Peerless Cox puts dispute behind her to claim victory
Briton wins 400m after season without funding Wild crowd spurs athlete through the pain barrier
It was never in doubt. From the moment she broke at the start of the T38 400 metres, it was evident Kadeena Cox, the double-sport hero of Rio, was going to seize Great Britain’s 14th gold medal of these world championships. Powerful, smooth, easy in her stride, she shimmied over the line 40m ahead of her nearest rival, the Japanese athlete Yuka Takamatsu. This was not a race, it was a coronation.
“I’m absolutely shattered,” she said, her grin as sparkling as her performance. “That was a very painful run but it meant a lot. This was for a lot of people.”
The meaning was evident in every stride. Cox had come into these championships fuming about a suspension of her funding. Her dispute had come over the winter. After winning gold in the C4-5 cycling time trial as well as on the track at the Rio Paralympics, the multi-talented student from Leeds had tried her hand at a third sport: ski jumping.
The moment she was announced as a competitor in the Channel 4 celebrity snowfest The Jump, she was warned that she would have her para-sport financial support cut. The funders could not countenance one of their athletes taking part in such a potentially dangerous pursuit. But Cox, seeking a fresh challenge, had gone ahead with the television series. Which meant her training for these championships had been undertaken largely at her own expense.
You would not have noticed. Cox disqualified from the 200m in Doha at the 2016 world championships had been after she had missed registration for the event by a minute. One side effect of multiple sclerosis, the condition Cox was diagnosed with in 2014, is severe heat intolerance. And she had been sheltering from the sweltering Middle Eastern sun when she fell behind the clock. There was no danger of that on a cool July evening in London.
Cox turned up looking strong. After her disappointment in the 200m earlier in the week, when she had picked up bronze, she had suggested that only victory in her favoured 400m would suffice.
She burst from the blocks and was soon catching up Torita Blake, the Australian in the lane outside her. Long before the athletes broke from their lanes, Cox had passed everyone and was so far in front, the others in her wake required binoculars to spot her.
“I may have got carried away in the first 200,” she said. “I knew the last 100 would kill me but I got through and a win is a win.” Barely pushed by the rest of the field, her time of 1.02.87 was nowhere near the world record she had set in Rio. But that was of less concern to her than this chance for vindication.
“I didn’t hit my world record which I would have liked to have done. I am happy with the win,” she said. This makes up a bit for the 200m. I was disappointed with my
race in the 200m – technically it was quite bad. That was just lack of races. But when you don’t do yourself justice, it’s disappointing. I was a bit gutted but it came together today. I just wanted to go out and execute a better race for the first 300m and then the rest of it was always going to be death, so it didn’t matter what I did.”
Noticeable as she crossed the line was the tape strapping up her thigh. “I’ve got a bit of a niggle in the hamstring. It’s an athlete thing, isn’t it?” she explained. “Then you add in the neurological condition and I am having some problems on my affected side. It is all part and parcel. The Australian girl was also strapped quite heavily.”
But the pain was worth it, she added. Not least because of the wall of sound which greeted her as she approached the finish line.
“It was good in Rio but nothing like this,” Cox said of the huge ovation her victory inspired. “To have the support and hear everyone screaming down the home straight. I was kind of dying but I thought ‘nope, I have got to keep going down the straight’.”