I don’t want to just give up and let the tumour beat me
David Smith on why he’s delaying life-saving surgery for a shot at Rio
AS David Smith puts it, he’s in two races right now. On one hand, the rowing champion t urned cyclist is trying to speed everything up, to get relentlessly faster as he aims to qualify for a shot at the road time trial with Team GB in next summer’s Paralympics in Rio.
On t he other, however, he desperately wants to bring time to a complete standstill and halt the growth of a tumour on his spinal cord which, if left untreated, could kill him.
It’s a year since he underwent his second major surgery to remove this most fierce and stubborn of enemies — an operation which initially left him paralysed and having to learn to walk again.
It speaks volumes for the 37-yearold from Aviemore, his stunning resilience and his incredible will that he is currently to be found in Manchester, training with the British Development Cycling Programme. It’s precisely where he wants to be and he’s doing what he truly, madly, deeply loves to do.
But he is being severely tested again. Just last month, he was told the tumour has returned for a third time and that he needs another operation. If it grows only a mere eight millimetres more, the effects could be devastating.
Faced with the facts, Smith has made a decision which startled many. He has opted to delay going under the knife in the hope that he can curtail this growth for at least long enough to try to fulfil this latest Paralympic dream.
Given that he almost died twice in 2010 — first when he had a tumour which was the size of a tennis ball, and three vertebrae removed, and again when it was replaced by a sizeable blood clot — and he has shown such stunning powers of recovery and perseverance throughout a life in which he has constantly defied expectations, you’d be foolish to put anything past him.
For the moment, Smith is feeling good and training hard. With an international event next month to prepare f or — and the World Championships on the horizon in March — he is rarely happier than when he has targets to hit on the bike. A scan in January will reveal how he is progressing in his other race.
‘I’ve become quite fascinated with time,’ says Smith, who was born with clubfoot and almost had to have his right foot amputated at birth. He spent the first three years of his life learning to walk in special boots and plaster casts, the legacy of which is what qualifies him as a Para athlete. ‘I have this 8 mm o n my spinal cord, which is not j ust standing between me and making it to Rio but also between me and living.
‘ I wake up every morning and think: “Jesus! I’m trying to suffer and punish myself to find seconds on the bike while I’m also trying to slow d o wn this t umour” and, t o an extent, both goals are almost totally out of my control.
‘Psychologically, it’s quite hard to understand. It’s like trying to find that last word of a crossword and you can’t find it. I’m trying to think: “What can I do that’s going to slow the tumour down?”
‘ So I s pend my t i me researching things or people send me emails saying: “I’ve found this, try this.” It’s difficult, though, because obviously I’m governed by anti- doping, so I can’t try a lot of the stuff. There’s a lot of really good, proven stuff that has a good effect with cancerous tumours but I can’t just go and try everything. That’s pretty tough — to know there is something that could potentially save my life but I can’t take it.’ With a gold medal f rom victory i n the mixed coxed four at London 2012 already tucked away and an MBE to his name, many would wonder why Smith would want to put himself through all of this again. His reasons are many.
There is the burning desire to t r ai n, uninterrupted by health, to push his body to the limit and see what he might be capable of.
There’s also the fact that being i n peak physical condition is only likely to help him in his bid to recover from the next round of procedures.
There’s the realisation too that, given the reaction he has received from telling his story and to the recent airing of a searingly honest TV documentary about his most recent recovery, his battle is no longer just about himself and that he is, in fact, giving others hope.
Fundamentally, though, he simply refuses to surrender.
‘I know there are a lot of people out there thinking: “Why are you doing this? This is crazy”,’ admits Smith, who has also represented Great Britain at able-bodied karate and bobsleigh. ‘It’s a calculated risk, it always has been. It’s not something I’ve gone blindfolded into. I spoke a lot with the surgeon about what we’re doing.
‘For me, it’s not the winning. I know what it’s like to almost lose it all. I know what it’s like to sit in a room and be told you have this one-in-500 chance (of survival).
