Alex Wright: Walking with a renewed purpose on the road to Tokyo

Its been an eventful 12 months for racewalker Alex Wright with the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics. The arrival of baby Holly has changed his focus and perspective - but all for the better. 

MAN IN A HURRY: Alex Wright competing in the Irish Life Health National 20k Walks Championships in Raheny, last year. Wright competes in his second Olympic Games in Tokyo later this summer. Picture: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

For all Alex Wright’s adult life, everything revolved around his racewalking. Not only family but even having a family. Just as he habitually sits down with his sport psychologist Canice Kennedy before every competition to draw up a race plan, he and his wife Lauren conscientiously decided that they’d have a baby after the Tokyo Olympics, preferably as soon as possible after the Olympics. And so in early March of 2020, little Holly was conceived.

She would be a post-Olympic baby, help give him a post-Olympic focus. Something or someone that anytime earlier would have been a distraction.

But as they say, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Even someone as meticulous as Wright couldn’t have foreseen when hearing early reports of a virus in Wuhan that it would sweep across the world, causing the cancellation of the biggest sporting event in that world. But it did. A post-Olympic baby became a pre-Olympic baby. The promised joy a potential distraction.

But in hindsight, it’s been for the best. A distraction from all the cancelled races is probably what he needed in the form of that beautiful girl.

“I used to be so consumed with my sport and training but now the best thing in my life is having a daughter. It’s so enjoyable. In a weird way it’s worked out for the best that we had a baby before the Olympics because it’s given me a different focus during the pandemic, when things on the athletics side have been so challenging.

“The first few months especially I couldn’t wait to get home [from training and camps] and be around my wife and daughter. It’s been incredible for us. Life-changing.”

He won’t lie though: sometimes in changing his life, it has turned it upside down. Although within a fortnight of Holly’s birth, Lauren, a former racewalker herself, was back out on the roads of Cork with him, videoing him while pushing Holly’s pram along, training can be compromised; being attentive to Holly’s needs, especially at night, hasn’t always been the most conducive when it comes to his sleep.

And then when he’s had to go abroad on camps, as you inevitably have to do in an event like his, they’ve had to be shorter than usual because he finds it hard being away from Holly and Lauren for long.

As we speak, he’s in the southern Spanish town of Guadix, a regular training base for top walkers from Ireland and around the world because of the facilities, climate, and volume of racewalkers it boasts. Later on today he has a 20k race in La Coruna, one of the few races the sport has had during the pandemic, and most likely his last before Tokyo. 

This camp will have been his longest since Holly came along: essentially a whole month when any previous one this year was at most 10 days. He’ll fly back to Cork early next week but then on June 20, he’ll fly back out. By the time he sees Holly again in the flesh after that, it’ll be August, his Olympics over.

Tokyo will be his second. He’d hoped that his hometown of London, competing for GB, would have been his first but instead that proved to be Rio, when he was 26, racing for Ireland, the same country a few years later he would lead to its first European team bronze medal.

He was always aware of his Irish roots; his grandfather was from Sean Cavanagh country, the Moy, in Tyrone, while in his early teens he holidayed in Kinsale, the same town in which he and Lauren would marry in 2017.

But he actually grew up around the same neck of the woods as Chelsea, the football club he supports; the first part-time job he ever got was in hospitality on match-day at Stamford Bridge, often serving and clearing food in the corporate box next door to Abramovich’s.

After his local school was closed to renovations though he mostly studied in a boarding school in the Somerset countryside called Brymore Academy where they had an excellent athletics programme. Wright tried his hand at everything — steeplechase, shot putt, javelin, decathlon — but particularly took to walking and was soon breaking national school records. By the time of the London Olympic cycle he was competing for Britain in the European Cup and attending Leeds Metropolitan University where one of the event’s leading coaches, Andrew Drake, was overseeing a training group at the national race walking centre that included Lauren from the Isle of Man and a Brendan Boyce from Donegal.

Wright narrowly missed out on making the GB team for London but it hardly impacted his confidence or ambition. “I was developing hugely as an athlete, making the transition from a junior athlete into a senior one.”

No, missing out on competing in London wasn’t going to stop or derail him. But training there nearly did. After finishing college, he had moved back home and found the same support wasn’t there.

“Within a year I realised that if wanted to continue racewalking and being a professional athlete I couldn’t stay training in London. In university I had everything — a track, a gym, a great coach, and training group.

In London I had a top coach as well but it was the loneliness of doing it alone in a big city and having to start up my own high-performance system.

As it happened, someone and somewhere else was offering that — Rob Heffernan and the rest of the Irish.

From their Leeds Met days, Wright was good friends with Brendan Boyce and tended to gravitate towards the Irish at meets and camps in Guadix. Heffernan at the time was in his pomp, having won the world championships in Moscow, and begun coaching Boyce.

