Kelly Holmes

Following a last minute decision to contest the 800m as well as her favoured 1500m, Kelly Holmes achieved a historical double Olympic win which hardly anyone expected. Steven Downes tells the story of the 34-year-old who has now become a legend in the United Kingdom.

As her flight from the British pre-Games holding camp in Cyprus banked on its approach into Athens airport two days after the spectacular Olympic opening ceremony, Kelly Holmes could have been forgiven for feeling a twinge of an old pain in her calf muscle.

For down below her was the stadium where, seven years earlier, the British middle distance runner had suffered her greatest agony – literally as well as competitively – when her Achilles tendon ripped itself apart.

Holmes had gone to the 1997 IAAF World Championships flying, in the form of her life, the favourite for the 1500m title. However, she went home on the second day of the meeting on crutches, with doctors even suggesting she might never race competitively again.

It is typical of Holmes’s deep reserves of determination (and not inconsiderable guts), that she ever got back to racing at international level at all. Now approaching Athens for the second pivotal moment in her career, her mind was occupied less with nightmarish memories of injuries past, and was instead all a’ whirl with the doubts and questions which had been concerning her all summer… whether or not to race in the 800 metres at the Athens Olympics, as well as her nominated better distance, the metric mile?

With the heats of the shorter event coming up on the following Friday, Holmes knew she had just 48 hours in which to make a decision. “It was a risk either way,” she said. “I had been running really well at 800, but it came before the 1500, so it might have affected that. Yet it was also a risk if I just ran the 1500, and missed out on the 800.” 

Her predicament was made worse because she felt she could not turn to her coach of two years, the American, Margo Jennings: as the coach of Maria Mutola, the defending 800m champion and favourite for gold once again, Holmes’s question would put Jennings in an impossible position. 

During training sessions in Athens, Holmes twice beat her best time for 400m in quick succession. For confirmation of what she already knew deep within herself, she sent a text message to Dave Arnold, the septuagenarian club coach who had guided her through her teens and then again when she returned to the sport in her twenties to win medals at the 1994 European and 1995 World Championships.

“I had spoken to Margo on the Sunday and said, ‘Give me something that will make me decide either way’. I did not tell her what I had done. By that time we were in two camps, and I was a rival to Maria. 

“It was hard for my coach to split her loyalties, and I understood that. She has been with Maria for 14 years. But I needed it drummed into me that I was in the fittest shape of my life.

“I got that from my old coach. He had known me for so long, and I knew that if I told him the sessions I was doing, he would give me an honest opinion. After the 400s he said, ‘You have to go for it.’”

Thus was launched a successful bid for double Olympic gold that has transformed one of the international track circuit’s most popular figures, if perennial bridesmaid, into someone who must now be considered as one of the all-time great women middle-distance runners. Nevertheless, it took Kelly Holmes 10 years to become an overnight sensation!
 
Before the Olympics Holmes’s career (at age 34) had been characterised as much by her injuries as by the medals she has won. In Athens she was now in a rare position. “For the first time in seven years I was having to make my own decisions about racing, rather than having them forced upon me by injuries,” she said.

Yet even in her darkest moments, Holmes never lost her girlish enthusiasm for the sport, her love of racing, nor had her competitive spirit ever been blunted. As a 12-year-old schoolgirl in Kent, her teacher had sent her off to Tonbridge, where there was an athletics club with a reputation for bringing on talented young runners. Within a year she was an English Schools’ 1500m champion. Here was a rare, raw talent.
She would watch television as Britons ruled the world in the middle distances, seeing Coe, Ovett and Cram setting World records and winning Olympic medals in her event. When she grew up, Holmes dreamed, she wanted to show that British women could do the same.

By the time she was 18, Holmes was seeking new challenges, and became what she calls “Army barmy”. She did that by taking a career in the forces, developing a reputation as a pocket physical training instructor, who would bully men twice her size on the judo mat, or galvanise the Army volleyball team. Holmes would always be first in line when it came to abseiling down sheer cliffs, or rafting fierce rapids, despite her own fears of heights or water.

Running had slid a long way down Holmes’s priority list from when she was in khaki.  Then watching the Olympics one day in 1992 she saw Lisa York racing in a British vest. “I know her,” Holmes said to one of her mates in the sergeants’ mess. “I used to beat her when I was a kid.”

She recalls that time now. “I thought ‘Wow, I could be doing that’. If she could do it, I was sure I could. It gave me back the dream I had as a kid of running at the Games.” On such whims are Olympic dreams born.  

Holmes was back on track seriously. Within two years (by now 24 years old), she had won her first international medal, a silver in the European 1500m. By 1995, at the World Championships in Goteborg, Holmes was emulating one of those heroes she had watched on television as a kid, when she managed to win medals at both 800 and 1500m.

So it was that 20 years after watching Sebastian Coe on television (as he won a silver and gold in Los Angeles), Holmes leaned forward from the top of the Olympic podium to embrace the now ennobled member of the IAAF Council as he placed the Athens 800m gold medal around her neck. As she hugged him, Lord Coe told Holmes, “You ran the perfect race.”

