Heart of a Champion (13 page)

Sian decided to put her career on hold to support Greg. Her experience, dedication and discipline helped him through his recuperation and into his training build-up. ‘She was pretty much doing everything for me and we worked really well as a team.'

Greg concentrated on quality rather than quantity in his training as he gradually regathered his confidence and built up his legs. ‘I didn't really need to run fast all the time. I ran a lot with Sian, and her performances started to get better. Mine were building up after the accident. When I needed to run fast, I'd go to the track once or twice a week and just do intervals. We did a lot of our biking together.'

Greg and Sian's backgrounds as elite athletes allowed them to avoid friction over the self-focus that's essential for reaching the top in professional sport. ‘You have to be selfish to the point of knowing that you have to get your training done first. And then all the other things will be taken care of—media, photo shoots, whatever—you make it work. But you have to make sure that you get all the stuff done for yourself first, because if you don't, at the end of the day, you're going to miss out.'

Greg's early experience working full-time while competing served him well as he tried to balance his new responsibilities with his training commitments. He now had the love and support of the woman he adored and the desire to build a career that would give them financial security.

It would be a new and improved Greg Welch who lined up for the 1994 Hawaiian Ironman.

B
UT FIRST HE WOULD COMPETE IN THE
T
OOHEYS
B
LUE
S
ERIES
back home in Australia—beginning on the Gold Coast in January 1994.

The new series had a revolutionary format—the Triple Super Sprint. Three races, each about 20 minutes long, followed by a 10-minute break that started once the first person crossed the line. Drafting—where a rider tucks in behind another to travel in his slipstream and reduce air resistance, gaining advantage by the amount of energy he saves—was allowed for the first time and there was a purpose-built semicircular contraption like a mini velodrome on which the riders turned around. The distances remained constant—300-m (328-yd) swim, 7-km (4.3-mile) bike, 2-km (1.2-mile) run—but the order changed. The first race was swim, bike, run; the second was run, bike, swim; and the third was bike, swim, run.

Greg surprised even himself by coming second overall, with a second, first, second to Brad Bevan's first, second, first. Greg and Brad became arch rivals in the five-race series.

The fourth event of the series, at Penrith, west of Sydney, was an eliminator. Twenty-five competitors started in the first of three races. The last ten finishers in the first race were eliminated. In the second race, the last five were eliminated. That left 10 to fight out the final. Greg won the first two races easily, and was well positioned and feeling strong in the last race. But on a sharp corner, when the rider in front of him rolled a tyre, Greg clipped his back wheel and went flying. He instinctively threw out his hands to break his fall and broke both his wrists. Naturally, he missed the last race, but he still finished second in the series.

The lay-off was a blessing as Greg had begun to experience problems with his recovering knee. Eventually he located a brilliant American orthopod, Dr Richard Steadman, who worked with the US Ski Team. Steadman had performed surgeries on many elite sportspeople, including Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf and Monica Seles. The doctor examined Greg and decided that surgery would be counterproductive. He was convinced Greg could rehab his knee back to full strength.

Greg focused all his energies on the task and, only a few months later, he raced in and won the 1994 Ironman Japan. He was brimming with confidence when he flew out for Kona for the 1994 Ironman.

It was the turning point of his professional career: he made sporting history by becoming the first non-American World Ironman Champion.

The publisher of
Competitor Magazine
and an unofficial Ironman historian (not to mention being the guy who turned up to the first race with a sleeping bag), Bob Babbitt is in no doubt that it was a remarkable achievement: ‘Not only was Greg the first non-American winner of the Ironman, he was pretty much the first non-Californian winner. From 1978 through to then, all winners, with the exception of Gordon Haller and John Howard, had come from California.'

