Rio Olympics – Paralympics double the new goal for Jason Smyth

It may have been purely coincidental that at the same time Roy Keane was discussing breastfeeding this week, Jason Smyth, in the next training patch over, was discussing fatherhood. Two corners of the National Sports Campus at Abbotstown, only a million miles apart.

Two men in a state of perpetual motivation though. Except for Smyth, it’s not so much about operating in a parallel sporting universe as a near continuously suspended one.

Until it comes to the once every four year showcase that are the Paralympics. For the four years in between, it’s as if Smyth doesn’t exist at all.

It’s not entirely up to Smyth to change that perception, although he’s doing his level best. So, a week before travelling to Doha for the Paralympics Athletics World Championships, he offers a perfectly timely reminder of that existence in between.

It doesn’t necessarily bother him that the Paralympics may still be a quadrennial theme. Just don’t confuse that with the time and effort it still takes to succeed.

Seven years

It helps that Smyth has already changed so many perceptions – or rather misconceptions – of what the Paralympics are all about. It’s over seven years now since he made the Beijing Paralympics his own, winning a sprint double, two gold medals with world records to go with them, drawing justifiable comparisons to Usain Bolt.

Both were 21-years-old, supremely dominant, with no apparent limits on how fast they could run on the track.

On and off the track, however, Smyth did have limits; as a young child he was diagnosed with Stargardt’s Disease, a hereditary degenerative visual impairment, which by now has effectively taken away 90 per cent of his central eyesight.

Not that Smyth ever viewed that as limiting his athletic potential. Indeed the first time I met him, a Derry schoolboy winning an Irish sprint double back in 2006, Smyth boldly declared that he wanted to be a world-class sprinter who happened to have a visual impairment, not the other way around.

Nothing in the years since has changed that perception of himself.

Two years after Beijing, Smyth went where no Paralympics athlete had gone before, qualifying for the 100m at the 2010 European Athletics Championships, in Barcelona – the first Paralympics athlete to compete against the so-called fully-able.

As if to prove that was no fluke, Smyth also made the semi-finals – where no Irish sprinter, fully-able or otherwise, had gone before.

Then, in 2012, Smyth set himself the target of becoming the first Paralympics athlete to also qualify for the Olympics. The A-standard for London was 10.18 seconds; after several efforts, he got his best down to 10.22: the proverbial width of his vest. So it wasn’t to be.

Sprint double

Oscar Pistorius went on to write that Olympics-Paralympics headline (before making more gruesome headlines), while Smyth went on to defend his sprint double at the London Paralympics, again in world record times.

Now, less than one year before Rio rolls around, he’s targeting once more. Only this time the Olympic qualifying standard is 10.16 – faster that Paul Hession’s Irish record of 10.18, which has stood since 2007. To make a first Rio Olympics-Paralympics double, Smyth must first become the fastest Irishman of all time.

“That’s very much the intention,” he tells me. “I look back on London, and I was silly, silly close. I know I was in shape to run 10.18. I just kept making a few mistakes, tried to force it, then mentally, I just wasn’t ready for the situation, to properly deal with it. The big thing now is being able to accept that. Because I know I was capable of it. The last two years haven’t been ideal. I’ve had a knee injury, some setbacks.

“But these things happen for a reason. It’s about how we face these challenges, and difficulties, how we overcome them, and push forward.”

Mormon upbringing

If this sounds like some sort of religious devotion that’s because it partly is: along with his Stargardt’s Disease, Smyth has never shied away from his Mormon upbringing, and it continues to have a strong influence on his athletics career.

Four months after London, at a Mormon ceremony in Salt Lake City, he married his American girlfriend Elise Jordan. In order to give him the best chance of qualifying for Rio at both Olympic and Paralympics level, they’ve since moved to north London, where Smyth trains with the Lee Valley AC, under British sprint coach Clarence Callender.

Everything about the set-up at Lee Valley means Smyth can train, full-time, as an Olympic athlete who also happens to be aiming for the Paralympics. He’s blurred the line between the two but not necessarily separated them either, because Smyth knows the Paralympics are where he will leave his greatest mark.

Last month, at an event to mark the one-year countdown, Rio staged a unique Paralympics event, inviting all the best sprinters, from the various disability categories. Smyth beat them all, and the next day, every newspaper in Brazil ran the headline: The World’s Fastest Paralympian.

Fed up

“The Paralympics grew a huge amount from Beijing to London,” he says, “and I think Rio will grow them again. But they still have a long, long way to go. It’s up to us, as athletes, to build the sport, really push it forward, and I want to continue to do that. I don’t know of any athlete who gets fed up trying to win. That keeps me going, to keep winning, keep having success.”

Which brings him to Doha, later this month, where Smyth is targeting another extension of his 10-year unbeaten streak in Paralympics competition.

Only instead of defending his sprint double, won in Lyon two years ago, he’s only running the 100 metres this time.

“My wife is due our first baby, on October 25th, so I have to shorten the trip, and hope I make it home in time. I definitely wouldn’t like to miss that target.”