Finally Holmes puts on ideal exhibition

14 April 2012

Kelly Holmes was sitting there, checking through the list like a doctor on her rounds. "1996, Atlanta, stress fracture; 2000, ruptured calf muscle six weeks prior to the Games; 1997, ruptured achilles, 2003, ankle and calf injury . . ."

They were just the ones she could remember but, actually, there was a painful memory for each of the last eight years. We didn't have time to sit through them all but, anyway, she didn't care. Nothing hurt any more.

All the traumas, the heartbreak and misery of the unluckiest athlete in Britain had been consigned to distant memory. Because here she was, Kelly Holmes, Olympic champion - and the billing never fitted anyone better.

For Holmes is the woman who tried, tried and tried again - and even tried one more time when it seemed clear to everyone else that her efforts were destined never to earn her the prizes that her spirit merited. Having been round the block for a dozen years, this old soldier, broken down once more, almost quit in despair 14 months ago saying she'd never been physically or psychologically lower.

Down the corridor from this press conference room, in the bowels of the Olympic Stadium, is the medical office outside which the British press corps stood on a Saturday morning in 1997 waiting for news of Holmes, who had injured herself in the opening heats of the 800 metres on the first day of the World Championships.

She was the nailed on favourite for both the 800m and the 1500m. She was going to be a double world champion but ended up hobbling out on crutches to tell us of a damaged achilles. The championships were about half an hour old.

We got so used to these tales of woe that, perhaps like Holmes herself, it was hard to convince ourselves that she could ever win one of those global titles.

So it was that when she crossed the line first in an epic 800m battle here, she opened her eyes saucer-wide as if it had just dawned that things like this didn't happen to people like her.

"I thought 'no, it can't be'," she shrugged. "I just couldn't believe that, for once, I'd crossed the line first."

It was real. After seven World, Olympic and European medals, all of the minor variety, now she had struck gold. "I used my head and my strength of mind to see me through but, to be honest, I think it was my heart which took me to the line."

It is a wonder that she could win any medals at all - yet she had actually won 14 in major championships and Cup competition before last night. Her 15th put her in the elite company of six other British Olympic women athletics champions - Mary Rand, Mary Peters, Tessa Sanderson, Sally Gunnell, Denise Lewis and Ann Packer, the last 800m champ, 40 years ago.

Yet has Kelly's triumph topped the lot? Let's be honest; this was an epic she surely shouldn't have won. The 800m was the afterthought in her programme, a race she was only persuaded to run after one excellent final training session last week. Also, up against her was one of the best fields ever assembled, headed by Maria Mutola, the best 800m runner who ever lived, a woman who Holmes had never beaten in a big race.

Last year, the pair, training partners and housemates in South Africa, had been accused of concocting a race plan which would help them share the spoils - that is, gold for Mutola, silver for Holmes. Yet the 34-year-old Briton, even when clutching that silver, just growled indignantly: "It was my decision to run the way I did and I deserved that medal."

There was no magic about Holmes's run. This just showed how good she can be - and always was - when injuries don't keep tripping her up. She's fast, hard and as tough as the old Army boots she once wore. She pursued her old friend Mutola like a stalker before effectively mugging her with 70m left and held on to the spoils from the on-rushing Moroccan Hasna Benhassi and old foe Jolanda Ceplak. Her winning time of 1min 56.38sec was her best for nine years.

"I always thought that given a year without any problems I could do something," she said. Could that mere 'something' turn out to be the finest achievement in the history of British middle distance running, topping Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett?

Bring on one more ideal Holmes exhibition in the 1500m.

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