SWIMMING IN DEEP WATERS

 

 

 

It was in Canada that I met him for the first time. In fact I shook him warmly by the hand. Perhaps it would have been wiser not to. It’s complicated, you see. One man’s political prisoner is another man’s terrorist. One man’s swimmer, another’s bomber.

 

Even as I stood in front of Sebastian Rodriguez, I should have felt it unwise, the distant consternation of his victims should have pulled me up short. I should perhaps have been aware of their righteous disapproval picking at me, a rush of a breeze suddenly touching the back of my neck, and at this late hour, on this pavement, touching me with doubt. Instead, I was smiling like a benign fool and telling him what a fantastic athlete he was. And even this was only a marginal truth, since he’d finished no better than third in his final that afternoon.

 

But what else could I have done? There was no obvious protocol for an encounter like this, and if the Paralympics teach you anything, it’s that the rules, (and there are plenty of rules) are there to be broken. Besides, I’d wanted to meet him, and now I had. And so there we stood, well, there I stood. He sat. We gazed at each other in mutual confusion.

 

Anyway, here’s how it happened.

 

The place was rammed. It was a big Irish Pub in the university quarter of Montreal, a cut-and-paste kind of a place with Toucans and sepia photographs of Dublin shopfronts framed on the wall. It had air conditioning, not much real character and it had a fruit machine twinkling away in the corner. Behind the bar, two harassed staff in liveried outfits, studenty types, were frantically trying to fill the Guinness pints, shoot-up the shot glasses and rattle the tills to keep pace with the baying mob which stretched and groaned and reached imploring across the counter towards them, offering up fistfuls of Canadian dollars.

 

At the back of the pub, through a set of open French windows, stairs led down to a back yard, a beer garden, decked out with long tables and benches. It too was operating at capacity, a seething cackling mass had filled its every corner, braying and guzzling beneath the cooling night sky. Montreal was softly closing in on midnight, but here we were only just getting started.

 

From where we stood we could see it all unfolding. We had a good vantage point, my firends and I standing around a circular bar table, which occupied a raised decking area in a corner of the beer garden. Our conversation came in fits and starts as our attention was regularly distracted by a need to take in the scenes all around us, of which we were only peripherally a part. Here, we were in a minority of four. Everyone else was an elite international athlete. There were hundreds of them; gold medalists, world champions, world record holders. But that was only half of the fascination.

 

They were Paralympians. And they were riotously pissed.

 

It was the final evening of the 2013 IPC World Swimming Champions. The Canadian team, followed a time-honoured tradition, had taken very seriously its traditional obligation to organize the wrap party. During the final session of finals, ending in the thrillingly bizarre mens’ medley relay (like a mad acquatic karaoke from an iPod set to shuffle), word had been spread around the Paralympic family, that the party was to be hosted at MacLean’s Pub. It seemed to gather momentum.

 

The problem was that no one had deemed it necessary to ring ahead to the good people at MacLean’s and warn them of what they were about to receive. It was a quiet September Sunday night, most places were sleepily winding towards the end of their evening. Perhaps, at first, the bar staff might have simply raised a curious glance towards the door, as the first few revelers made their way towards the bar.

 

Perhaps the Brazilian team had arrived first, a large posse of sun-tanned types, all teeth (especially their iconic leader Daniel Dias) and good humour. They might have been the first to variously stride, limp, clatter, wheel, push and saunter towards the counter, where, unless they were sitting in chairs, they will have placed on the bar a bewildering variety of fully functioning hands, plastic prosthetics, smaller hands, tiny arms and stumps; an improvised jazz riff of human flesh, all pointing towards the same universal requirement; beer.

 

And if that had caught them slightly off guard, then it was only an opening salvo, a taster for what was to come just behind them; Germany, with an unusually high preponderance of completely blind drinkers, six foot tall to a man and a woman, Great Britain, arriving en masse and descending on the establishment with the Hynd brothers flying the flag for muscular dystrophy and rattling with medals and thirst. A thump on the bar, a shout for service, replicated over and over along the length of the pub with varying, dizzying, increasingly overwhelming multi-lingual demands. ‘Hey! Over here!’ Then perhaps the victorious Ukraine team, a marauding mass, more or less composed of winners, most of them wheelchair bound and competing in the “lower” classifications, Ireland, calling the shots on home-like turf, South Africa, the USA, Holland, Sweden, China, Russia, Argentina, Mexico and on and on and on. It was only a small place to contain so much internationality, and so much suddenly unleashed athletic exuberance; a howling alcoholic whirlwind of unwinding tensions. The Games are over! Let the Games begin!

 

MacLean’s had not given much thought to the application of inclusive accessibility established in the 2006 United nations Treaty on Rights for the Disabled. The principle shortcoming was this: To get from the beer garden at the back to the toilets, involved mounting a short flight of steps back into the pub, then turning sharp left and descending a steep set of narrow steps towards the basement which housed the toilets. So now the Paralympic Family had a new problem to contend with. Outside were dozens of athletes, many of whom were seated in wheelchairs, washing down their achievements with lager, which by now, as we drew closer to the hour for chips, ketchup, fights and taxis, had begun to work its watery magic on the human bladder. One by one they were succumbing to the terribly predictable demand that unites the human race, the need to urinate.

 

And so, with great ingenuity, and encouraging solidarity, began one of the great migrations of the sporting world; a natural phenomenon to rival the Serengeti wildebeest. A steady stream of swimmers were now being ferried towards the toilets, lifted clear from their chairs and then borne aloft by both their teammates and fiercest rivals up the steps into the pub, passed from drinker to drinker, and then with solicitous care, down the perilous descent towards relief, and back again. Seen from above it must have looked like a troop of giant swaying ants ferrying material back and forth as they set about building a new nest, composed entirely of international swimmers.

