Craig McCann: The life of a paralympic hopeful

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The setting was Old Billingsgate Market, a Victorian location overlooking the River Thames and a stone’s throw from The Tower of London.

The dress code was the official formal wear of the ParalympicsGB London 2012 team and the occasion; a fine dining meal plus entertainment, all hosted by Chanel 4’s Rick Edwards.

This was the night athletes and support staff, plus a number of leading sponsors and official partners of ParalympicsGB came together to celebrate the launch of the team that, come the end of the month will have moved into east London with only one task in mind; improving on the medal tally from four years ago in Beijing.

The night was a welcome break from the hard slog of training over the last couple of months and not only offered athletes the chance to refresh and regroup but also gave us the opportunity for an extra bit of fun.

Both myself and team-mate Gemma Collis had been kindly “nominated” by our team manager to represent the sport and model our competition wear in the ParalympicsGB fashion show, an event I am told always takes place as a bit of fun prior to each games.

The life of the athlete is not all about fun weekends in London however, and since my last blog, when I had been notified of selection, many hours have been spent both in the gym and the fencing Salle, working harder than ever before with my coach and team-mates at Touché Fencing club in Milton Keynes.

We are making sure that we are all at our best come competition day when, for the first time, we will all step out into the world’s greatest arena and compete for the nation at the one event which will never happen again in our lifetime.

The end of June saw a quick trip over the Irish Sea for a training camp in Belfast, with both the Hungarian and Russian squads.

This gave a relatively young and inexperienced GB squad the opportunity to train and learn from fencers with years of experience - the top Hungarian fencer having been competing in the sport many years longer than the youngest GB fencer has even been alive.

The week was a “mundane” day-to-day existence of breakfast, fencing, strength and conditioning, lunch, rest, fencing, dinner, fencing, recovery (sauna and ice-bath), a game of UNO and sleep.

Needless to say we all came away much improved having trained with some of the best. Plus; with a greater respect for very cold water!

The camp was followed by the last international event before the London Games, a World Cup event in Warsaw, Poland.

Having missed the previous international event, plus the majority of the preceding six month’s competitions due to injury, the competition was a chance to see where my standard was after so long out of action.

To this end, the results proved somewhat useful through a strange sense of deja vu as not only did I finish with similar results in my Poule as to those I had in my last international but I also got (unfortunately) knocked out of the competition by the same opponent - from Hong Kong, in the same round, and to exactly the same score, 15-13.

All we can say is “at least I’ve not gone backwards”. The weekend did have a highlight though, a second win over the Italian World No 3, an opponent I am likely to face once more in our foil team’s first round at London.

Time is becoming a cherished thing the closer we get to the opening ceremony on August 29, but I will try to write from inside the Games to give you all a first-hand insight into life at London 2012 for a Paralympic athlete.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

It has been a while, a good three months, since my last post and this has been for good reason.

Since the last qualification event for the Paralympic Games, which I discussed in my previous blog, we have been - akin to young graduates anticipating their final results - anxiously awaiting the announcement of the Wheelchair Fencing squad for London 2012.

This announcement was unfortunately delayed for reasons out of our control and so the wait turned into a long, drawn-out affair.

However, I am delighted and truly honoured to be able to say that all the hard work and sacrifice I have discussed over the months has paid off as I received selection to represent Great Britain in the Men’s Team Foil event at the London 2012 Paralympic Games.

This hard work and sacrifice is water under the bridge now. The previous chapter and a new page must be turned.

The more observant of you will notice that it has been nearly three weeks since the actual announcement was made. Those less observant should be purchasing your Yorkshire Post more regularly!

This delay in writing has been due to the new chapter that has begun with the final preparations for the Games.

The level of hard work and sacrifice has now been elevated, as would be expected. This now sees me, unfortunately, away from my Yorkshire base for around five days of the week, leaving me very little time to see family and friends.