“I still can’t believe it,” she said, choking back the tears of joy. “I’ve dreamt of this moment since I was 12. That’s a long time. There were times when I got close, but never close enough”. Until now.  

Maybe Holmes started to want to win just too much after 1995. The runner trained harder than ever before, but injuries frequently curtailed her season prematurely.

Her doctors' notes is such a heavy tome, it could be used at the Olympic weightlifting! Before the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 she suffered a stress fracture, but got back to finish fourth at 800. Much of the 1998 season was disrupted with injury and illness, but she managed a silver medal at 1500m at the Commonwealth Games. In 2000 she ruptured her calf muscle, and had just six weeks to prepare for the Sydney Games, where she won bronze at 800. Even at the World Indoor Championships in Budapest earlier this year, a fall in the final of the 1500m denied what she believed was one of her best chances of gold.

However, it was in 1997 that the bitterest blow happened. It was World Championship year, with the event staged in Athens. “I don’t remember much about the stadium, or the city,” Holmes says now. “I wasn’t here very long.

“It was the first race, on the first morning of the championships. I was there for, what, all of four minutes, five minutes?

“If ever I had a major chance, that was it. I had set my British 1500m record (3:58.07) earlier in the season, and was five seconds faster than anyone else going into those championships. I was really in the shape of my life. To not actually carry that through was heartbreaking.

“The lasting memory for me is of limping down the home straight. It was at the 200m point on the track that it happened. I just remember trying to somehow get round the bend and into the home straight, with what felt like a golf ball exploding in my calf.
Then I was whisked off to Zurich for treatment. Those were my memories of Athens, so they're not very fond ones.”

So it becomes more understandable, when returning to Athens and winning the ultimate sporting prize, that Holmes can hardly believe her luck. “I have to keep pinching myself. I’ve been in this sort of position before, so I was waiting for something to go wrong, even after I crossed the finishing line. That’s why I was so surprised.”

Were you to analyse Holmes’s career closely, that cruellest of injuries in 1997 was something of a turning point. She now attributes her gratitude to two physical therapists, Gerard Hartmann and Alison Rose, her coach, Jennings, and erstwhile training partner, Mutola, for resurrecting her career.

First Hartmann and, more recently Rose, pummelled and massaged Holmes’s broken-down body back into working order. Holmes admits she needs almost constant attention – “Alison has kept my body in one piece”.

Then, in November 2002 Holmes decided to pack up her home in London and make one last effort to win Olympic gold. She did that by moving to Potchefstroom (near Johannesburg), to live and train at altitude; sharing Mutola’s eight-bedroom house there, receiving training schedules from Jennings by fax and e-mail.

“Maria has been the world No.1 for years. Training together with her has been beneficial for both of us”. Holmes handled the question with good grace, but there had been signs of a rift between Mutola and her before the Games, ever since the Mozambican tripped over her training partner and fell to the track at an indoor race in Birmingham in March.

After, they went their separate ways, Mutola to St Moritz, Switzerland, Holmes to the 1,860m altitude of a Spanish ski resort in the Sierra de Guadarrama. Holmes explained: “I’ve been concentrating on the 1500, Maria on the 800, we’ve had different race plans entirely.

“I based myself where it as more convenient for me, and I was able to concentrate on myself”.

Holmes (for once) arrived on the start line of a championship final with no tweaks or pains. She was able to concentrate on the matters in hand, her 12 years of international experience helping her to run the best tactical race of the eight women, in what she later described as “the best field ever assembled.”

Holmes’s late surge delivered her best time for nine years, 1:56.38. “I knew I just had to use my head to win,” Holmes said “but it was my heart that got me to the line first.”

Later in the week, after her sixth race in seven days, and employing much the same tactics in the 1500m final, Holmes again reigned supreme. Only this time, she did so with a degree of confidence and domination rarely seen in her running at such a lofty level: this time, it was her rivals that feared Holmes, the strong runner with the 800m racer’s finishing kick. 

The 3:57.90 winning time bettered her own British record, set in her build-up to her last visit to Athens, seven years earlier. “If you had told me I'd have had to run that fast to win a medal, I would not have turned up,” Holmes said.

Holmes’s second gold thus makes her the oldest woman ever to win either the Olympic 800 or 1500m, and it also makes her the first Briton since Albert Hill in 1920 to achieve the middle-distance double at the Games.

After all the long years of anxiety, Holmes is looking forward to enjoying the short time she has left. “I so desperately wanted to get it right that the races were not enjoyable because I was putting myself under so much pressure to perform”, she said.

“It feels like somebody else in my body has done it, not me.”

“I am not planning on retiring yet and I would like just to enjoy the athletics now.

“I’ve never given up,” she said, in tears as she pinched herself one more time to check that her greatest dream had at last been fulfilled. “But for all the downs I have had, this erases them all.”

Published in IAAF Magazine Issue 3 - 2004