Nobody was more pleased with Greg's breakthrough than Paula Newby-Fraser, who believed he was finally using his gifts to their full capacity. ‘Greg was a great racer. He could see someone go by and decide whether to chase or back off, based on what he knew he was capable of. Greg did win from some pretty big deficits, with other people believing he couldn't make it up, but he knew that he could. Greg was very good at knowing where other people's athletic strengths and weaknesses lay. He has a fine eye for details, and he watched and he knew.'

On the very day that Greg finally broke through to win the Hawaiian Ironman in 1994 at Kona, back in Kurnell in Sydney's Sutherland Shire, David and Liz Walker were watching the eighth running of the Richie Walker Memorial Triathlon, the annual race in honour of their late son. David recalls the surge of emotion that washed over them when they heard over the PA system that Greg had won in Hawaii. ‘It brought things full circle for us. We knew Greg would have been thinking of Richie, just as we were. We were delighted for Greg. He'd trained so hard and waited so long, and we felt so proud that he'd achieved his goal and that Richie had helped to inspire him.'

Indeed, in his acceptance speech in Kona, Greg dedicated his win to Richie. But it didn't take long for the old larrikin Plucky to emerge during the monumental celebrations. Things started out with some decorum. Greg repaid his long-term sponsor, Mrs. T's Pierogies, by sitting at Tim Twardzik's table at the awards night. Tim won the double that year because he also sponsored Paula Newby-Fraser, the women's champion.

Tim began the celebrations for Paula and Greg with a champagne extravaganza at the table. Then Scott Tinley exacted some revenge for years of Plucky's practical jokes with a well placed glass of champagne right on the crotch of Greg's pants—just as he rose to make his acceptance speech.

But Greg was unstoppable, and he soon had the audience rolling in the aisles as he relived his Hawaiian odyssey and thanked all those who had helped him realise his dream. ‘Apparently it was 45 minutes long, but I reckon it was about 20 minutes. I was milking it. I thanked everybody.'

By the time he sat down with his trophy, Paula reckoned Greg had read through the entire phone book. Then it was time for some serious partying. ‘First we went to a place called Marty's. It was big. I have vivid memories of dancing with Sian on my shoulders. Apparently ever since, the place has refused to open on the night of the Ironman awards.'

The following night, their last before returning home, was the traditional Aussie party in Kona. The usual suspects were all there, with the Southwells leading the way. Well into the night someone produced a 40 m length of souvenired Gatorade banner and the gang wrapped Greg in it as if he were an Egyptian mummy. They refused to undo it, and plied him with grog as he waddled around like a penguin. The inevitable happened. ‘I was trying to walk and I fell. I couldn't put my arms out to stop my fall, so I fell like a bag of spuds and broke my collarbone just where I'd broken it ten years earlier playing touch football. I was immediately sober and I said, “Sian, we need to go to the hospital.”'

Luckily, the pain was largely anaesthetised by the celebrations, but the next morning it was Sian who had to pack and load everything as her Ironman champion looked on sheepishly with his arm in a sling.

While they waited for their plane, one of their friends from San Diego, an orthopaedic surgeon on holiday, walked over and handed Greg his card. ‘Come and see me tomorrow and I'll sort it out.' Greg accepted his invitation and, after another enforced training break, recovering from the broken collarbone, Greg returned to Australia in early 1995 for what became known as the Triathlon Grand Prix after Tooheys pulled their sponsorship. Greg equalled his previous year's second place, once more showing his versatility, switching rapidly from the Ironman long course to the short-course events. Then he went to St Croix in the Caribbean and won there in a race record that still stands.

Going into the German Ironman in mid-July, Greg was battling a serious problem with his soleus muscle, the key calf muscle that attaches to the Achilles tendon. He considered pulling out of the race, but he'd been paid an appearance fee and he didn't want to let the organisers down. ‘In the end, I had to pull out about 25 km (15.5 miles) into the run while I was in third place because my soleus just wouldn't hold up.'