However, it is a necessary evil in order to be best prepared come the competition date on September 8 (a shameful plug to go and buy remaining tickets for that day…) and one that I have to be fully committed to achieving.

The three months was not just spent waiting, however. First of all training had to continue as if the announcement had been made on time, in order that no time be wasted or lost.

Secondly, I was offered the opportunity to undertake some work experience in the offices of one of the worlds largest law firms. This was an opportunity that I could not refuse in order to keep a focus on my career plans post fencing, although, granted, it was an awkward time to take a two-week sabbatical.

It was decided that this would not hinder progress too much as I was due to fly out to an annual training camp in the South of France with the rest of the London 2012 squad, where, for the best part of a week we would spend around eight hours a day training with a number of high-level international fencers which would not only make up for lost time but would help my progression to London.

The last few weeks following this camp have not been the greatest of my short fencing career so far. First of all my wheelchair was damaged beyond any further use on the return flight and so the last few weeks have been a frantic time for my supplier, building a new chair as quickly as the workshop would allow.

This unexpected change from fencing training to solely gym work also led to a lapse in, what I’m sure my team manager would only describe as “common sense”, which led to a bad tendon injury in my right arm.

However, following a recent trip to a World Cup event in Italy, where I was forced to sit on the sidelines due to the aforementioned injury, I am pleased to say I am in my new chair and slowly building the training level back up to 100%.

Unlike my last post, where I had to apologise for bringing the weather back from Northern Germany, I would like to say that this time I bought you all the weather back from Italy.

Tuesday, February 6, 2012

And so we are finally into 2012 and onto the “home straight” towards the Paralympic Games in London.

Now the decorations have been confined to that little space in the back of the loft and we are back to the normalities of life, it is time to return focus to what is happening in our own back yard in around 200 days time.

It is my journey towards this event which prompted the initial subject of this blog – were those few life changing words voiced to me in January of 2004 to change my life for better or for worse...

New Year’s Eve brought the opportunity to set off a couple of Chinese Lanterns; make wishes, set New Year’s resolutions and realign my focus for the coming eight months.

The first of these months saw the final international event of the qualification period for the Games and so at the end of January we once again headed out of Heathrow’s Terminal Five to the colder climate and snow of Malchow, northern Germany. I can only apologise for bringing this weather back with me!

With this event carrying the extra weight it did we all knew what we would have to do individually and so in order to be as prepared as possible we started off the year at our newly-established home of Moulton College, in Northamptonshire.

Over the first weekend of the year we trained harder than ever in order to make sure that any stray mince pies were out of our system and we were once again fully focused on the task in hand.

From here we moved on to Stoke Mandeville Stadium, the birthplace of the Paralympic Games, a week later to train with a number of French athletes who travelled over to help put each other through our paces.

Finally the date came to once again pack up all the equipment and start what was to be a day-long journey to our competition destination. I have to admit, aside from the weather; this was one of the best-run competitions I have taken part in.

However, I was out there with one job and had to be ready to perform this wherever the competition had been held. It has been obvious for a while now that due to the short amount of time I have been in the sport, getting the required qualifying ranking was probably asking too much.

Fortunately as host nation we have a couple of other options available to us and so I knew that I had to put in some of the best performances of my short career in order to let the selection committee know why I will be a good choice to consider.

This was more important in the Foil competition, as the team event during the games for men is in this weapon.

Due to this I have been focussing a great deal of time and effort into this weapon and was looking forward to displaying this work on the international stage.

Luckily, the added pressure of knowing I really had to perform did not make my nerves too bad - hopefully a sign that the work I have been doing with the team psychologists is working.

I was therefore able to put in arguably the best performance of my short career to finish in 21st place.

Now back home from the competition, and in the warmth, my initial job has been done.

It is now in the hands of those above me as to whether I make the Games.

While the question of whether I will take part in the London 2012 Paralympics is still unknown, Lord Baden Powell taught us all to “be prepared” and prepared I shall be.

