Attacker left victim with broken jaw ‘to teach him a lesson’
He’s the Welsh world champion athlete living on £1,500 a year and relying on his homemade gym to get him to this year’s Olympics. Dai Greene tells LAURA CLEMENTS about the struggle to get to Tokyo...
A MAN subjected a pub customer to a brutal beating which left him with a broken jaw in order to “teach him a lesson”, a court has heard.
Steven Rees sought out his victim after the man had been involved in a disagreement with the defendant’s brother. When he found his victim he took him out of the bar and repeatedly punched him in the face before driving off and leaving his victim on the floor.
Swansea Crown Court heard that when the boss of the bar went to see what was going on she found the injured man laying in a nearby alley and initially thought he was dead.
Rees had previously been found guilty to inflicting grievous bodily harm at trial when he returned to the dock for sentencing.
The assault, which took place on September 12, 2019, was sparked by a dispute between Rees’s brother Darren and a man by the name of Jason Jones that had happened a few days earlier.
The court heard the parties had in fact reconciled their differences but on the day of the attack the defendant texted Mr Jones saying he wanted to see him. Mr Jones said he would be in the Turn Style bar in Llanelli.
Rees went to the bar and the two men went outside to talk. However once outside Rees attacked Mr Jones by repeatedly punching him to the face and head.
Mr Jones fell to the floor and the assailant fled in a car. The court heard that when the boss of the bar went out to see what was happening she found the victim laying on the floor and feared he was dead.
At his trial 39-year-old Rees claimed he had been acting in self-defence. It was the prosecution case that Rees had gone to the bar “to teach Jason Jones a lesson”.
The court heard Mr Jones suffered a double fracture of the jaw and had to undergo surgery to have a metal plate fitted. He was initially unable to eat solid foods, and has been left with ongoing pain and now feels anxious about going out.
Rees, of Llys y Felin, Llanelli, was convicted of inflicting grievous bodily harm at trial. He has seven previous convictions for 11 offences though none in the last 15 years.
David Singh, for Rees, said the court would be concerned that the defendant was not taking responsibility for his actions in the pre-sentence report.
He said his client had worked hard for many years and had some caring responsibilities for his parents and he said the personal references handed to the court on the defendant’s behalf “show a very difference side to him”.
Recorder Aidan Eardley said he had formed his own view of the incident from the evidence heard in the case and he was satisfied Rees had not been acting in self-defence and that there had been a “degree of premeditation”.
He said Rees had gone to meet Mr Jones to confront him over some “perceived slight” involving his brother and having taken him out of the bar subjected him to “inexcusable and significant violence”.
The recorder said it appeared the defendant still maintained Mr Jones was the aggressor, and the offending was so serious only immediate custody
would suffice.
Rees was sentenced to 26 months in prison and will serve up to half that
period in custody before being released on licence to serve the remainder in the community.
FOR a former world champion athlete and Olympic hopeful, you’d think Dai Greene would be paid enough to live and have access to some of the best physios and facilities money could buy.
But you’d be wrong. The stark and unglamorous reality is much more sobering – the Welshman must somehow live on yearly funding of just £1,500 and train using a homemade gym he’s rigged up on his farm.
A combination of age, funding structures and the Covid pandemic have meant Dai, who’s gunning for selection for the British athletics team for the Tokyo Olympics in July and August, has had to dig deep into his mental, physical and financial resilience.
And he’s also had to get inventive to reach peak fitness during a crucial preparation year that’s seen gyms closed by lockdown after lockdown. It’s far from ideal and yet the 35-year-old is far from fazed.
Dai is used to the ups and downs that are part and parcel of life as an elite athlete and he has an enormous reservoir of experience to draw on. The last time we caught up with him properly he was the reigning world, European and Commonwealth champion and raring to go for the 2012 home Olympics.
But the race in London was not good. Dai, one of Britain’s best hopes for a gold medal in the Olympic Stadium, ran a disappointing final to finish fourth.