‘The tumour sits on your lungs and if it grows and crushes your nerve root, then you will stop breathing, which then leads to all sorts of problems. Often you might die, you might become paralysed from the neck down… there were all these scenarios that I thought I would never have to deal with in my life.
‘On the anaesthetic table, I just remember lying there thinking: “Oh s***”. What if I don’t open my eyes again? I haven’t done everything I want to do.”
‘When you experience that then, when it comes to dealing with sport, and to keep pushing, I always think back to that moment. If it’s a horrible rainy day, I think: “Actually, I remember thinking I’d give anything to be out getting soaking wet on my bike right now.”
‘I’ve always thought the pain of doing sport is the pain that makes you feel alive, whereas the pain in hospital... you feel dead and you feel you can’t do anything just lying there.
‘When I got rediagnosed, I didn’t have much emotion. I’ve cried since then and there will be highs and lows but ultimately I think: “If I give up, then that’s it. What’s the point?” I thought that if I keep striving for things... I thought that if I don’t make Rio, then I will have the surgery but then straight after that, I will cycle across America or I will go and do one of the very first routes of the Tour de France, which have now been taken out of it because they’re so hard.
‘There’s always things to do that will get me through the surgery and put my mind in the right place to say: “Well, I’m not just going to lie back and take the diagnosis.”’
GRATEFUL’ is not a word you’d think would fit well with the situation Smith is now faced with. On top of everything he has gone through, his surgeries have left him in constant pain, which is what forced him to change sport from rowing and is in fact exacerbated by the position he needs to adopt while cycling.
He has been aided, however, by a former football start urned self-help guru.
‘I worked quite closely with the former Manchester United goalkeeper Gary Bailey, who explained to me the power of gratitude,’ says Smith. ‘He said: “You can’t be unhappy if you’re grateful.”
‘I said: “Gary, you’ve played for Man United and married Miss World, of course you’re going to be grateful! I’m lying in a bed and I look like I’m
I’ve always thought that the pain of doing sport is the pain that makes you feel alive
90 with no sign of any Miss World.” But he told me: “If you practice gratitude every day, you won’t be unhappy and it has a real positive effect. You’ll see.”
‘So I’d wake up in the morning and think: “I’m so grateful to have the house, I’m so grateful to have good friends and support, a good surgeon” — and it’s amazing how that installs a positive mindset.
‘What I realised is that I’ve got it (the tumour), I can’t change it — the only thing I can do is either learn to thrive with it or let it beat you. It would be easy to just sit down and say: “Oh, I’m in too much pain, I can’t handle this, I’m just doing to sit on the sofa.”
‘But I think then you just become a passenger through life and you’re not really living. I just feel it’s so important to have that dream, have that goal — something that makes you want to thrive, make you a better person and get out and live life, because it’s such an amazing thing.’
For all his positivity, Smith has found himself in dark places, too. He doesn’t shy away from the fact that not knowing if or when he is going to be stopped in his tracks again by the foe within is difficult to handle.
This is where his extraordinary mental powers, and the messages he’s received from others, come in.
‘If I’m tired and a bit sore, some of the symptoms have flared up a lot and my initial response when I go to bed every night is to say “please don’t grow,”’ he admits.
‘My tumour doesn’t seem to respond to anything because it’s so rare. Every other surgery has happened really quickly (after diagnosis) but this time it could be six months, it could be 10 months, it could be a year or even two years — I might be able to slow it right down or it might grow.
‘It’s like being in a tunnel but not knowing where the end is and you can’t even see the light.
‘Every day I think “that’s another day I’m alive, that’s another day I’m pushing.” I guess in a lot of ways I was doing it for myself and then as the story has grown, more people are reading it and now I feel I’m not just doing it for myself, that there are a lot of people getting hope and strength from it.’
Given how Smith describes the metaphorical sledgehammer blow which lands on delivery of bad news, it seems that there simply cannot be enough support for sufferers.
