Aileen's Athens Dream

September 18th turned out to be the best day of my life, so far. From that day on my life has changed dramatically!

After a patchy night's sleep, the mood at the breakfast table was rather subdued, with other team members in their own world, thinking about what lay ahead. I felt reasonably calm but as the time drew nearer for us to catch the bus to the velodrome, I could feel my heart starting to race.

We had done a dress rehearsal of our warm-up at the velodrome a few days beforehand, so I knew what to expect. Marshall Thomas, our coach, kept us right on our timing and whether the events were running to schedule, so all I had to do after my warm-up was to sit back and stay calm! We had practised our standing starts loads of times on my fortnightly trips to Manchester Velodrome and it was a case of making a good start, getting on top of the gear and keeping the cadence going for four laps! I kept saying to myself “It’s only 4 laps, one and a bit minutes out of your life!”

We were off 4th out of the 13 tandems competing in the 1km TT and I had originally thought that going off fourth wasn't to our advantage. However, it turned out for the better! Marshall positioned our tandem on the start line and we got on and clipped our feet into the pedals. The clock counts down from one minute once you have your feet clipped in. The buzzer sounds at 10 seconds to go and then the buzzer sounds on each second from 5 to 1. At zero, we were off! We got a really good start and got on top of the gear really quickly, after half a lap we sat down and drove through the pedals. Each time we came around past the start/finish line, Marshall shouted out the laps to go. Our first lap was the fastest we had ever ridden, taking nearly a second off our previous best time and this is really what won the race for us because we were so far in front of the rest, on our first lap. Our second lap was even faster and we maintained it in our third lap but then we started to die off a bit in our final lap as the lactate acid built up in our legs. However, we drove through the pain, and finally we crossed the finish line. I suddenly felt a rush of pain to my head as though someone had hit me with a baseball bat. My eyes went blurry and my whole body was in agony! I was just glad I wasn't steering the tandem! We rode around the track and I asked Ellen how we had done. She looked up at the score board and saw the 1.11.16 but wasn't sure at first if that was our time or they were showing the World Record. It wasn't until we rode past it again that she realised that we had in fact broken the World Record and our time was the new World Record. It was a fantastic feeling to know that we had gone out and done a personal best and for that to have broken the World Record of 1.11.90 by nearly 8 tenths of a second.

It was nerve-wracking waiting for each competitor to do their ride. I couldn't watch the others as they raced but Ellen gave me a running commentary of each lap on whether they were up or down on our times. With only 2 competitors remaining, we knew that we had a least won the bronze! The pressure for us really came when the USA rode last, as they were the best in the world. It wasn't until they crossed the finish line with a time of 1.11.221, only 6 hundredths of a second behind us, that we could relax. We were totally ecstatic and couldn't believe it had really happened. We were now officially Gold Medal winners in the Paralympic Games. The first Gold medal of the GB team, the first ever Gold medallists for either men or women in cycling at the Paralympic Games for GB and the first women ever to win Gold in cycling for GB in either the Olympics or the Paralympics. So it was a fantastic achievement for us!

Once we had calmed down a bit, we received our medals. It was a surreal moment standing on the podium receiving my Gold Medal. We were then escorted over to the crowd and it was only then that I noticed the Scottish flags that my family and friends were draping over the barrier. It was fantastic to know that my family had been there to see me win! We were then escorted to a press conference and then doping control. Whilst waiting at doping control, my mother had somehow persuaded the officials to allow her down to doping control to give me a hug, which was fantastic, as I didn't get a chance to meet up with my family at any other time that day.

We were then asked to go to the BBC studios to do a live interview on Grandstand. Then followed a series of other radio interviews and then another TV interview. It was not the best post race recovery, but it was a fantastic experience. The congratulations continued when we eventually arrived back at the athlete village around 8pm. However, we had a qualifying flying 200m to do the next morning for the Sprint, so there was no celebrating that night, just a quick massage and bed by 11pm.

The next day we qualified 3rd fastest for the Sprint, followed a day later by a hard fought victory against the USA in the semi-finals. However, all the exertion over the previous three days had taken its toll and we had to settle for Silver.

All-in-all, the Paralympic Games was a fantastic experience and for it to have been our first international competition and to come away with a Gold Medal and Silver Medal out of the two events we entered was awesome and something I will cherish for the rest of my life. Even since I returned home, I have been invited to Jack McConnell’s Bute House and the opening of the Scottish Parliament building where I met, amongst others, the Queen, Sean Connery, Gavin Hastings and Fred McAuley. I also attended the Parade of Medallists in London, which was fantastic.

I was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, who remembered me from the opening of the Scottish Parliament building (once seen, never forgotten!) and I have been invited to Downing Street on 29 November. I also picked up the Glasgow Disabled Athlete Award for 2004 at the Radisson Hotel last weekend, so it has been a life changing experience for me. In between all this I am back doing my day job as an actuarial trainee for Hymans Robertson. I have also resumed training for the Paralympic World Cup and the European Championships next year and hoping to make it to Beijing in four years time!