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First published 2013
Copyright © Alistair Brownlee and Jonathan Brownlee, 2013
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
Cover photograph: © Janos Schmidt/ITU
All rights reserved
Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
ISBN: 978-0-670-92313-7
Prologue
Learning the Game
Climbing the Summit
SWIM
The Big Time
On Top of the World
BIKE
Brother on Brother
Inside a Race
RUN
Here Comes Trouble
Coming Back Hard
THE BROWNLEE WAY
The Final Countdown
Two Hours
After the Storm
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
To Mum and Dad,
for everything they have done.
Six forty-five a.m., 7 August 2012. I opened my eyes and looked around.
I saw the ceiling of my hotel room. I saw piles of kit strewn around the floor. I sat up in bed and asked myself how I felt.
How do you sleep the night before a home Olympic final, the biggest two hours of your life?
If you’re me, the answer – rather unusually – was extremely well.
Two nights earlier I just couldn’t get down. I had turned the light off, lain there for half an hour, turned it back on again to read, and then repeated the whole cycle. But with the hooter in London’s Hyde Park just hours away, I had no such problems, nodding off around ten p.m. and then waking up nine hours later, completely naturally. I had only one thought: where did the time go?
Instantly I felt the excitement. Never before have I felt like that on the morning of a race; usually there are nerves. You are shaky, you struggle to eat breakfast. This morning there was none of that. It was pure excitement.
I looked out of my hotel-room window. Blue skies, a few white clouds. There would be no torrential rain, as there had been all summer. But there would be no heatwave either. Normal British summer weather. Good.
When your race starts close to midday you don’t want to eat breakfast too early. So I turned on BBC Breakfast news, and there it was: a reporter doing a preview for the nation, standing on the race finish line, the Serpentine in the background, Union flags fluttering in the foreground, all of it less than a mile away from where I sat.
For once this didn’t trigger the nerves I would normally feel. Instead there was a delightful thrill. Wow! It’s actually here!
There was little to do but count off the minutes. As always my kit was already packed. My bottles were ready. My energy gels were in place. Our bikes were taken care of; our wetsuits were taken care of.
With an hour and a half before the start we strolled across into Hyde Park and into the athletes’ entrance, completely at ease, completely unaware of the madness that was going on everywhere else.
Even at that early stage, Hyde Park was in glorious ferment. There were spectators ten-deep around the bike course, thirty-deep around the Serpentine. People were hanging out of trees. But because we were entering through a cordoned-off area, we saw almost no one. This is rather disappointing, I thought. Where are the crowds?
The home-town support that had defined London’s splendid Olympics so far, and would define that day too, became obvious in small stages. We arrived at the main security check-point on our bikes.
‘All right, lads?’ said the army boys on duty. ‘You lads ride straight through.’ Alarms were sounding. Our rucksacks were on our bikes, unopened and unchecked. ‘Keep going, lads,’ they told us. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’ Just behind us were the French team. ‘Right, you lot. Off your bikes. Open your bags.’ Brilliant.
As we set up our helmets and running shoes in the transition area – which we would later come sprinting into after the swim and then the cycle – we became aware of the thousands crammed in along the banks of the Serpentine. Then, coming round a corner and out from behind a screen as we headed out on our bikes for a brief warm-up, the noise hit us.
Bang! It was incredible, almost disconcerting. What should we do – wave? Smile? Try to acknowledge it all?
At a stroke any final nerves went. I looked at the endless smiling faces, felt the cheers hammering my ears and thought: this is the coolest thing I’ve ever experienced.
The noise was impossible to imagine. We would find out afterwards that lots of mates who had driven down from Yorkshire at dawn that morning couldn’t even get close to a vantage point – some managed to find a spot by one of the two giant screens, but some had to turn right round and drive home again.
Of course, we were oblivious to all this, locked into the last countdown before the show began. We checked transition, checked our positions, checked our slots on the starting pontoon. This was our mantra: ‘It’s an ordinary race in Hyde Park, racing the same rivals, wearing familiar kit.’
And so to the pontoon. We were announced to waves of cheers rolling across the Serpentine from all sides. It had clouded over now, warm but not scorching, the water cold enough, at 19 ºC, for wetsuits to be mandatory. As strong swimmers we always prefer a non-wetsuit swim – they give weaker swimmers a decent boost – but we had expected this, and we had prepared for it.
We jogged to our positions on the extreme right. Water splashed on the face, green swim-hat pulled tight, goggles lowered on to eyes and adjusted.
A helicopter clattering overhead. Heart thumping.
Twenty-four years, all building up to this. Eighteen years of training, much of it brutal, much of it wonderful, culminating in this single race.
Mum and Dad on the lakeside, barely able to look. Old swim coaches and young training partners gathered round their televisions. Best mates in the grandstand, thousands squeezed in tight along the loops and turns of the course, most of Yorkshire and millions around the world watching, waiting, wondering.
Into a crouch, poised for the hooter. Three. Two. One …