“I HOPE these girls are f**king ready. There’s 10 million quid in funding on the line if they don’t get a medal. I’m telling you, they better f**king get this together tonight.”
The words of the senior UK Athletics figure ring in my ear as we step out of the call room for the final of the women’s 4x400 metres at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
I wasn’t meant to hear the official talking about us as if we are an unpredictable index fund on the London Stock Exchange, not four women who have sacrificed everything to be at the Olympics.
After over a decade with UK Athletics, I’m not surprised.
I used to believe in the sanctity of the Olympic spirit, watching my heroes on the telly with my Dad. Not now.
The individual dreams and hopes of the athlete don’t matter. You are a cog in a machine designed to churn out metal at the podium and thereby generate a sustainable financial model for UK Athletics.
For me, after the life I have lived, this Rio final is more than a race. It has become the symbol of something bigger. I should have been dead, either from malaria or suicide. I was repeatedly sexually assaulted in the system.
I have been viciously racially abused. I have come back from it all and am ready to enter the Olympic stadium.
WINNING an Olympic medal had been a dream my dad and I had forged together in our little Liverpool living room while watching Denise Lewis win gold in the 2000 Games.
Dad died in February 2012, months before he would have seen his daughter cheered loudly by a packed London stadium.
His sacrifices as a migrant had given me the platform to get to those Games, and I was determined to honour him.
Instead, having been an unused relay reserve in Beijing, I was quickly knocked out in two heats of the 100m and 200m in London.
I cried for the wasted years of my adult life and decided to kill myself. I had defined my life by this sport and got nowhere with it. I wanted to climb out of the window and fall from a height, but the window wouldn’t open fully.
In the bathroom were scissors. I had them in my hand and was about to make the first crisp cut when my room-mate suddenly appeared.
I snapped out of the mental storm but felt physically and mentally drained. A day after the Games I decided I want out of this sport.
FOUR years on and I am on the start line in Rio, my perspective totally changed.
Once you have nearly experienced death, you start to appreciate the utter fragility of life and just how precious it is. I have no time to waste anymore.
I have been driven to drink by injury, come close, again, to taking my own life, and contracted one of the deadliest strains of malaria. Ten months out from the Games I had to teach myself how to walk again.
On August 20 we win relay Bronze, Eilidh Doyle, Emily Diamond, Christine Ohuruogu and myself. It saves the collective asses of UK Athletics. They hit their medal target.
I think of Dad, who would have given anything to be in the stadium. Of Mum, ringing every relative in Nigeria to tell them the news.
Years of financial sacrifice, lonely nights, torn inside from sexual assault, facing death too many times and suddenly, your dream comes true.
Finally, I shed tears of joy.
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Adapted by ALEX SPINK