Greg suspended training until the muscle recovered, which meant he didn't race again until that year's Hawaiian Ironman. He went into the race in the unfamiliar—and uncomfortable—position of defending champion. His 1994 win had attracted great media attention at home and abroad. Paula Newby-Fraser believed the scrutiny was a heavy burden for Greg. ‘He was the first non-American Ironman champion, the one who finally broke the streak, creating a position of pressure for him. He was suddenly catapulted up there with the great Australian athletes. All of a sudden everybody was looking at him and writing about him. Greg did not like being at the top. He preferred to be the underdog.'

Greg faced the growing pressure uneasily. Could he defend his crown? ‘In 1995 I didn't train as well as I did in '94. I had injuries but also maybe I thought that it was all too easy and, that after my breakthrough win, I was going to be a six-time Ironman champion like the rest of them. I went and raced but I had my arse handed to me and got fourth.'

That setback allowed Greg to face 1996 with renewed passion. He loved being the underdog again and he had a wonderful year, racing in the International Triathlon Grand Prix Series, held in exotic locations all over the world, in Europe, England, North America, Honolulu and Australia.

Greg came second in two races, in Oceanside in America and Koblenz in Germany, even though he had set himself for the longer events and wanted to have an off-season and race himself into shape.

In September he won the World Long-Distance Championships in Muncie, Indiana, his fifth world title, adding to his wins at the 1988 World Surf Club Championship, 1990 World Triathlon Championships, 1993 World Duathlon Championships and 1994 Ironman World Title. No other triathlete had ever won world titles over the grand slam of the major distances.

Five weeks after Muncie, Greg lined up for his ninth Ironman. He raced superbly. In the leading pack out of the swim, he rode his best ever bike leg, 5 minutes faster than his winning time in 1994. But by then the race had been hijacked by a gang of outstanding European cyclists—the Germans Thomas Hellreigel, Jurgen Zack and Wolfgang Dittrich as well as Luc Van Lierde from Belgium in his first attempt at Kona. Hellreigel and Van Lierde blew the field away. In the absence of the
ho'o mumuku
winds out on the Queen K Highway, they put 4 minutes on the third placed Dittrich and 5 minutes on Greg by the turnaround at Hawi. On the ride back, Hellreigel and Van Lierde staged a relentless duel, exchanging the lead many times. During the ride Van Lierde incurred a 3-minute penalty for blocking, and while he and Hellreigel came off the bike together, the Belgian headed for the penalty box as Hellreigel ran off.

Thomas Hellreigel had set a new race record of 4 hours 24 minutes 50 seconds for the bike. But Van Lierde remained calm and used the enforced rest to compose himself for the run. Dave Scott was in the field but too far back to figure in the finish, despite an amazing 2-hour 45-minute marathon. Van Lierde chased Hellreigel, who had built up a lead of more than 5 minutes, even though he was hampered by a tightening hamstring. By the time Hellreigel reached the Natural Energy Lab, Van Lierde had cut his lead back to 2 minutes. Some 3 km (1.9 miles) out from the finish, Van Lierde ghosted up behind Hellreigel, then powered past him to cross the line in a race record of 8 hours 4 minutes 8 seconds. Hellreigel held his nerve and came in 2 minutes later.

The ride had taken the edge off Greg's running legs but he still finished an excellent third in his fastest Hawaiian time of 8 hours 18 minutes 57 seconds—two and a half minutes faster than his winning time two years before.

Chapter 9
A Natural Out

B
ACK IN
S
EPTEMBER
1993, like millions of his countrymen, Greg's Aussie heart had swelled with pride when he heard the International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch announce: ‘…and the winner is…Syd-en-ee!' Sydney had beaten Manchester, Istanbul, Beijing and Berlin for the right to host the 2000 Games. Greg was even more delighted the following year when the IOC announced that triathlon would debut as a full-medal sport in Sydney. In 1997, the International Triathlon Union took a further step down the road to Sydney when it agreed on a formula for a point series that would allow triathletes to qualify to represent their countries at the Olympics.

