Most of the 20 sports will know 75 per cent of the certainties for selection, but it will be a testing time for those who are on the fringes.
I’ve been through that myself three times before the Games, and not been selected twice. It can feel as if your world has collapsed around you. I had it in 1992, 1996 and 2004. The first time, I was young and on the fringes, and then I missed out on Atlanta. I was devastated. I was 22, and at the time, it felt like the worst moment in my life.
I had turned down a sports scholarship to an American College, and instead, had taken up the offer of a contract playing as a professional in Spain for two years. It was pre-Lottery funding, I was broke, and Zaragoza wanted to pay me to play. Bingo. As the overseas pro, I grew up, learnt to be the ‘go-to’ guy in big games, and felt I’d come of age. Several of the world’s leading players were contracted to the Spanish league. At the time, UK wheelchair basketball was not professional and John Stainton, the GB coach at that time, had ruled that unless you were playing in the UK you would not be considered for the squad. So I came back. By 2000, I was an established member of the squad.
In 2004, I was one of the few British wheelchair basketball players who gained a public profile, from the BBC Ident in which I’m spinning in my chair. I’m still recognised from it today. That 10-second Ident was shown 45,000 times. It took two days to film at Shepperton Film Studios, where they filmed Harry Potter.
The entire studio was kitted out as a basketball court, but our spinning in the chairs was so violent the floor of the basketball court was ripped to shreds. I think there were 37 takes of that particular sequence before the director was happy.
Early in 2004, I suffered a wrist injury, and a serious dip in form. The GB coach told me he felt I wasn’t putting enough effort in. There was an off-the-cuff remark that he’d seen more of me on television than he had on court — because of that BBC Ident. The funny thing is that I knew how much I was training. Too much. I was training so hard it made me ill. At the time, I was playing and working for two BBC productions: Xchange, a kids show, and The Holiday Programme.
I was travelling, filming day to day and training twice a day. My body wasn’t getting any rest at all. The fact that television crews were also following the basketball squad for a BBC documentary — Wheels of Gold — made it even more intense. In January, the coach picked eight players. I was not one of them. It was devastating. The camera crews recorded our every reaction as team selection process was filmed and dramatised as we opened letters at our homes. I recovered form and health in time, and was selected for Athens last man in, by the skin of my teeth, two months before the Games. Strangely, even though we won the bronze medal in Athens, it was one of the worst years of my life because of stress. Most of our athletes will face that intense media attention for these Games. It will be new and daunting. But hopefully, very, very special.
