At poolside in the Manchester Aquatic Centre, Julie O’Neill, the United States
coach, watched closely as Jessica Long, a 15-year-old with no legs below the
knee, ploughed laps up the pool and offered a breathtaking understatement.
“Jessica is pretty extraordinary,” she said.
But “pretty extraordinary” is miles off. It does not remotely do credit to a
girl who won seven individual gold medals at the Paralympic swimming World
Championships last year. Nor does it come anywhere close to capturing this
extraordinary young girl’s spirit. In a career as a sports reporter, I have
interviewed a number of world-beaters whose mentality, self-belief and
determination set them apart – Tiger Woods, Carl Lewis, Jonny Wilkinson,
Evander Holyfield, Sir Steve Redgrave – and here we have another.
On the face of it, her story is her background. She was a baby in an orphanage
in Irkutsk, Siberia, where conditions were so poor that her father, Steve,
took photographs so that one day she could see where she came from. The
lights, plumbing and windows did not work, Jessica was one of many babies
with bedpans tied to their cots because there were too few staff to care for
them all.
Steve and his wife already had two children but were told that they could have
no more and so he had travelled from Baltimore, Maryland, to adopt. The
child they adopted had pretty blonde hair and bones so ill-formed in her
fibulas, ankles, heels and feet that he knew that both legs would need to be
amputated before she reached the age of 2.
That is the background. At first, she struggled with her condition, but now
she is so at home with it that she would not change it for the world. Offer
her a deal: a pair of fully functioning everyday legs or two stumps that
finish below the knee and she will take the latter. The legs have made her
who she is. “I can do anything,” she says, nonchalantly, and
the fuel that she burns is the desire to demonstrate this. She can ski,
rollerblade and play basketball. She has been a cheerleader, she has coached
cheerleading, she used to do gymnastics – running, jumping, spinning
cartwheels and backhanded springs, all off her “stumps” – until her family
persuaded her that she was damaging her knees.
She competed last year in a disabled rock-climbing event in Florida and
finished second, beaten by a second by a 25-year-old with one real leg. That
explains why her goals are world records in today’s two Visa Paralympic
World Cup events in Manchester, seven golds in the Beijing Paralympics next
year and that Florida rock-climbing event later this summer. “I definitely
want to go back there and win!” she said, spitting out the exclamation mark.
This is the key. For when she says she can “do anything”, she is lying
because what she clearly cannot do is finish second.
Before she reached her teens, she struggled with her identity. “I used to
wonder why I was adopted,” she said. “I used to talk about it a lot and I
used to want to meet my birth parents. I also couldn’t understand why God
didn’t give me legs.”
As she grew, she started to exhibit a tempestuous determination. She recalls
trying to walk up a hill when she was 8, falling over and her prosthetic
legs coming off. “My parents tried to help me and I said, ‘No.’ That’s me:
determined to be able to do everything on my own,” she said.
From there, this furiously driven athlete emerged. Aged 12, she competed in
the US trials to make the team for the Athens Paralympics in 2004 and her
parents, naturally, tried to prepare her for possible disappointment. “They
said, ‘Jess, you know it’s OK if you don’t make the team’, ” she recalled.
“I was, like, ‘No, I’m going to make the team.’ And I did. Ha! Then before I
left for Athens, they said ‘Jess, it’s OK if you don’t get a medal’ and I
was thinking, ‘I am getting a medal.’ And in my first event I did – I got a
gold. I was, like, ‘Ha! I got a gold medal!’ I ended up coming home with
three of them.”
There is real vitriol in this – cold, sugar-coated vitriol. Did she enjoy
proving people wrong? “It was a good feeling,” she said. “My parents didn’t
think I could do it, but I did.”
Long can switch this on and off. She likes hanging out with friends, she likes
music, she laughs when asked about boys – “My friends at swimming talk about
their boyfriends, but it seems to me like so much drama and stress” – and
when she does so, she comes over like an everyday, cookie teenager.
But return to the subject of the pool and the other side of her personality
clicks in. Ask her, for instance, about the 50 metres freestyle in Athens,
where she finished fifth, and this is her answer, coolly delivered with a
smile: “I don’t really like to look back at that because now I’m ranked
first.”
It has got to the stage where she knows that her parents know how to motivate
her: they simply cast doubt on her ability. And she cannot help herself.
Before the World Championships last year, they told her not to be downcast
if she did not win the backstroke. Her response? “I was, like, ‘No, I am
bringing home seven golds.’ ” And she did.
Will she win seven medals in Beijing next year? “Likely,” O’Neill said. All
gold? “Probably.”
That would represent a reasonable haul even for Michael Phelps. Many call him
the best swimmer in the world, but others could question whether he is even
the best swimmer in his home town.
Phelps, also, is from Baltimore. Long clapped eyes on him once across a pool,
but they have not met. The one occasion that she saw him was at his swimming
club, which she was considering joining. Phelps has two legs and world
reknown, but that does not diminish Long’s competitive spirit.
“It might be hard to train with him because he’s got legs and I’d be really
slow,” she said. “But if he didn’t kick, it would be cool to do a lap with
him.” On those terms, could she beat him? “I don’t know,” she said,
entertaining the possibility. “We’d have to see.”
Yet this is another factor that motivates her: competing for her club in
Baltimore against able-bodied swimmers. Some events she wins – “in all of
them, I’ll place,” she said. What drives her? “Knowing that the other
swimmers are all kicking, knowing they’re going to get a better start than
me and a better push-off at the turns. It just makes me want to beat the
person next to me. So when I do, it’s a good feeling.”
Does she resent the able-bodied? Quite the opposite – that is why she would
not exchange her prosthetic legs for a pair of real ones. “Because I
wouldn’t have made the friends I’ve made,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to
swim like this. And I wouldn’t be able to inspire people the way I do.”
So she no longer questions her identity, she no longer wants to trace her
birth parents and she certainly no longer wonders angrily why God did not
give her legs. “I now understand why,” she said. “It’s because I have found
that I inspire people, especially people with disability. I seem to have
spent my life proving that I can do anything I want. And I want to show
others that they can, too.”
Long story
Jessica Long’s record
World swimming records for a swimmer with a disability
January 2006
100m breaststroke 1:32.52
April 2006
50m breaststroke 44.27
200m breaststroke 3:26.03
December 2006
100m freestyle 1:07.03
100m butterfly 1:13.25
200m individual medley 2:43.60
400m freestyle 4:53.14
400m freestyle relay 4:30.06
March 2007
200m backstroke 2:58.70
400m individual medley 5:56.08
800m freestyle 10:17.50
April 2007
50m butterfly 33.69
200m freestyle 2:23.45
1,500m freestyle 20:00.35
Paralympic Games records September 2004, Athens
100m freestyle 1:09.67
400m freestyle 5:07.88