After arguably the best 18 months of his sporting career, the following months and years were beset by injuries and disappointments. Even now there’s no guarantee he’ll even qualify for Tokyo, which would be only his second Olympic games.
Why does he push himself to the max each and every day at an age where he’s classed as a veteran by the sport and when most think he’s past it? Mostly for the joy of competing, he says simply.
“Having success early on in my career has helped,” Dai said from his home on a working farm in the Midlands. “Even though I’ve had some bad moments in the last few years in terms of injuries and things like that, I believe I can get back to somewhere near that standard.
“And I’ve seen flashes of that in training – more so recently than in a long time – but I wouldn’t put myself through it, I don’t think, if I hadn’t experienced that success before.”
Dai, who grew up in Llanelli, was the first British man to win the 400m hurdles world title a decade ago. He knows he’s older than his fellow athletes and he’d have been forgiven a moment of selfpity when the 2020 games were postponed as it meant he’d be another year older when he finally reached the starting line. But he has overcome too much to stop now.
“I don’t feel as old as the number says. I’ve done some of the best training in the last 12 months as I have done in the last seven to eight years,” he added.
“While the training’s good and I enjoy most of that, it’s competing where I get the most joy. So I try to make the most of this while I can. If I didn’t enjoy it then I wouldn’t do it and I wouldn’t commit to it every day.
“Nothing else in my life gives me as much joy as training and competing. I know that when that moment disappears and I’m not getting that buzz or excitement, then it’s time for me to step away.”
Since moving to his partner’s family farm and living alongside her parents and brother, he’s found a support network that’s different from his former elite years, but one that’s no less important.
When gyms were closed during the second wave, Dai had to travel to Loughborough to use the elite facilities, which was a 90-minute round trip in his car. And while most athletes have struggled to continue training consistently during the pandemic, Dai had the farm at his disposal and made the most of it.
He’s charted his progress – both good and bad – on social media and it shows the kind of athlete he is at heart: determined, disciplined and with unrelenting standards. He is a refreshingly honest voice.
He hasn’t been funded by British Athletics since 2016 – he was dropped from funding after a series of operations between 2013 and 2015. The current Welsh Athletics support amounts to £1,500 per year and the physios are all in Cardiff.
Living as part of an extended family has lowered living costs, he admitted, but he’s also been known to help out with his partner’s new takeaway pizza business and lends a hand where he can.
The lack of funding clearly rankles and he believes that with more support he’d be running “incredibly well”.
“It wouldn’t be difficult to get to that point because I’d have somebody checking on me every day, but when you don’t have that it’s tough,” he said with more than a hint of frustration.
“Seeing other people getting supported, knowing they probably won’t make it past a certain level, or seeing other athletes in my discipline supported, knowing they won’t get past a certain point – that’s tough.
“Even though I’m someone who’s been there and done it before, I don’t get supported or I haven’t been supported for a while
– it is a bit frustrating.”
He’s channelled that frustration into developing sessions that involve bounding up straw bales and lifting “heavy stuff”.
“I just got inventive, doing plyometric stuff on straw bales, lifting heavy stuff like tractor tyres and logs and I made a lifting rack out of concrete blocks,” he said.
He took a lot of inspiration from the strength and conditioning coaches at British Athletics, who looked at how power output relates to muscle mass around the hip area. Essentially, they found that the bigger the muscles, the more power and therefore the higher and faster the athlete.
So Dai has done more work to create more muscle: “I did everything, three or four sets of 10 on everything in training just to increase muscle mass in those areas so I knew that when I could start back running, I’d be in good condition.”
There are videos of hm i on Twitter effortlessly bounding up bales of straw at most people’s waist height, each jump taken from a standing start, with Dai almost seeming to stay suspended in the air longer than possible. That impressive control and strength comes from knowing what to focus on in training for the best results.
“That knowledge comes with doing it for years and being a student of the sport for so long. I had a lot to go to in terms of my handbook of sessions and
the things I could do that would benefit me.”