Prior to the ITU announcement, Greg had noticed that his enthusiasm for the grind of competition had started to wane. For the first time in his life, he had begun to seriously question how long he wanted to push himself and nurse his body through the pain and pressure of training and competing at the top level. ‘I was standing on the start line and I was pretty blasé about it. I was turning up, and my natural talent just took over and I would still be winning races, about 4 out of the 5 in the space of six weeks, but I wasn't that motivated. I reckon I was going.'

From his broadcasting experience, Greg knows that stories often have what the producers called ‘a natural out'—a compelling and logical end. Looking back, he can see that 1997 or 1998 would have been his ‘natural out'. Except for one thing—the chance for a final incandescent blaze of glory in Sydney.

What started as a fleeting thought started to play as a feature-length movie in his subconscious. The Sydney 2000 Olympic Games were almost within touching distance, he felt, just three short years to go. How good would it be for the boy from Greenacre via the Shire to win the first ever Olympic gold for triathlon in his home town? He would have the Triathlon World Championship Golden Grand Slam—victories over all major distances and an Olympic gold medal. It would be the ultimate Hollywood ending to his career.

He found the golden lure irresistible, so he began to slowly set himself to achieve the dream, feeling an unaccustomed strain. ‘I think that the Games started to bring a little bit of pressure, a different kind of pressure. And there was the pressure of qualifying. Although I was ranked number one in the world, that didn't qualify me for the Olympic Games. I'd have to perform well in the two Olympic Games selection races or get that third subjective choice spot, which I couldn't count on. I really thought about it a lot and I really put a lot of pressure on myself to actually perform. That's out of character for me.'

Greg's concern was due to the strange qualifying system. There were two qualifying races. The winner of the first race qualified for a place on the team. If that person won the second race, the second placed finisher would then qualify. Then, there was a third ‘subjective' place to be awarded at the discretion of the selectors. Greg, as the then world number one, would have had a strong claim for the position but so would Miles Stewart, the best performed Australian from the previous year's world titles.

After his third place at the 1996 Ironman, Greg had taken a couple of months off. When he came to Australia to compete in the St George Triathlon Grand Prix in January the following year he was grossly undertrained for the first time he could remember. (Greg and Sian had gone to Lake Tahoe, where they skied and partied and took a complete break from training for a change.) ‘I came ninth in Manly in a very fast race—a triple super sprint. I knew I was vulnerable. I was just trying to intimidate the rest of the field because they knew that I was always one to beat.'

Greg knew he was in trouble at Manly when he placed himself in race positions where he'd normally be comfortable but instead of his heart rate being at its normal aerobic level, he was struggling well into his anaerobic threshold. He felt like a 2 am partier with too many beers on board—on the verge of throwing up. After the race he knew he would have to take immediate remedial action. He decided some desperate measures were needed.

Greg went to Australia's highest area, around Thredbo, for a concentrated three-week block of training. After two weeks of solid training there at altitude, he subjected himself to an extraordinary day of workouts, just one week out from his next race in Adelaide. In the morning, he swam 6 km (3.7 miles) in the Australian Institute of Sports pool at the base of the Thredbo ski slopes, at an altitude of about 1400 m (4593 ft). He then rode a 6-hour ‘turbo trainer' on a stationary machine. He knew that riding inside was a harder workout than riding outside because there was no freewheeling and he would always be forced to drive the wheels. Greg aimed to spin his pedals at 90 revolutions per minute. Scientific testing had shown that this was his most efficient rate. ‘While I trained on the stationary bike, I watched the entire Australian Open tennis final, and it was a three-setter. It was Pete Sampras and Albert Costa. It ran for about 3 hours and 45 minutes. Then I put a video on and watched a 2-hour movie and still had 15 minutes to spare. The beauty of that day was that I never went anywhere near my median aerobic threshold. I stayed below 135 beats a minute the whole time.'

This drastic training regimen worked amazingly well. Greg won his next Grand Prix event. It was an extraordinary example of his recuperative powers and it heralded the start of a purple patch that saw him notch up three firsts and two seconds in his next five starts.

