From The Times July 22, 2009
Denise Lewis queries British athletes’ training methods
Rick Broadbent, Athletics Correspondent
Denise Lewis sat in a changing room in a West London stadium in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs and debated the limits of the human body. It is a subject that is relevant to Usain Bolt, as he continues to defy logic, and to the Berlin-bound Great Britain team, held together at present by raggedy seams and Band-Aids.
“When it comes to the male sprints you have to be able to open your mind as a spectator and say, ‘Can someone really run that fast?’” Lewis said.
“Do you just say it’s evolution? I watch and think, ‘Can someone really do this clean?’ I really don’t know. There are only so many hours you can train before the body says, ‘Enough.’ Can someone really be head and shoulders above everyone else?”
Does she have doubts about Bolt? “I don’t know,” she said. “I just know he’s the coolest sprinter we’ve had in a long time.”
Bolt is the star turn at the Aviva London Grand Prix tomorrow, but an alarming number of injured Britons will not be at the showpiece meeting, leaving the 2000 Olympic heptathlon champion pondering our methods.
“I’ve always wondered about the conditioning of our younger athletes,” she said. “Instead of ripping it up on the track, I’m more concerned with what our teenagers are doing off it. We’ve always had good under-23s and juniors, but our youngsters are not good at laying down bread-and-butter conditioning.”
The number of injuries among the senior ranks has provoked the search for a common denominator.
Injury has ravaged the Britain team and means Jessica Ennis, the heptathlete, may go to the World Championships in Germany next month as one of only two gold-medal contenders.
“I don’t think it’s a case of training harder, but smarter,” Lewis said. “When you’re not 20 you think you can be out clubbing all night and still get to the track, but it’s a short career these days.”
Whether Ennis competes at Crystal Palace this weekend remains to be seen, but Lewis is well placed to comment on her ability. “Jessica could be huge,” she said. “I’m not surprised at how well she’s come back from her injury [a fractured ankle]. She’s taken her time, she’s gifted and she’s on the way up.”
Ennis’s best points tally is 6,587, a long way adrift of the best of Nataliya Dobrynska, the Olympic champion from Ukraine, and even farther from Lewis’s British record of 6,831.
“She needs her long jump and throws to be stronger, but I look at how Hyleas Fountain took silver at the Olympics,” Lewis said. “I’ve never rated her. She got that medal and I thought, ‘How the hell did that happen?’”
Looking ahead to Berlin, Lewis admitted the vista was “bleak” and suggested Charles van Commenee, the head coach of UK Athletics (UKA), would be “going grey”. Three medal hopefuls have already withdrawn and others, such as Christine Ohuruogu and Paula Radcliffe, may well follow.
However, Lewis says that Van Commenee, her coach in 2000, will get it right in the long run. “I was a bronze medallist without him, but the thing he gave me was the ability to keep my eyes on prize,” she said.
“I never just turned up to train with Charles. Every jump, every throw, every circuit session was designed to win gold. A lot of the time I thought he was a pain in the neck, but he won’t say things to put wind up your skirt.”
Van Commenee famously damned Kelly Sotherton, already out of Berlin, as a wimp and Lewis sampled the same acid tongue. “I was chuffed with a silver at the World Championships in 1997 and he said, ‘I don’t know why you’re so happy, you haven’t won silver, you’ve lost gold,’” she said.
“I thought it was humorous. He’s mellowed and is a bit more measured, but he’s direct and there are an awful lot of sensitive people in British sport.”
She then tested that theory with her assessment of Sotherton. “She has underperformed for the last couple of years,” Lewis said. “She might have been injured but she should have got a medal at the Olympics. This year’s different. She has a real injury and I think it would have found her out.”
The UKA medics have spent an inordinate amount of time with the unfortunate this season, but there is always hope rising from adversity. “Who would have predicted that I’d get swine flu and spend four days in bed watching a 59-year-old nearly win the Open?” she said. “Anything can happen. That’s the beauty of sport.”
Denise Lewis was promoting the British Airways Great Britons scheme, which offers free flights to rising stars in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. Apply online at ba.com/greatbritons That’s Me! I’ll swap the kilt for lycras and look out London! -kk 