I will know by April 10 if I have qualified for the Paralympic Games.

I will be back with more shortly after the Easter Break and will hopefully bring with me the news, either way, which may help answer the question for everyone.

For better or worse, our future will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.

Monday, December 19, 2011

I wanted to fight for my country in the Royal Air Force, but instead I now fight for Great Britain in a wheelchair.

It has been a while since I last wrote following a short break after the World Championships in Sicily, after which I returned to that “practice” I mentioned about in my previous scribblings.

This practice not only furthers my fencing for the future, but also prepared me for the recent Beazley British Championships.

The 2011 World Championships saw my first ever venture to a major competition; one rung of the ladder away from the greatest competition of them all - next summer’s Paralympic Games in London.

That being said, I had a few nerves to deal with on the first day, as usual the individual foil competition, and be it these nerves or just the high standard of opponents there I under-performed and found myself unable to make the cut following straight defeats in the initial poule stages.

I spent the next two days working with both my personal coach and the psychologist in order to bounce back on my second day of competition; the individual epee.

And I did just that, with three victories in the poule stage and narrowly missing out on a fourth by one hit to a strong Thai fencer.

This saw me progress on to the elimination stage where I was knocked out to finish 22nd.

That’s not a bad finishing place for my first major championships, I hope you’ll all agree.

I once again made the starting line-up for the team event and after putting in a foil performance to wash away any memories from my individual performance - along with memorable performances from my team-mates - we were able to finish in a credible 10th place.

The culmination of the trials and triumphs of my first international year sees me move into 2012 ranked 30th in the world for epee and 35th for foil.

These places are outside of the qualification criteria for the London Games, but with the final qualification event taking place at the end of January, as well as host nation places available, my journey is not yet over.

The weekend of December 10/11 saw the British National Championships take place at what is becoming British Fencing’s “home stadium”, the EIS in Sheffield.

It’s a favourite venue of mine, due to not only to my Yorkshire roots, but also the fact that I can stay in my own bed too.

This year’s event was well attended with some great up-and-coming talent. It was a great sign for Rio in 2016; but also a reason to keep me on my toes and training hard.

I went on to finish both my weapons in third place.

This double podium finish was exactly what I had targeted while planning the year with my coach, however, there is one place on the day I am thinking about and anything less is always hard to take.

As it turned out I was beaten by two great fencers who outclassed me on the day and took deserved gold and silver medals home with them.

I was unfortunately forced to take a few days off following the competition due to a cold; not man flu, before you say anything.

I was back at training by the end of the week though and undertook my usual weekly journey down to spend a few days in Milton Keynes to work with my personal coach.

This was my last venture away to train with him before the new year, and so by the time you read this he will have received his Christmas present, delivered to him by my team-mate and collaborator there, and will hopefully not have drank it all already!

And so I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

In return, while at your Christmas parties, please spare a thought and have a drink for all us athletes who, although we will be enjoying Christmas, will also have our thoughts set firmly on making next year’s main event. So it’s training as well as turkey for us.

As Aristotle said; ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.’

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Practice makes perfect, and as I prepare for my first World Championships in Italy next week, it has made perfect sense to me.

It might be an old adage but one that we all know makes sense. It’s just a hard lesson for athletes to deal with..!

Part of the practice element of the proverb entails losing, and certainly no athletes ever enjoy that.

This lesson is one that I have had to deal with over the past few months, at various World Cup events as well as the 2011 European Championships.

Still in my first international season and having not yet even been fencing for two years, I am far removed from some of my opponents who have been fencing for most of my 27-year existence.

A couple of weeks ago I went back out to Hungary, this time to Eger, for the final World Cup event of the season.

This event is a special one for the GB squad as Laszlo Jakab, our head coach, was born and raised in the small medieval town. This meant that from the start, even while in Heathrow before we had left, we were given a history lesson vis-à-vis the town. On the plus side however, we had the perfect guide and interpreter with us.

