Jason Smyth: my greatest race

Paralympic sprinter looks back on his T13 100m narrow victory in 10.53 at the Tokyo Games

When you have a four-year cycle, you’re planning for the fourth year. Then, all of a sudden, Covid came and things changed. That led to an injury. I continued to train in lockdown because I don’t live far away from the Mary Peters Track in Belfast. But, all of a sudden, I went from getting treatment, physio, having the support staff around two or three times a week to going a number of months with nothing.

It was my choice to continue to train. You feel like you’re going to lose out by doing nothing and allowing other people to get ahead, but I ended up with a pretty bad lower back issue and, around August 2020, I couldn’t even touch my knees. I’d irritated one of the discs.

I’ve had issues with my back in the past. I’d had to adjust things, knowing I was getting towards the end of my career and there was a little bit of a concern on that front. After a number of weeks, things settled and then, all of a sudden, I was doing something in the gym and it came back again, but worse.

The same thing happened over a number of weeks, where I was trying to build things up, I made a few changes, and my back became worse again. It was lasting longer and it was feeling
slower to ease up.

All of a sudden, we were in November and I was sitting there wondering: ‘Is this me done?’ I wasn’t sure even if I could make the Paralympic Games. I got through it but I picked up a few niggles, some Achilles issues, so I went into the springtime under-prepared. That had a knock-on effect that, going into the summer, I under competed as well. I was only able to compete twice.

There were new athletes on the scene. The Algerian guy who ended up finishing second to me in Tokyo [Skander Djamil Athmani] had been an athlete for years but had only just come into para sport. I’d seen he had run quicker than I had in the last few years. He had a personal best of around my 10.2 from a good few years before that. So, all of a sudden, there was this athlete who was a serious contender.

Jason Smyth

In para sport, you can kind of come through unseen. I was aware of Athmani a month or two out but everybody on the outside was going: “Jason Smyth is going to win the gold medal.”

That was the whole backdrop headed into Tokyo: doubts, uncertainty, being under-prepared, a new athlete who had run quicker than me. But yet everybody expected me to win because they were unaware of the issues.