Leap year for Phillips Idowu

10 April 2012

For most athletes, the hope of winning a gold medal on home turf at London 2012 would be enough of a load to bear. But for Phillips Idowu, the triple jump Olympic silver medallist who also has Commonwealth, European and World Championship golds under his belt, there is a feud with the Team GB head coach to contend with as well.

The sometime flame-haired athlete and Charles van Commenee, the chief of UK Athletics, spent most of last year - including the World Championships - at each other's throats. The battle began in June when the abrasive Dutchman criticised Idowu for announcing via Twitter that he did not intend to compete at an athletics meeting in Stockholm.

Idowu subsequently said that he would not speak to van Commenee unless he received a public apology. Which, given van Commenee's pitiless character, is rather like saying you won't vote for Boris Johnson in the mayoral elections unless he campaigns in a Che Guevara T-shirt.

So how is the relationship with van Commenee now? Idowu's manager, seated nearby, springs over as if summoned by a dog whistle. 'We can't talk about that.' A rueful expression passes across Idowu's face. 'Everything we say about it comes back to bite us in the arse,' says the manager, before retreating. 'And I was just about to unload some f-bombs,' laughs Idowu.

What he does unload is an uncompromising commitment to speaking his mind, rather than parroting the usual sportsman's platitudes. 'You could interview 50 different athletes and probably get all the same answers,' says Idowu. Not from him. 'I've worked hard to get into this position and the choices I've made have been the right choices. I'm not going to just sit there if someone's disrespecting me or my achievements and not say something.'

Phillips Olaosebikan Idowu was born in Hackney, on 30 December 1978, to Nigerian parents who were, as he puts it, 'from a low-income background'. He was brought up on an estate, his father was in and out of prison, and Idowu spent some of his youth in foster care. He is uncomfortable talking about his early years, visibly squirming when asked about them and politely but firmly evading most questions.

What he does admit is that he had an authentically poor Hackney upbringing. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the hipsters and bohemian mummies had yet to move into the borough. Growing up out East, says Idowu, 'You saw things: drugs, crime, which were just normal.' Was he involved? A crooked half-smile. 'I'm not going to sit here and say that I did any of that, but yeah, I had friends who were.' Could he have seen himself having gone down the same route? 'Yeah. Definitely.'

Fortunately for Idowu, while he was at school he showed athletic promise and that prevented him from being swept up by street culture. Tall and strong (he is 6ft 5in), he was a very good basketball player. So good that he thought he could make a career of it. 'I thought I would go to America and play in the NBA,' he says. 'But I had a PE teacher who more or less forced me to do athletics.'

Very soon he realised that track and field might provide an escape. 'Athletics was a chance to get out of Hackney.' Literally so: 'I was going to Mile End to train, and then later to Crystal Palace.' He trained compulsively and by any means possible. 'If I didn't have enough money to get into the athletics ground, I'd jump over the fence.'

One way and another that jump training paid off. Idowu excelled at triple jump. In 1997, aged 18, he won the English Schools Championships and placed fourth in the European Junior Championships. Three years later he finished sixth at the Sydney Olympic Games. In 2002 he won silver in the Commonwealth Games, behind Britain's last great triple jumper, Jonathan Edwards. As Edwards wound down to retirement, it was clear that Idowu was the future. Yet throughout this impressive rise, athletics was an intensely personal, almost
secretive pursuit.

'My parents never watched me compete,' he says. 'Like a lot of African families they wanted me to concentrate on my schoolwork. They saw athletics as a distraction from that. Athletics was something I did for myself.' While other young athletes were cheered on by their proud relatives, Idowu was all alone. Was that strange? 'No, not really. What was strange for me was seeing people with two parents coming to watch them.' Even now, he says, 'My sister probably only watched me compete for the first time two years ago. I don't know if my brother has ever watched me.'

Idowu has reacted to the dysfunction of his upbringing by ploughing every scrap of his energy into his own young family. He has two children with his partner Carlita: D'Karma, four, and Prince, who will be two next month. Do they watch him compete? Well, sometimes, but that, too, can be tough. 'My daughter used to get upset watching me,' he says. 'She would see me in the hotel the night before and then not again until I stepped out on to the runway. Then she'd start crying because she wanted to come and hug me. I found it hard to switch out of being Daddy. It's easier when they're watching me on the TV, when they can jump up and down and shout "Go Daddy!" '

He still finds the conflict between family and athletics hard to resolve. Last summer he was very close to abandoning Team GB when they travelled to Daegu in South Korea for the World Championships. 'I nearly didn't go,' he says. 'My final was on the same day as my daughter's birthday. I'd never missed her birthday before and I seriously thought about not going. It was like there were two options: either take them with me, or don't defend my title.' In the end he went but failed to defend his title, narrowly bumped into the silver medal spot by a spectacular jump from the American athlete Christian Taylor.

Idowu takes a veteran's attitude towards his failure. 'What I've always said about triple jump is that it only takes one good jump,' he says. 'You have six attempts and you only need one of them to be good enough. Even when Christian jumped 17.96m [the winning jump] I was still confident I could beat it. But World Championships are always about building towards the Olympics. And I still jumped more consistently than pretty much any other athlete in World Championships history.'

But dig a little deeper and there is the sense that jumping was not the only thing on his mind last summer. 'Being away in Daegu, and knowing I was missing D'Karma's birthday, my heart wasn't really in it,' he says. Fortunately for Team GB, neither D'Karma's nor Prince's birthday conflicts with the London Games, a fact Idowu acknowledges with a laugh.

Obviously, you can't interview Idowu without asking about his hair. He may be Britain's best triple jumper, and an MBE, but it is the colour of Idowu's barnet that really screams for attention. At various times it has been pink, white, red and yellow. Combined with his numerous facial piercings, shaved eyebrows and trademark 1980s towelling headband, Idowu's space-punk vibe has made him perhaps the most instantly recognisable of all Britain's Olympic hopefuls.

When I enquire how often he dyes it, he shrugs with a smile. 'I really haven't dyed it that many times,' he protests. 'It has been red for most of my titles, but when I'm not competing, it's like it is today.' Which, for the record, is a neatly cropped, au naturel black. The whole point, for Idowu, is having an image that he can manipulate at will. 'It's the same with the piercings. It wasn't like having tattoos that were permanent.' (Currently visible: lip, eyebrow, ears.)

Idowu talks about his Dennis Rodman-esque, almost cartoonish image without a hint of resentment, just a touch of bewilderment that it has become such a big deal. What started as one element in his love of fashion ('I love Gieves & Hawkes three-piece suits. Most of the time I'm in a tracksuit so it's nice to get dressed up') has now become part of his brand.

With the London Games approaching, the pressure is naturally on Idowu to complete his East End story: to return to the deprived part of London from which he emerged and win the one gold - Olympic - that has so far eluded him. It would be some return: 'To have the Olympics not only in your hometown, but in your manor... that doesn't happen for many athletes.' Winning gold would not just cap the extraordinary rise of Phillips Idowu, it might even give people more to talk about than just his hair. ES

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Leap year for Phillips Idowu

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