My personal goals for this event, following disappointing results at the Europeans and the previous World Cup event in Poland, were to put no pressure on myself to attain certain results but to go out there and fully enjoy my fencing and to not deliberate too much on what I was doing.

This would then give me, as well as my personal coach (I had the added benefit that my personal coach was also standing in as team manager for the competition), the knowledge of exactly where I am in order to distinguish precisely the areas to be focused on in training leading into the World Championships and beyond.

To this end I achieved what I flew out there to do, however as I am fencing various opponents with a great deal more time in the chair than myself, as previously mentioned, this once more brought disappointing results.

Reflecting on these results afterwards it became clear that although I am still learning and developing as a fencer, as an individual athlete and as a squad we are not training anywhere near enough to compete at the highest level with some of the more established foreign teams.

This in itself is due to the sport being one of the lowest funded and so training camps in preparation for such events cannot be afforded.

As a team we benefit from the support of British Fencing’s premier partner Beazley and as the great prophets ‘Bloc Party’ once sang “we’re doing the best with what we’ve got”.

It is this time spent training that helps develop perfection, in relation to the old adage.

This realisation has eroded any slight doubts I had about putting my legal studies and career on hold in order to pursue my newly-found fencing career.

This time next week I will be in Sicily along with a number of other GB fencers, both able-bodied and wheelchair, for my first World Championships.

I have spent the last week away from my Doncaster home staying near my coach in Milton Keynes in order to create, as best as we could, my own preparation camp for the upcoming worlds.

This being my first World Championships and the culmination of the season, I can only hope to put in my best performance thus far and come home with personal best results.

My initial post hopefully whet your appetite to follow with a promise to deliver the highs and lows of working towards representing Great Britain at next year’s Olympic Games, and the last couple of posts have certainly brought you the lows.

These are an important part of the learning curve and the ‘practice’. I intend that sometime over the future posts you will read of the highs as I strive towards that ‘perfection’.

Thursday, July 29, 2011

In my first blog I revealed that I was about to enter the European Senior Fencing Championships 2011.

These took place this year in Yorkshire itself; as the European Fencing community descended upon Sheffield.

Living only 20 miles away in Doncaster this competition was extremely exciting. Not every athlete gets the opportunity to compete in a major championships on home soil, let alone a city so close to their home, or the venue being a major training base of theirs – that being the English Institute of Sport.

This gave the opportunity for all British athletes involved to compete at an international level on home soil and in front of a home crowd.

For myself, I have been able to learn a great deal from the event.

Going into my first day’s event, the Mens Foil, I was more nervous than usual and my performance was greatly affected by this tension.

I cannot make too many excuses however. The lessons I have learned from both my first major championships and my first international meet on home soil will stand me in good stead as I look towards future success, particularly for next year at the London 2012 Paralympics.

Although my results were not exactly how I would have liked (athletes often have to remind themselves that only one person will ever be happy with their final result), this competition can be named in true “Friends” manner as ‘The One where I beat the World No 5!’

It was a result that, after only 15 months of fencing, I hope truly shows my future potential.

I promised an account from ‘inside the competition’, however, time constraints would not allow this and so I am salvaging the memories from two weeks ago for you while sat in an internet café in Hungary following a day’s training.

Arriving at the EIS on the Monday before the competition began it was already noticeable that the Institute had been completely taken over by the event. It was impossible to look anywhere without seeing advertisements for the event itself or the Premier Partner of British Fencing and the event; Beazley.

What is commonly used as the badminton hall had been turned into a training hall for both wheelchair and able-bodied athletes, as well as the home for all the wheelchair athletes fencing chairs and sweaty kit.

The main hall, which houses the indoor athletics track, was home to pistes for the preliminary rounds of the able-bodied competition as well as for the wheelchair competition.

A small portion of the spectator seating in here was used by school children on day trips, as well as my parents - they had been banished there so as not to hinder my focus by standing by the piste.