‘When you’re first diagnosed, it’s a pretty lonely place,’ he says. ‘It’s like you’re sitting in one of those space ball things that they roll you down a hill in and you’re in the busiest street in the world and you’re rolling around but no one can see you. And you’re trying to say: “Someone help me.”
‘When you’re diagnosed in that room... the walls come in and you can almost see the words coming out of the surgeon’s mouth. You leave and you’re emotional while everyone else around you is just getting on with life and they’re buzzing around you.
‘I remember this time walking around London. I was standing in Oxford Street with everyone flying around and I was just going “wow”.
‘Then I start thinking, because it’s such a common thing now, with all these illnesses, to be diagnosed “how many other people that day were in the same position as me?”’
He continues: ‘I get really moved by all the emails people send to say that they’re battling cancer, that they are battling challenges in their life. I’m quite humbled by that but I think that we’re all here for a purpose.
‘Sometimes we go through life and we never find out what that is but someone said to me: “What you’ve got is a gift. Use it wisely.” I thought: “That’s so true.”
‘If my decision to postpone surgery and try to get to Rio is giving strength to people that I’m never actually going to meet then I think that, rather than seeing the tumour as this negative thing, it gives you a purpose and it helps you train harder.
‘The fact you can make a positive impact on someone else’s life is quite powerful and I would never abuse that that. That’s quite a nice thing to be able to do.’
Smith, himself, will take his own inspiration from the company he is now keeping in Manchester. Having spent recent months training almost entirely on his own in Aviemore, being surrounded by the best in the business and people who strive to reach new heights on a daily basis could barely be better therapy.
‘I think it’s crucial because I was training up in Aviemore on my own, resting on my own, so it gave me a lot of time to think,’ he says. ‘That can be dangerous because you tend to overanalyse things. I’d love to get to Rio but I just want to go and live as an athlete for 10 more months, thrive off it and love every second of it.
‘Everything there is an amazing set-up. On your day off you can go and have lunch with other athletes and chat about sports stuff and not have your tumour as your major focus. Obviously, with the decision I ’ ve made, “normal” people perhaps don’t quite understand it and in Manchester they are all athletes — so I start off with the idea they’re all mad, they’re not normal! They get it.
‘Being surrounded by like-minded people will really help.’
SMITH’S appetite to succeed, you will have gathered, is nothing short of insatiable. If he doesn’t book his place on the flight to Brazil, it certainly won’t be through lack of effort. All he’s asking for, in the next few months at least, is to live his life on his terms.
‘I can handle not making it to Rio on performance,’ he says. ‘If it isn’t good enough and I don’t get selected, then I can take it. But if this tumour grows faster and it stops me going... I’m not ready for that. I’ve not managed to prepare for that.
‘I remember saying to myself on the startline in London 2012 that nothing can hurt like what I’ve gone through — almost dying or waking up paralysed — emotionally or mentally. Physically, yes, but not emotionally. I use that in the start gates.
‘When I’m really tired in training, it would be easy to sit up and say: “Oh, I can’t do this” but I’m going to finish it. And I think that’s the same with this whole tumour thing — I’m going to finish what I set out to do and I’m not going to let it stop that happening. I don’t know when that time will come. I don’t know when I’ll say: “I’m content now, I’ve done what I wanted to do as an athlete.”
‘I still love this and I’ve still got too much to do.
‘I think as soon as I know it’s time for surgery the first thing I’m going to say to myself is: “I’ll be back on that bike.” Whether that’s racing for Great Britain or doing some crazy cycle challenge,
‘I think that’s what I need to have in that 8mm race... to have that focus.’
He adds: ‘If I made t he (Paralympic) team it would just be a dream come true and if I could even just squeeze a bronze medal out... I would probably be more proud of that than I would be of the gold in London. The odds of gold in London were a lot higher because we were double world champions whereas, at the moment, I’m nowhere near the podium.
‘It’s a neverending journey and I just hope this chapter ends in Rio.’
No one could begrudge that wish coming true.