He’s shared the heartache and the frustration when he’s got injury niggles, offered video explainers for why he does specific exercises and showed the grim reality of the pain and suffering he goes through on the really tough sessions, with pictures of him completely spent and flat out on the ground next to the track.
Despite the pained look on his face in many of the pictures, he loves every minute: “When I’m training, I love it and it’s not a job. When I’m injured, it becomes a job, more like I need to do this session – it might be on the bike or in the pool – something that I don’t want to do.
“It means I’m more robotic in how to go about it, but I approach it as something I have to do so I can be back doing what I want to do.
“I don’t take any enjoyment in having to do the rehab and crosstraining stuff, but it’s a step I have to take.”
He still has a coach and does also now have access to the track facilities at Loughborough, a 45-minute drive away, and he also sees a physiotherapist once a week. But apart from that, he’s on his own.
“There is an issue that youngsters who have potential often get more [support] than seniors who’ve gone through problems,” he added. “If you’re 18, 19, 20 then you get contracts snapped up because everyone thinks you’re going to be amazing, but athletes often just don’t progress.
“But once you get past 30 they look at you and go, ‘Yeah, they’re done, their time is up’.”
Dai was always a toplevel sportsman and spent his teenage years playing football for the Swansea C i ty youth team.
His dream was to be a professional footballer, but the young Dai reached a point where his favourite sport made him unhappy.
“The coach was giving us a hard time,” he recalled. “I’d lost all my confidence as a teenager and I was just playing worse and worse and I was getting upset after pretty much every game.
“My parents said, ‘You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to’, so I stopped.”
It wasn’t until he went to university in Cardiff that he realised he could make a living out of athletics instead. He’d dabbled in track competitions through college and had a degree of fitness from football but, even so, in that first year at university, he went from an average college runner to being the second-fastest in Europe.
“For the first time in my life I had people who wanted to do athletics and train every day. I never had that in Llanelli, but when I went to Cardiff it changed and it just snowballed from there,” he said honestly.
“I obviously had a certain amount of ability because I was excelling in the sport of football. I had a natural talent in terms of sport and applying myself and training well – I just needed the environ- ment.”
Recognising the importance of having the right people around you at such a critical point, he is now helping to mentor students at Coleg Sir Gâr in Llanelli, his old college.
“I’m helping the young sport students because when I was that age I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “They have aspirations for that jump from junior to becoming a senior, so I’m helping them with that. I can contribute in a small way through mentoring.”
He certainly has bucketloads of advice to offer from a record-breaking and gold medal-winning career. He can’t pick just one highlight as his proudest achievement, but narrows it down to three instead.
“The 2011 World Championship gold medal was a real highlight,” he said. “It was the culmination of so much work. The 2010 European Championship gold medal was my first medal at a major event so that was special – it was a huge step up from being nothing to someone who won something.
“And then the Commonwealth Games gold [in the same year] was special because I had been ill in the run-up, so to come through that and win showed the type of person I really was.”
After his world title, Dai only raced 11 times between 2014 and 2017. Groin and hernia problems forced him to miss several major championships, including the 2014 Europeans and the 2016 Olympics. A hamstring problem saw him withdraw from the 2018 Commonwealth Games as well as the European Championships later that same year.
After such a torrid run of bad luck, he got to a point where he’d pretty much had a year of no running at all.
Having only been able to keep up with some “basic gym stuff”, he’d totally lost all his fitness and reached perhaps the lowest point of his career.
“That was the hardest point,” he said. “I was 30 years old, trying to get back into the sport again from basically zero and it’s probably taken me three years to get back to the point of thinking I could be competitive again.
“I didn’t have a chance to show it last year, but I did some good work and this year is the same.”
A potential Olympic comeback is made even harder by the fact that recent changes by World Athletics and British Athletics have raised the standards required for Olympic qualification and they are the hardest they’ve ever been for track and field, said Dai.
