Tuesday 23 October 2012

On meeting a Paralympic legend.

I recently had the privilege of meeting Chris Holmes. I have to say I didn't know who he was, but he turned out to be a brilliant and motivational speaker. As a boy he was keen on sport, including rugby and cricket, and he was a county standard swimmer. He had three ambitions: to get his A-Levels, to go to Cambridge, and to represent his country at sport. Then, when he was 14 years old, he woke up one morning to discover that he’s lost his sight. He had a genetic eye condition called exudative vitreoretinopathy (the retina is folded and doesn't grow properly, so it tears easily), but up until this point his eyesight hadn't been badly affected. But even now that his sight had been lost, he was still determined to achieve his three goals. Chris returned to the pool and committed to the same training regime as sighted swimmers aspiring for the Olympics. He got straight As at A-Level and read politics at Cambridge, but his first swimming championships wasn't such a success. This was the Junior European Championships in Moscow, just a year after he’d lost his sight. After his race, an official said to him “It’s a long way to come 28th out of 29”. Chris saw that in order to finish on the podium he’d have to improve his time by about six seconds – a massive time in a 100-metre swim. But then he did a really clever thing: he worked out the number of training sessions that he would do before the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, and calculated that he would only have to improve by one five-hundredths of a second per session. This seemed eminently possible. I was immediately reminded of Sir Clive Woodward’s famous quote “Winning the World Cup was not about doing one thing 100% better, but about doing 100 things 1% better”. I asked Chris if anyone had helped him come up with his idea, but it was entirely his own reasoning. The training regime he followed meant getting up at 4.40 in the morning, and swimming 7,000 metres in the morning, and another 7,000 metres in the evening. He did this, six days a week, for 17 years. He would go on to win six gold medals in Barcelona, and nine Olympic medals in a career in which he broke 35 World records. When talking about his achievements, Chris would often begin a sentence by saying “I was lucky enough to win…” Clearly, hard work counted considerably more than luck. But what struck me was the phenomenal mental strength he had at just 14 and 15 years old. I suppose you could argue that he was “lucky” to have that. Chris Holmes is the most remarkable person I've ever met. He’s almost certainly the most remarkable that I shall ever meet. David Donner

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