Golden girl Hannah out to dazzle London
THE Cockroft boys have a particular way of ensuring the golden child of the family ignores her own hype. ‘I have two brothers,’ says Hannah, the winner of five Paralympic golds, seven world titles and all but one of her 350-odd races in the past eight years. ‘Daniel is 21, Joshua is 27, I’m 24 and they have never treated me any different to when I wasn’t an athlete — they will still happily push me over or sit on my head. ‘My only memory of them showing they were proud was in London when I got my first gold and we went into this room to see family. My brothers flew through the door and hugged me so hard I fell out of my chair. They then tried to brush it off all cool, like, “Let’s see the medal, yeah you did all right, whatever”. ‘They would never sit there and say I’m amazing because that would make my head too big.’ With that, one of the most dominant athletes in British sport heads into the World ParaAthletics Championships today trying to suggest she is something other than a guarantee of gold medals. But the record shows she is close to untouchable in the T34 classification, in which she will contest the 100m tonight before tilts at 400m and 800m. As a measure of her credentials, she is defending champion in each and has set world records in all three in the past two months. ‘I think the only one I am comfortable in is the 400m,’ she says. ‘That’s the one I am confident of winning. This year [team-mate] Kare Adenegan has already done a big PB in the 100m and is the only other girl to break 18 seconds in the 100m, which leaves me very little room to make mistakes. In the 800m it is all about tactics, about who you want to sit behind, so anyone could win it.’ It was Adenegan who, at 14, ended Cockroft’s six-year unbeaten run in a 400m race in London in 2015 at a time when, Cockroft admits, she was bored with her own dominance. ‘You just get to this place where you kind of feel like you don’t care any more and it feels pointless being on the start line because no one can touch you. It wasn’t a nice place to be,’ she says. ‘And then when it all went wrong it was an even worse place to be, but it was a lesson that I needed. That feeling of losing is one I never want again.’ She hasn’t had it since and it is indicative of her dominance that questions have arisen over her right to contest the T34 class, given she is able to walk short distances. ‘I think the problem is the T34 was always described as a cerebral palsy class until I came into it,’ she says. ‘It has never been a cerebral palsy class, it is a class for athletes with neurological conditions. That could be cerebral palsy or me — I have brain damage. ‘When I stand up it looks like I have spinal damage but actually my spine is straight, it is the messages and signals that don’t get there to make me stand straight. ‘It really frustrates me because I just want to say to them, “Do you really think the authorities aren’t watching me?” ‘If I was a cheat they would have pulled me up by now. People at the front are there because they train bloody hard.’