Greg was selected for the ‘shadow' Australian Olympic team of six men and six women (the likely team members whom the selectors fund and expect to be in the final team). As part of the team's preparation, Dr Diana Robinson gave each member a series of extensive medical checkups. Greg's blood tests came back with some strange results. His ferritin (or iron) levels were off the charts. Greg was in Mooloolaba training with the team when he was asked to do a follow-up blood test at a local laboratory. The results confirmed that he suffered from hereditary haemochromatosis, a relatively common iron overload disease that causes the body to absorb and store too much iron. It is a manageable but serious condition. Without treatment, the extra iron can build up in the organs and damage them. Left unchecked, it can cause the organs to fail—a strange irony for an ironman.

While iron is an essential body nutrient, too much can cause major problems. Most people absorb around 10 per cent of the iron contained in the food they eat to meet their bodies' needs, but people like Greg, who suffer from haemochromatosis, absorb more iron than their body needs or can handle. Because Greg's body has no natural way to rid itself of the excess iron, it stores the iron in body tissues, particularly in the liver, heart and pancreas. Once absorbed in the body, iron becomes part of haemoglobin, a molecule in the blood that transports oxygen from the lungs to all body tissues. For Greg this meant good news…and bad news. ‘It probably explains why I was such a good endurance athlete because the oxygen-carrying capabilities of someone with haemochromatosis are far superior to someone without it. I've been told it's almost like taking EPO.'

EPO, or erythropoietin, is a protein hormone produced by the kidney. When released into the bloodstream, it binds with receptors in the bone marrow and stimulates the production of red blood cells. In conventional medicine, EPO is used to treat certain forms of anaemia, often those caused by chronic kidney failure. Because it accelerates red blood cell production, EPO also increases the body's capacity to carry oxygen. In simple terms, the drug stimulates bone marrow to produce more red blood cells, allowing the user to benefit from more oxygen in the bloodstream and, thus, have more stamina. All an athlete needed was three or four injections a week for a few weeks and he could experience as much as a 10 per cent improvement in performance.

This side effect brought EPO into the sights of sporting cheats. EPO provided unscrupulous athletes with a new way of ‘blood doping', an illegal method of increasing their red blood cells and thus improving athletic performance. Before the cheats discovered EPO's illicit possibilities, blood-doping cheats would ‘donate', say, 1 litre (35 fl oz) of their blood before a big race. It would be kept in storage while the athlete's body naturally replaced it over about three weeks. When the natural blood replacement was complete, the athlete would have his ‘donated' blood transfused back into his body—effectively giving him that extra unit of blood and the improved oxygen-carrying capacity that came with it. The advent of EPO meant that blood-doping cheats no longer had to ‘donate' and transfuse. They could simply shoot up with EPO and artificially increase their red cells and thus their oxygen-carrying capacity. EPO was outlawed in the late 1990s by sporting bodies around the world, not just because its use gave an unfair advantage but also because it entailed some serious health risks.

EPO use can be lethal. It can dangerously lift the percentage of red cells in the blood, known as the haematocrit. In simple terms, a low haematocrit means thin blood and a high one means thick blood. EPO thickens the blood. Past a certain level, that thickening can clog blood vessels. In the worst case, it can cause strokes or heart attacks. EPO can be particularly hazardous to endurance athletes: dehydration alone raises the haematocrit, but dehydration plus the effects of EPO can raise it to critical, even fatal, levels.

But while international sporting bodies banned the use of EPO, initially the authorities had no accurate tests for it: EPO occurs naturally in the body, so it was hard to establish normal levels for it, and the EPO made in laboratories was practically indistinguishable from the natural form.

