Being born with one hand was never going to hold me back McKillop and Smyth lead strong Irish team
A former Ireland basketball star, Jordan Lee is now making rapid progress as a high jumper and is aiming for world glory in Dubai
FOR a brief moment, Jordan Lee thought he had cleared two metres for the first time in his life. Here he was, at his maiden national senior championships in Santry with about 18 months of serious training under his belt and he was holding his own against the best high jumpers in the country.
In fact, he was doing even better than that – competing for a place on the podium. He thought he had done it. Everything had gone right and that feeling never gets old. The perfect lift in the air, the arching of the back. The safe fall towards the mat. Except when he was coming down, one – or maybe both – of his calves made slight contact with the bar. In this sport, that’s all that matters. It can be the difference between a medal and nothing.
That slight error will give Tomás Griffin, the local coach in Killarney Valley who has taken Lee under his wing, enough to work with as he tweaks his technique ahead of this week’s World Para Athletics championships in Dubai.
‘I almost cleared it. It was only my calves just briefly clipped the bar on the way down, but that is all it can take,’ Lee sighs as he recalled his first national senior championships recently.
‘I can be very harsh on myself at times and I was disappointed not to finish top three. But looking back now, I realised that I finished fourth in a national able-bodied championships with less than two years serious training under my belt.’
Jordan Lee. The name may be familiar to some. It’s coming on five years now since Lee found himself in the middle of a blizzard of media attention. The Late Late Show and the whole shebang. His feat was to be chosen to play for Ireland’s Under 15 basketball team.
There were a few weeks when everyone wanted to hear the story of the one-handed basketballer from Killarney. ‘The whole thing blew up,’ he smiles now. ‘As a 14-year-old boy, I had to keep my head.’
Still, he remains understandably proud of what he achieved. ‘I remember my first basketball training session as if it was yesterday,’ he remembers. ‘I was five at the time, going into the court and opening the door. It was like a scene from a movie. Everyone just stopped what they were doing, started pointing and whispering, chatting about me as if I couldn’t see them. As a five-year-old, that’s pretty tough to take.
‘But nine years later, I became the first one-handed basketball player to represent my country. I had a choice at the time. Was I not going to play this game because people were telling me I couldn’t do it or was I going to prove these people wrong and do what I wanted to do.’
At six years of age, Lee, whose father Jarlath was a renowned player in Kerry basketball circles, got up early every morning and practised on the court before school. He’d return to the court in the evenings.
‘I was so driven and determined in my goal to prove these people wrong. It paid off when in 2015, I got my one and only cap for Ireland against Wales over in Wales. Standing there, wearing the Irish shirt, facing the flag with the national anthem playing and a tear in my eye, I had proven all those people wrong,’ he adds.
Lee’s basketball career came to an abrupt halt in St Brendan’s schoolyard in Killarney. Playing football with some mates at lunchtime, he picked up a knock and dislocated his knee. He lost his place in the Ireland Under 15 side. When he finally got over the injury, he just didn’t have the same interest or grá for the game,
‘I wanted to try something else,’ Lee recalls. Having surmounted so many obstacles, he wasn’t going to stop now.
All through his life, Lee and his family ensured his disability wouldn’t hinder his quality of life. Amniotic band syndrome, when the umbilical cord wraps around the limb in the womb, restricting the blood flow and preventing full growth, was the explanation for Lee being born with one arm.
But neither he nor his family allowed it to be a restriction.
And even when that bad knee injury curtailed his basketball career, he refused to get too downhearted about it.
‘Look, dislocating your knee is a horrible injury. But when those things happen, you have two choices. You can rise above it or you can crumble. I definitely wasn’t going to crumble. And I truly believe that things happen for a reason and that happened for a reason. Someone, somewhere, knew I was going to rise above it.’ As he dislocated his left knee, Lee had to learn to jump off his other leg. ‘And that is not an easy thing to do, trust me. You basically have to retrain your mind,’ he points out.
At a loose end, he was invited to give a talk at the National Seminar for Inclusion in Dublin back in December 2016. Relating his own experiences of discrimination and bullying, Lee was able to talk about the integral role sport had played in his life and how it had altered perceptions. ‘Sport has been a huge part of my life,’ Lee explains. ‘It has given me a focus and helped me prove all the doubters, those who doubted me through my life, wrong.
I have gone from being bullied and looked down on to being looked up to. And now I am well-respected by everyone in Killarney and Kerry. It’s a big difference to when I was a five-year-old boy.’
Lee heads to the World Para Athletics championship in Dubai this week, as one of the medal favourites in the high jump. At the recent French Grand Prix in Paris, he destroyed a field that included the European and Asian champion, setting a new personal best of 1.95 metres.
That new personal best illustrating Lee’s improvement under Griffin. His PB has gone from 1.84 to 1.95 in the past 12 months – and from 1.55 to 1.84m the previous year. It was only by chance that the two started working together. At that inclusion seminar, Jason Smyth had invited Lee to a paralympic exhibition in January 2017.
There were a number of sports chasing the athleticism of Ireland’s first one-handed basketball player, but he settled on the high jump.
