The York 1,500 metres indoor championship

I was very foolish.

 

I allowed myself to be caught with a prostitute. With a male prostitute at that.

 

The world is very forgiving these days, but not when you’ve been caught with a 14 year old. Words like ‘paedophile’ can ruin a career. And what a career I have ahead of me. I’m the youngest runner ever to break the world 1,500 metres record, I won the silver medal at the world championships two years ago aged just 16, and I’ve won Commonwealth gold at 1,500 and 800.  

 

The world was my oyster. Until I strayed, a moment of madness after a lonely month of long flights and soulless hotel suites as I attended three back to back championships. I needed company, I just went for the wrong sort of company. By about five years. 

 

I was blackmailed. It was a bloke in a suit who approached me, when I was sitting in Starbucks taking a break between media interviews. Very polite about it he was, said he represented an organisation called the Syndicate, clearly the front name for a criminal gang. All I had to do if I wanted the photo destroyed, he said, was to throw a race. They didn’t need any money from me, just one little poor performance.

“I can’t,” I said, “that sort of thing gets investigated. The governing body's dead serious about race fixing.”

 

The man smiled reassuringly. “You just need to choose the right race,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

 

I tried to stop him, but he clearly wasn’t there to hear me say no.

 

A few days later my home phone rang. It was a woman this time, a complete stranger. “The North of England Indoor Championships,” she said. “They’re taking place in November in York. We need you to enter the 1,500 metres.”

 

“Who is this?” I asked. “Why should I enter an obscure event like that?”

 

“You know who we are,” she said. “The Syndicate. Just say you’re entering it as part of your training programme, or that you’re going to attempt to beat your world record.”

 

“I fancy that if I break the world record I’ll probably win the race.”

 

She hung up, not bothering to respond to my joke.

 

The race was carefully chosen, I had to give them that. You have to be born in the north of England to take part and I only qualify because I happened to be born while my mother was visiting my aunt in a little Yorkshire village that I can’t even locate on a map. It doesn’t even have a postcode.

 

The local restriction of the event meant than none of my main rivals were taking part, indeed there was only one other professional in the race, Tymal Hoskins,a member of the British Junior squad. He’s quite decent, but nowhere near as fast as me, maybe in three, four years, but not now. The rest of the athletes were also rans (pardon the pun). Non professionals who barely made the top 100 runners in England.  I don’t know if it was a deliberate plan, or whether the Syndicate just got lucky, but it meant that all they had to do was put their fortune on Tymal and they’d be guaranteed to win.

 

I took another phone call.  “I can’t lose to Tymal Hoskins,” I said. “I’m ten seconds faster.”

 

“Go for a quick time,” the voice said, yet another person, who knew that criminal gangs were so overstaffed. “Try for record-quick time, so it looks authentic, then, on the last lap, feign an injury, or trip up. It happens, you can blame the track, say it’s not up to professional standards.”

 

“It’s an indoor track, it’s a venue that’s been used in the student Olympics” I said, “it’s hardly going to have a pothole in the middle lane or a dead badger lying at the edge of the track.”

 

“Complain anyway, everybody will think you’re just making excuses, but it will sound genuine.”

 

They hung up. These short phone calls were unnerving. Clearly the Syndicate had mastered the psychology of manipulating sportsmen. Or had they. Maybe their boss was just really tight about phone bills.

 

The main reason for my success (did I mention the World Championship silver at just 18?) is that I train  hard, swot up on where I’m running, how my competitors pace their races, the likely weather and temperature, the size of the crowd, I leave nothing to chance. I’m not just physically perfect for an event, I have every second of the race mapped out in my mind, clearer than the memory of my first blowjob (thank you Sally Benson). So I wasn’t going to leave it to chance, I’m not like one of those actors in Eastenders who film a 30 minute TV programme in 31 minutes, barely bothering to read the script in front of them, let alone learn it in advance. I prepared weeks ahead, practiced falling several hundred times. Eventually, having fallen enough times to scrape most of the skin from my legs, I felt I looked natural enough. That’s what it takes to look natural: practice, practice, practice. We’d make brilliant clowns athletes would.

 

I decided to fall at the start of the final lap, a reasonable part of the race for me to try to pick up the pace and make a mistake. I should be clear of the field and that was important too, I couldn’t risk falling over with other runners around me. That would result in an investigation and my perfect plan would be ruined.

 

I was nervous before the race. Far more than usual, even at the World Championships I was just buzzing, waiting for my legs to take me to glory. Here I had nothing to look forward to. The gun went off and I was first out of the blocks. I decided to set a fast pace, as none of these local nobodies could be described as pacesetters, at least not world record pace. They were slower than I thought though, and I was out at the front within the first few seconds. I needed to be though, at the end of lap one I was only just within target of a world record time. By this point I was well clear of everyone bar Tymal, who was keeping a sensible pace just touching the hair on the head of my shadow.

 

Tymal was quick, I’ll give him that, much quicker than the last time I’d been in a race with him. Every time I picked up the pace he matched me, still stomping on my shadow. By the end of lap two I was a second inside the record, with Tymal less than a second behind me. This was quality running.

 

I kept running, hard and fast, knowing that I was only completing three laps instead of four, so I didn’t have to worry about pacing myself. I had to get clear of Tymal, to make sure he wasn’t near me when I fell, so I upped my pace and upped it again, yet I just couldn’t shake him off.

 

The end of the third lap came with Tymal still two steps behind. I couldn’t decide what to do. Maybe just fall to my left, out of Tymal’s way, surely he wouldn’t be affected. Or maybe feign an injury, slow down, start limping, let him take the glory, though I hadn’t rehearsed that.  Or I could just wait. There was no way that Tymal could keep up this pace, I could wait until he fell back then (one of the methods I’d practice) turn to look and trip, with my head facing backwards. I’ve watched the videos of myself doing that one, you would simply never believe it was faked.

 

What to do?

 

Before I had time to decide, Tymal surprised me. Just as I was expecting him to drop off he did the opposite. He surged past me, just 200 metres from the finish line, he made a move. Christ, he was on line for the world record. If I’d stopped to think I would have just let him pass me and concede honourable defeat, say that I was trying too hard to break the record and had underestimated my opponent.   

 

But I didn’t think. I was so thrown by being overtaken that I momentarily lost my stride. More than momentarily, I took my eyes off the track and found myself stumbling. Not to my left, though, to my right. I fell over straight into Tymal’s path, just as he was passing. He fell splat onto his back, before screaming in pain and clutching his knee. I hadn’t rehearsed that.

 

What seemed like several minutes later the other runners passed us. I was still on the floor, not injured myself, just too ashamed and afraid to get up.

 

I had thrown the race, just as I’d been told to do. So badly, in fact, that I would probably be banned, for at least a year. The injury to Tymal looked serious and I wold suffer for that.

But that was the least of my worries. I had somehow contrived to throw the race in such a way that the Syndicate would have lost all its money.

 

I had nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide. All I could do was wait to find out my punishment.