 

It was all happening downstairs, it seemed. On one of my brief forays down there, I was stopped by a Paralympic silver medalist who needed change for the cigarette machine, and walked swiftly past a posse of South Africans who were huddled around the condom machine, trying to figure out which coins it took. At one point, as we stood at our able-bodied perch, wordlessly gazing out over a scene which only Breughel could have attempted to  render (and even then only with help of Photoshop) we were joined by Rachael Latham. Rachael was part of our Channel Four TV team, an ebullient, bright, funny reporter who just happened to have won medals of her own at successive world championships. She knew pretty much everyone. And she was always first with the gossip. On her arrival at our perch, it was fairly clear that she was in possession of something more or less fantastic.

 

‘Anna’s being naughty.’ (I say, Anna. It wasn’t Anna. I’ve redacted the lady’s real name.) ‘In the toilets. Someone just walked in on her.’

 

‘Go on.’ We wanted to know what the two-time Paralympic gold medalist had been up to.

 

I won’t recount the story. It does no one any credit. But suffice to say, that there was one elite Australian swimmer who left MacLean’s with a skip in his necessarily slightly uneven step and a smile in his heart. Anna (not Anna) emerged from the toilet cubicle a little later, avoiding eye contact.

 

The party showed no sign of letting up. The GB team were at the heart of it, too. There had been some dispute amongst their ranks as to whether or not they would be allowed out, despite having smashed their medal target in what, for them, had been a very successful tournament. They had a new coach, a serious-minded individual who had converted to swimming having been part of the extremely well-respected (and well resourced) GB Cycling outfit. But he had a dilemma. He clearly couldn’t let ALL the team go out and get drunk. Some of them, actually lots of them, were under eighteen, (their youngest teammate, Amy Marren, had celebrated her fifteenth birthday only a few days previously) and so the coach was “in loco parentis”. On the other hand, the more senior squad members were not going to be stopped. They had worked hard, trained hard, swum hard and won. Now they needed beer. In order to stave off a full scale mutiny, the GB coach had negotiated a two o’clock curfew with those old enough. The kids had to stay back in their hotel.

 

I found out later that it had not been an entirely smooth hotel re-entry for the revelers. Most had made it back OK, save for one of the S12 (a classification which indicates an intellectual disability) swimmers. A Paralympic search party had been dispatched into the Montreal night, only for the autistic one hundred metre butterfly specialist to be discovered in a kebab shop, onto his second doner.

 

I took my leave, alone, shortly after 1.30 in the morning, weaving my way past a brace of Russian S6s (double below-the-knee amputees) trying manfully to out-vodka each other on the off chance this might impress the watching Japanese S4s (swimmers who cannot use their trunk or legs). I took one last look back at the Irish bar, heaving with good humour and crackling with that febrile tension which can only be transmitted by teenage pheromones. I swung the door open and descended the stone steps into the warm Canadian night. I would walk the few blocks back to the hotel.

 

It was then that I saw the man in the wheelchair. Even from the back, I recognized him. He had a powerful set of shoulders, and neck which looked welded on. The streetlights picked out his graying temples, and as I rounded his chair I was surprised to see him wearing glasses. He almost looked his age. At fifty six, Sebastian Rodriguez Veloso, known as “Chano”, had that day won the bronze medal in the 50 metres freestyle.

 

But that was barely worth mentioning when set against the other numbers in his CV: An 84 year jail sentence for murder, a 432 day hunger strike, 1 royal pardon and 8 Paralympic gold medals. I had watched him swim, both in London and in Montreal. It was a fearful sight. His brute muscularity and balance in the water; dragging redundant legs through the water as if it were simply an act of willpower. He was a glowering presence, poolside; his pre-race appearance in swimming cap and speedos full of intent. And he had history.

 

I had never been so close to him. He turned to face me, and I saw that he had a cigar on the go.

 

‘Señor Rodriguez.’ My Spanish was non-existent. But before I knew what I was doing, I had initiated a conversation. Now it had to continue.

 

He raised his eyes towards me, and smiled warmly. ‘Si.’

 

‘Do you speak English?’ I tried to explain, ‘Because my Spanish is, you know….’ I pulled a “nothing” face.

 

He shook his head, gravely. The he leveled a much sterner look in my direction. Emboldened by the occasion, and by the booze, no doubt, I was undeterred. I offered my right hand to him, which he accepted. Then, oddly, I reached out my left hand too, encasing his proffered hand. What had taken hold of me, that I felt such familiarity?

 

‘Well, fuck it,’ I told him. I’d have to speak my mind. ‘Your career. I just wanted to tell you…has been…’

 

He was looking squarely back at me now, from his chair. His smile had returned, now flooding his features, an upturned crescent moon mouth and sad, sloping eyes. He looked infinitely genuine, like a favoured, fondly remembered schoolmaster.

 

I’d lost my way. ‘It’s been…’ I was struggling for the right word. ‘Unbelievable.’

 

That was probably the only word for it.

 

One vigorous downward motion of the hand, and then he disengaged, grinning warmly. He nodded at me, and, loading up his cigar, he pushed off with both hands. Chano Rodriguez and his wheelchair slipped silently off, up the pavement, and into the night.

 

I turned and walked very deliberately back in the opposite direction. Perhaps we’d never meet again. But I rather hoped we would.

 

In fact, I hoped this would be the beginning of a journey, and not the end of a party.