However, the majority of the main seating had been invaded by the various able-bodied teams and turned into small camps.

This was not a sight for the feint hearted as these camps became home to weapons repairs, team physios for body repairs, resting athletes and a lot more sweaty kit.

Finally the basketball hall had been turned into the finals hall; a spectacular arena which hosted international fencing in all its glory.

It was here where the spectators were mainly based, along with TV cameras, the press and various VIPs.

Following the first major international fencing competition to take place on British soil, and in Yorkshire, I felt you might like a small behind-the-scenes tour.

My next blog will come to you in late September, following my return back out to Hungary for the final World Cup event of 2011, and continue on its original course; helping you decide whether those few words did change my life for the better or for the worse.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

‘You have a growth inside your head’.

These few words were to change my life entirely.

I will let you the reader decide whether this was to be for the better or for the worse as you discover my story and follow the new journey that is my current life as I know it.

My name is Craig McCann and I am a 27-year-old Yorkshire-bred wheelchair fencer who currently gets to take part in one of the most honourary experiences by wearing the coveted Great Britain tracksuit as I represent my country in my sport and work towards qualifying for the 2012 Paralympic Games, which we all know will be held on home soil.

The news that I had a brain tumour hit me in January 2004, shortly after signing on the dotted line to represent the country in another capacity, as a serving member of Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force.

During my medical examination, part of the application process used to determine whether all my bits were in the right places, I soon realised that I had an issue with my hearing and wanted to get this sorted hastily so that I could begin the arduous task of basic training.

After seeing an ENT specialist in my hometown of Doncaster and a subsequent MRI scan I was given the news.

With those few words my Royal Air Force career was over before I had even been made to do one press-up.

I entered Royal Hallamshire Hospital almost immediately and underwent the precarious brain surgery on January 16, 2004, less that a week before my 20th birthday.

As there is still so much unknown about this area the surgeons could not reveal what condition I would be in following the 18-hour long surgery.

All my sisters could fathom to come up with was reminding the surgeons that the small growth they had found was most likely to actually be my brain. You can really count on your family when you need them!

The surgery was however, to leave me with nerve damage in the left side of my body, which greatly affected my hearing and sight in that side and weakness in those limbs, as well as leaving me with a balance impairment.

I spent the next few years undertaking the long process of recovering, both physically as well as mentally.

This saw me spending a great deal of time recovering at home before making my first attempt at gaining a degree, something which due to my mental state I unfortunately could not complete.

However, after another subsequent spell at home recovering I finally got back on my feet, packed my bags and in 2008 headed of to make another attempt at studying in Guildford.

While there I began rowing and quickly fell in love with the sport, often spending more time concentrating on improving my stroke rather than my business skills.

This led me to attend a Paralympic Potential day in Birmingham in order to seek out the adaptive rowing squad selectors.

En route to those selectors I came across the wheelchair fencing coaches who were there seeking new talent and shall we just say the rest is history...

After receiving an email from the British Disabled Fencing Association stating they would like to see me again I began training in the sport and quickly fell in love all over again.

Following an extraordinary 18 months of hard training, mental focus and pure determination to succeed I am currently ranked as the country’s No 2 and am competing in my first international season, one that counts towards qualifying for next year’s games.

Following graduating with a 2:1 I headed off once more to study a post-graduate diploma in law, with a view to becoming a sports and entertainment lawyer.

This is a career goal I still have but due to fencing I have made the decision to turn my attention to my sport and train as close to full-time as the limited funding for disabled athletes will allow me to.

As I write this I am preparing to enter the biggest event of the season so far, the European Championships right here at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield.

I will be back with more from inside the competition so you can all hopefully gain an athlete’s account of what is an extremely important week for all those involved.

My journey will continue on from there and I hope you can all join me as I write about the highs and lows of life as an athlete working towards representing Great Britain at the 2012 Paralympic Games.