Paralympic sprinter looks back on his T13 100m narrow victory in 10.53 at the Tokyo Games

When you have a four-year cycle, you're planning for the fourth year. Then, all of a sudden, Covid came and things changed. That led to an injury. I continued to train in lockdown because I don't live far away from the Mary Peters Track in Belfast. But, all of a sudden, I went from getting treatment, physio, having the support staff around two or three times a week to going a number of months with nothing.

It was my choice to continue to train. You feel like you're going to lose out by doing nothing and allowing other people to get ahead, but I ended up with a pretty bad lower back issue and, around August 2020, I couldn't even touch my knees. I’d irritated one of the discs.

I've had issues with my back in the past. I’d had to adjust things, knowing I was getting towards the end of my career and there was a little bit of a concern on that front. After a number of weeks, things settled and then, all of a sudden, I was doing something in the gym and it came back again, but worse.

The same thing happened over a number of weeks, where I was trying to build things up, I made a few changes, and my back became worse again. It was lasting longer and it was feeling
slower to ease up.

All of a sudden, we were in November and I was sitting there wondering: ‘Is this me done?’ I wasn’t sure even if I could make the Paralympic Games. I got through it but I picked up a few niggles, some Achilles issues, so I went into the springtime under-prepared. That had a knock-on effect that, going into the summer, I under competed as well. I was only able to compete twice.

There were new athletes on the scene. The Algerian guy who ended up finishing second to me in Tokyo [Skander Djamil Athmani] had been an athlete for years but had only just come into para sport. I'd seen he had run quicker than I had in the last few years. He had a personal best of around my 10.2 from a good few years before that. So, all of a sudden, there was this athlete who was a serious contender.

In para sport, you can kind of come through unseen. I was aware of Athmani a month or two out but everybody on the outside was going: “Jason Smyth is going to win the gold medal.”

That was the whole backdrop headed into Tokyo: doubts, uncertainty, being under-prepared, a new athlete who had run quicker than me. But yet everybody expected me to win because they were unaware of the issues.

Stephen Maguire was involved with me again on the coaching front in the lead-up to the Games and his experience was massive and hugely influential in how we went about that process and having the patience to go about it. If I had a competed a week earlier, I wouldn't have won. That's where we were in terms of time, and we were absolutely on the money in terms of getting things right at the right time.

At that stage, you're just ticking over and sharpening up. But it's really the mental battle at that point. That’s where it's won and lost. We talk about it all the time in sport: control the controllables and influence the things that you can influence. I felt that was something I did very well: that whole mental piece. But I had to find something and get even more focused than I'd ever been in my career.

Stephen’s biggest influence came between the heats and the final. There were pieces I knew I needed to do: I needed to put Djamil under pressure over the first half of the race. Stephen said:  “If  you put him under pressure, he’s going to make mistakes.”

I hadn't done the work on the back end of the race just because of injuries – and I had to find something over the first 60m of my race that I hadn’t found in quite a few years – but I was forced into that situation.

There were other things we were talking about, even around the call room. The phrase Stephen used was “bring presence”. I am the one with the experience here, I'm the gold medallist. I'm the one that people look at and expect to win. Those moments bring that kind of presence when you’re in the call room, that you're ready. And that then can influence or change everyone else or how they think. They didn't know anything about the injury issues. They had no idea where I was at.

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And there was that ability to switch on mentally. I don't know exactly how I was able to do it but, ultimately, that was the difference. I ran 10.53 which wasn't around the quickest I'd run in a number of years, so being able to win in that manner felt completely against the odds for me.

Under the pressure of the Games, it just felt like all those years paid off. I've always tried to make good choices, even earlier in my career – not because of where I'm at right then. Let's say, in terms of when I might have been a few metres ahead of people, I could probably get comfortable. But I really felt like I was preparing for the day when I would need something else.

And that final turned into the day where all those choices, things that I had sacrificed, boiled down to being part of that hundredth of a second. In hindsight, it meant I was able to leave the Paralympics on that moment and leave at the top. That’s something I don't think most sportspeople get the chance to do. 

As told to Mark Woods

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