Nevertheless, some cheats were caught red-handed. In the 1998 Tour de France, some team doctors and team members were caught with bags of EPO doses. Testing has now caught up with the cheats and a urine test can differentiate between artificial and naturally occurring EPO. That test plus the health risks have deterred many cheats from using the substance. Greg says, ‘When I told people I'd been diagnosed with haemochromatosis, some of the sceptics started pointing the finger at me and accusing me of using EPO. It was quite ironic.'

The doctors told Greg they had to treat his haemochromatosis by blood letting—draining units of his blood and allowing his body to replace them, thus reducing the overall amount of iron in his circulatory system. They told him it shouldn't affect his performance as long as he did it away from racing. Greg did not welcome this advice. He learnt that it took 30 to 50 days for the body to regenerate its full level of blood. In the hectic world of elite-level competition that was virtually unworkable.

‘So, basically, I neglected it. I found out that you don't normally get diagnosed with haemochromatosis until you're in the fifth or sixth decade of your life. And even then, it was usually discovered in routine testing when you went to the doctor for a check-up and they found out that you had cirrhosis of the liver. I thought, “I'm in my early 30s. Time is on my side.” Sian and Paula were adamant that I wasn't looking after myself but I thought, “I can probably put it off for a little while, until I've finished as an athlete.”'

Greg felt he knew his body well. He knew his heart intimately. He knew his resting or sleeping heart rate would range from 30 to 35 beats per minute (bpm). During the day his resting heart rate was between 40 and 45 bpm—compared to the average person's resting rate of between 60 and 90 bpm. Greg could remain in his aerobic zone when he swam at 148 bpm, rode at 150 bpm and ran at about 145 bpm. He would drop into his anaerobic zone (or go into oxygen debt) when swimming from 166 bpm, riding at 158 bpm and running about 162 bpm. If he had to, Greg could crank up his heart rate into the 190s on a very fast track run and he could maintain those levels over 10 km (6.2 miles) or so. But the marathon was a different animal. In the Ironman, Greg always tried to keep his rate below 155 bpm because of the impact of the heat, humidity and wind in Hawaii.

As his career developed, Greg had read widely on scientific advances in training and equipment. He was constantly on the lookout for any knowledge or gear that would give him an edge. When he learnt of the impact of heat on performance, he made sure he wore a cap rather than a visor to prevent additional heat reaching the top of his head. He would also wear lighter coloured clothing to reflect as much heat as possible. And he expanded his understanding of the impact of other factors on performance. ‘I see the Ironman as having five legs, not three. Swim, ride and run are the first three. The fourth is your mental approach and the fifth is nutrition.'

Both the fourth and fifth legs came into play in the marathon. Greg knew from bitter experience that if you were at risk of bonking in the marathon, you had to be astute enough to adjust your race plan to cope with the changing situation. ‘If you're running 4-minute kilometres, that's a 2:48 marathon. But if you're reduced to running 5-minute 30-second to 6-minute kilometres for 5 km (3.1 miles), you lose 10 minutes. But what if you went out a little bit easier, you got in your nutrition and you ran 3 minutes slower than usual? Well, you're still 7 minutes ahead of the curve. At the end, those factors can become critical.'

By the end of 1997, Greg had put all his eggs into winning the International Triathlon Union's World Cup series. For the first time since 1987, by his own choice, he didn't race in Hawaii. He was well placed going into the ITU World Championship in Perth, after a fifth in Stockholm and second in Hamilton and in Sydney.

But during the World Championship race, things went wrong from the start. Early in the swim Greg was next to fellow Australian Chris McCormack. In the turmoil of the initial sprint, Chris's elbow struck Greg, snapped his head back, forced his goggles into his eye and left Greg with mild concussion. At first it wasn't so bad as Greg battled along with the lead pack, almost swimming from memory. But, when he came out of the water, he found himself disoriented as he ran to his bike. ‘I lost about 45 seconds. I hardly knew where I was, and when I got up, I couldn't really focus or move properly and I lost contact. I've never been punched by a boxer but I imagine what I experienced was pretty close to being belted right on the kisser!'