FAME and misfortune
Clegg’s surprise showbiz celebration may have bit the dust but Paralympian is more concerned with just how her Tokyo dream will be impacted by new guidelines
BY THE time coronavirus is banished from our lives, we will all have a story to tell about how the various degrees of lockdown affected each and every one of us in so many different ways.
Libby Clegg turned 30 a fortnight after the pubs went dark. Having recently sweltered in the spotlight on ITV’s Dancing On Ice, the double Paralympic sprint gold medallist had intended to chill out and celebrate without undue fanfare.
Her fiancé Dan, sneakily, had other ideas. A suitably raucous bash had secretly been arranged. Regrettably, it had to be yanked from the diary faster than you can say ‘Schofe and Holly’.
‘And he’d already invited loads of the cast from Dancing On Ice,’
Clegg giggles. ‘Michael Barrymore nearly let it slip to me on the on the last night of the show that he was coming to my party.
‘That could have been the big party of the year. But now I’m going to try and do my birthday party on the day before my 31st.’ Let’s hope the Scot is able to
Strike It Lucky with the festivities second time around. By next March, she hopes to be in the thick of preparations for her fourth Paralympics without fear that Tokyo’s Games might be cancelled,
rather than postponed.
Her training base at Loughborough University is due to re-open this week. As a visually-impaired athlete, the conditions imposed present a perplexing challenge for Clegg and her coach Joe McDonnell.
Social distancing must be maintained with contact forbidden. How, she queries, to adapt a rapid regime which is normally undertaken with a guide runner adjoined at her side?
‘We were discussing it but we’re not quite sure how it’s going to work,’ she admits. ‘It’s going to be difficult. I’ve been going onto the 4G pitch during the lockdown and Joe has been meeting me there.
‘Obviously, he’s not been allowed to technically coach me. But he’s been letting me know if I’m running near the fence. It’s not ideal but that’s all I’ve been able to do. I obviously can’t run on a road or a normal field because there’s divots and it’s quite dangerous when you can’t see anything. And if I trip and twist my ankles, that’s really not very good.’
With her degenerative eye condition — Stargardt’s Dystrophy — largely limiting her sight, the obstacles erected by the ‘new normal’ are not limited to the track.
‘A lot of blind people are quite tactile as well,’ she underlines. ‘So, if I go to the supermarket for example, I pick things up and feel it. Like, pasta, rice, whatever. You feel it, right? Well, you can’t really do that.’
Pandemic aside, daily life is infinitely more complex than four years ago when she seized gold in both the T11 100 and 200 metres in Rio. Clegg’s son, Edward, has just turned one and is already demonstrating a turn of speed on all fours that suggests the apple has not fallen too far from the tree.
The gambit of learning to skate on national television during what passed for maternity leave was accepted with a nod to their future. To open doors and explore pathways.
Finishing third on Dancing on Ice, as former EastEnders star Joe
Swash salchowed his way to victory, should also have afforded her the kind of valedictory tour that puts a few quid in the bank to underwrite any transition.
Covid-19, frustratingly, slammed shut the window to — in a financial sense — capitalise. ‘I’ve lost a bit of work,’ she rues. ‘But it’s just one of those things, isn’t it? It’s been quite nice having time to sort of have a think about what I’d like to do and learning a bit more about me.’
Clegg will continue diversionary chats with her new-found coterie of celebrity chums. Schofield and Willoughby and the pirouetting pair of Torvill and Dean can expect invites to parties galore.
‘Phil and Holly were lovely,’ she enthuses. ‘Chris and Jayne were fantastic. They were all normal people, which was a bit of a surprise.’
However, shimmying in sequins must now bow to gallops in lycra. 15 months, presumably, remain until the defence of her crowns. With the 2020 schedule decimated, it will feel a long, slow build.
‘I was really hoping that it would continue as normal this year because after Dancing On Ice, I was actually in really good shape,’ Clegg maintains.
‘But, it’s another year. And everybody’s in the same boat and we’re all stuck in that situation, aren’t we?’
We don’t know how my running is going to work under the new rules