“I’m confident [about qualifying], but I also know that I will have to run faster than any British athlete has ever run to qualify for the Olympics,” he explained. “It’s frustrating for a lot of athletes given that the number of competitions and lack of travel are making it harder to find competitions that are actually going to be held.”
There’s a competition in Doha, Qatar, in a few weeks’ time, but British athletes are reluctant to go there because it’s redlisted and they’d be forced to quarantine. Many are resting their hopes on the British Championships held in June this year.
“We haven’t heard too much about Tokyo,” added Dai. “Apart from it’s likely to go ahead but without any crowds – that’s where our heads are at, I guess.
“We’ve been told there’s likely to be a holding camp as well, but everyone’s focus is really on trying to cement their place on the team.
“I haven’t thought too much about Tokyo and no crowds. But it’s going to be difficult competing early on in the season because there’s going to be no crowds there either, so that will be our first taste of it.
“It might become normal by the time we get to Tokyo, but having a massive stadium that’s predominantly empty, it’s going to feel pretty weird, I have to say.
“If you’re successful in an empty stadium it’s 100% going to take the shine off it. Nobody wants to go into the 100m final and look around and there’s no-one there.”
While the uncertainty could distract lesser athletes, that’s not the case for Dai.
“I’ve been good at processing things like that in the past,” he said. “It’s something that’s come quite naturally to me – the ability to look at the shortterm goals I can achieve.
“The Olympic qualifying standard is not out of the realms of possibility, but I do have to make sure the next eight weeks are on point. It’s such a small window so I can’t afford to get injuries or anything and it’s all about the small margins at the moment.
“This time of year it’s super-specific. One second difference over a 300m rep is huge, so we need to be properly on it and skimming off as many tenths of a second as we can.”
His training week is typically broken down into three track sessions, all sprint-based and involving something like six reps (repetitions) of 150m one day and two reps of 300m another day. He also does an aerobic run once a week at a pace no faster than seven minutes per mile. It’s repetitive and hard and yet there’s no trace of resentment.
He says some of his former competitors who’ve now retired from the sport tell him: “Once it’s gone, you’ll be disappointed you didn’t carry on for as long as you could.”
So that’s what Dai is doing – carrying on for as long as he can.
“I’m in a good place physically and mentally, but it’s crunch time now. I have to make sure I hit as many sessions as I can, get some good races and then hope for good weather when I have those races.”
He does seem remarkably chilled and he says that’s partly down to the “real team effort” he’s got in his home life.
“It’s really nice to be involved in that,” he said. “I’m not someone who’s really close to my family – my parents now live in Spain – but being in a family network like this is probably the most supported I’ve been for a long, long time.
“The people around me are a positive distraction and it’s a great environment to relax in and spend time in when I’m not training.”
Although he’s given minimal thought to life after athletics, he is nurturing a fledgling business idea that was born out of a lack of access to physio during lockdown.
In the past 18 months Dai started using a handheld massage gun for the first time and noticed how every athlete seemed to have one in their kit bag at one international competition. He was also impressed with the effect using one was having on his own muscles.
He went away, did a bit of research and designed his own version – called the Tomahawk – and got it manufactured to his specifications. He’s been selling them online through Amazon and his own website for the past six months with modest success.
“I’ve ventured into that business world and it’s something I’d like to continue, but it’s difficult because it’s a world I don’t know at the moment,” he said. “But I’m trying my best and taking baby steps all the time.
“It’s only a matter of time before they filter down to the kit bags of the masses.”
He’d also love to do more TV appearances after he’s hung up his spikes, but adds that is a conversation “for a couple of years down the line”.
“It would be a shame to lose all the knowledge and not go into some sort of coaching too,” he added, so it’s clear he’ll stay in the athletics world when he’s done racing.
But for now his focus is resolutely set on less than 50 seconds of work at the British Championships at the end of June – just seven short weeks away. After that, all being well, it will be on to Japan for the Olympics. “I’ll have done something wrong between now and then if I’m not there,” he said.