“Rob would always have been ‘Sure come over and you can train with us.’ And I was always messaging Brendan so one day I just made the decision with Lauren, ‘Let’s go over and see what it’s like.’ The next day we hopped on a national express bus over to Cork because it was cheaper and we were able to take more stuff.”

According to Heffernan in his autobiography Walking Tall, he took a shining to Wright because he was “very talented, very professional in his attitude and also a very nice person. I remember back when I was younger and how many people had helped me, so I decided to pass on that knowledge and do my best to help him.”

Wright will testify that’s precisely what Heffernan did. “Rob was so generous, a great person to turn to. I was only 22 when we moved over but he made sure we were looked after in every way. He had a friend who had an apartment in Blackpool so we rented it for a few years.

“And he showed me what it took to compete at the top level. How it’s not just about showing up to training and thinking of that day, that week, but organising your camps and your races and your races. He pointed me the way of Robbie Williams in Fitness Works who’d give me [S&C] programmes. They could see I was a young athlete and didn’t have much money but they looked after me as if I was an Irish athlete. He definitely crafted me into the athlete that I am. I still train very similar to the way he used to train and the likes of Olive [Loughnane].”

He just took to everything about Cork, just as it seemed to take to him. Being able to show up at Blackrock Castle and find Rob and Brendan there and do a 12k loop down around there. The respect and friendliness people showed to them as they passed.

I was lucky to come to Cork when I did. Rob had just won the world championship and the buzz in the city was incredible. I’d have a similar stature and colour of hair to Rob so I was always mistaken for him!

By the end of the year he’d decided he was going to stay in Ireland and, if he could, compete for Ireland. Heffernan put him the way of Patsy McGonagle and the necessary paperwork was completed.

As the years passed the band not so much broke up as drifted apart; Heffernan took a year out after retiring from competing, Boyce went travelling around the same time while Wright now lives in Mallow, meaning his commutes to the city are more sparing. But Heffernan’s legacy remains with him.

You can even hear from the way he talks how much of a hold Cork and Ireland has a grip of him; while he hasn’t quite adopted the lilting local accent, he’s picked up some of the tics of the native lingo — a frequent number of his sentences finish with the term ‘like’. Leevale is not just a club to him and his family but a home, just as the town and his country isn’t just where their daughter was born but their home.

He’s had some great days and some rough days in the green singlet. An undoubted highlight was helping his adopted country to a bronze medal at the 2017 European team race walk in the 20k, behind only Spain and Germany. Wright actually was the first Irish racer over the line that day in Podebrad, Czech Republic, finishing sixth before Heffernan (13th) and Mayo’s Cian McManamon (26th) secured the other crucial points. He’s won several grand prix events and finished in the top 10 at the 2018 European championships, having been in the lead until 6k to go.

Rio and the 2017 world championships in London didn’t go his way though, through a combination of factors. Misfortune has definitely been one; in London in 2017 his shoe was clipped and lost, and in his attempt to claw back lost ground was adjudged to have lifted three times and was thus disqualified.

But his old mentor Heffernan also hinted that Wright was prone to making the same mistake he used to do as a younger race and peak too early in the year (“Alex would be dropping the group in November and I’d be thinking, ‘Oh, no, you’ve 10 more months of this, don’t give it all away now.’ Of course you’ve to put in the foundation but don’t get carried away. There’s no point in winning small races early in the year with no one around.”

Wright accepts there was some validity to that but that there’s little danger of that this year, between circumstances and experience. Although it’s been draining, physically and even financially, taking so many PCR tests and having to now fly from Dublin instead of Cork to train and compete abroad, he still a reservoir of fuel in store from not going to the well earlier in a season. He qualified for Tokyo two years ago. Now that he’s a more mature walker and moved up to the 50k, a top 20, even top 10, spot wouldn’t be beyond him.

“It’s definitely been a very difficult year with all the uncertainty but I’m very much in a space now where I’m very motivated to go the Olympics and deliver the best performance that I can get out of myself. Earlier in my career I was a good athlete to go out early in the season, around October and November, and produce some very good times, but now between the pandemic and the birth of Holly, I’ve been a lot more relaxed. I’ve been later really getting into it. And I think that’s a positive. I hope and think it’s going to bring me to my peak at the Games.”

He’s wiser from and for Rio. “I learned that the Games is not just like turning up and running your race. There was a holding camp, the food hall factor, [being around and seeing so many athletes, a number of them world famous], having to take buses to go anywhere. You were more restricted, it was less relaxed than other races.”

As it happens, Tokyo is going to be a more stripped-down game. No crowds. Once your race is run, you leave town. Which suits him fine. With Holly, he has someone to race back to as well as race for.

“For me personally it’s always been about my event. All the other things, yeah, it’s nice to have the Olympic experience but I had that in Rio. I much prefer it being more controlled than it being cancelled altogether, like.”

He might be away from Cork and Holly for the next while but at this stage it’s hard to take the Cork out of him.