‘A couple of different sports wanted me to participate at a serious level,’ Lee remembers. ‘But after a bit of thought and consideration, I went for the high jump. Through my involvement with basketball, I already had a decent jump and decent height.’
His first international competition didn’t go well. Having only been involved in the discipline for a couple of months, he finished fourth in a Grand Prix meet – of four competitors. ‘That was far from ideal. I wasn’t happy about it, as you can imagine.’
Lee admits now that he didn’t know what he was doing in those first few months. Griffin had noticed him getting increasingly frustrated with his jumps on the Killarney track.
‘I never had a full-blown conversation with the man so I was really surprised when he came over and said, he would give me a hand with the sessions. And without a doubt, I wouldn’t be the high jumper I am today without Tomás and how he has coached me,’ he says.
‘He said to me one of those first days that you either give 100 per cent or you give nothing. And that has stuck with me. For all Tomás can do, he is not going to jump the bar for me. And if you are not performing on the day, there isn’t another 10 or 14 guys on the team picking up the slack for you. There are no substitutions that can be made.’
Griffin went back to basics with his athlete. ‘My routine and technique were all wrong. In my first session with him, there was a lot of
‘SPORT HAS GIVEN ME A FOCUS AND HELPED ME PROVE MY DOUBTERS WRONG’
improvement.
‘To be honest, I didn’t really start the high jump properly until January
2018, when I started working seriously with
Tomás.
‘I was 82 kilos bodyweight, I lost 10 kilos in eight months to prepare for the European championships, I increased my speed by over 30 per cent, my PB increased from 1.55 to 1.84 – in just five months. Jumped three times the height of Carrantuohill in just three months, so it is great to have those statistics and figures to see how much you improved over the course of the year. And it keeps you motivated to keep improving as the year goes on.’
And where will this all lead? Having won the Grand Prix in France. Lee will go into this week’s high jump event as one of the favourites. And he doesn’t want to leave Dubai without some sort of medal.
‘To be honest, I am a better high jumper than I ever was basketball player.’ Lee insists. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I was a decent basketballer but I was never in the top 10 players in the country.
‘But I finished fourth in my first senior championships with less than two years serious training under my belt. That’s something I am really proud of, knowing that I am one of the best in the country when it comes to able-bodied competition.
‘With the world championships in Dubai, the goal is to win a medal. Any medal. Ideally, it would be silver or higher, because I am ranked second in the world. But in my first world championships, any medal will do.’
Lee remains his own harshest critic. When he blitzed the field at the recent Grand Prix in Paris, he was more frustrated at himself for not clearing 1.98m and setting a new
European record for their discipline. As the camera lingered on his face, the annoyance was clear.
‘It took a few words from Michael McKillop, a multiple-time world champion, to calm me down. He told me to think about this strong field that I am after destroying and forget about the European record, It will come,’ Lee recalls.
Given his rate of improvement in the last two years with Griffin, it seems only a matter of time before Lee breaks two metres.
‘That is definitely one of my goals,’ he says. ‘You need to keep on raising the bar, literally in my case. Every athlete around you is getting better, so you have to get better.
‘Keep setting the bar higher. The higher you set it, the more you are going to jump regardless – if you set it at 2.15m, you mightn’t achieve it, but you will keep striving for it.’ MICHAEL McKILLOP will make his eagerly-anticipated return to a major championships at the upcoming World Para Athletic Championships in Dubai.
McKillop (below) is one of 11 athletes who will represent Ireland at the championships, which get underway on Thursday.
Following an injury-ravaged couple of seasons, this will mark his return to major competition for the first time since his 800m and 1500m gold medal double in London back in 2017.
Jason Smyth, the fastest Paralympian on earth, will aim to continue his extraordinary winning streak by claiming an 18th major championship medal while Galway native Alex Lee will make history as he will become Ireland’s first ‘blade runner’ when he competes in the 100m and 200m T64 heats. Jordan Lee, ranked number two in the world in the high jump, also competes in his first world championships as does David Leavy and shot putter, Mary Fitzgerald. Conor McIlveen will also be making his first appearance at a world championships in the T38 400m. Cork’s trio of discus throwers will also compete for glory as Orla Barry, Noelle Lenihan and Niamh McCarthy will all look to repeat their podium success from London 2017. European champion T13 1500m runner, Greta Streimikyte, will hope to earn a medal.
Podium success will carry even more importance for Team Ireland as a top-four finish will secure a slot for Irish athletes at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo 2020.
James Nolan, Head of Para Athletics with Paralympics Ireland said: ‘We have a great mix of experienced and rookie athletes in the team, for five athletes this will be their first world championships and there are also six very experienced athletes that have won medals at major championships.
‘World Para athletics is developing rapidly and standards at world level are tremendously high but this team is exceptionally talented and will make an impact in Dubai.’
McIlveen will be the first of the Irish in action and the only member of the team to perform on day one of competition as he goes in the heats of his event.
His final is set for Friday, a day which will see Alex Lee take to the track for the 200m. Barry goes for a medal on Saturday in the discus.
Smyth gets his campaign for yet another gold underway next Wednesday, the same day Jordan Lee goes in the high jump.
McKillop has to wait a full week before his 1500m heat. Streimikyte also goes next Thursday in the women’s equivalent.