Men themselves have wondered

What they see in me.

They try so much

But they can’t touch

My inner mystery.

When I try to show them,

They say they still can’t see.

I say,

It’s in the arch of my back

The sun of my smile,

The ride of my breasts,

The grace of my style.

I am a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

— Maya Angelou, ‘Phenomenal Woman’

You are James Haskell. It is Saturday, February 2, 2008, the morning of your third cap for England. You open your eyes at 8am in a big double room of the Chiswick Moran Hotel. There is one thought in your head. Is it the magic of Shaun Edwards and what he might do with Wales? No. Is it love for your beautiful girlfriend Felicia, who is lying alongside? No. Is it the excitement of your new column starting today in The Guardian? No. You’re thinking about Margot.

You are Danny Cipriani. It is Saturday, March 15, 2008, the morning of your first start for England. You open your eyes at 4am in a big double room of the Chiswick Moran Hotel. There is one thought in your head. Is it your clash with Ronan O’Gara? No. Is it concern for Anne, your hard-working mother? No. Is it fear of another sting from the News of the World? No. You’re thinking about Margot.

She’s a woman, phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that’s her. And she knows it. It is the end of the interview and I’m thanking her for the 13,391 words she has bequeathed to my tape recorder. “One thing you can guarantee in an interview with Margot Wells,” she smiles, “is that you will never get monosyllabic answers.”

Quite.

The questions have been mostly about speed, the enduring passion which has shaped her life. The speed that brought her from a small mining village in Fife to a job teaching physical education in Edinburgh; the speed that saw her compete for Scotland at the 1978 Commonwealth Games; the speed that made her the star of the Moscow Olympics; the speed that has made her the waking thought of Haskell and Cipriani.

“I have always been fascinated by pace,” she says. “\ I nearly drove my dad nuts because I wanted to know why I could run faster than everybody else. He said, ‘Oh, your legs are longer’. I’d say, ‘But surely if my legs were shorter they would go faster?’ He’d go, ‘Well, you were born like that’. I’d say, ‘Why was I born like that?’ He couldn’t tell me. He kept just chivvying me along.”

She was Margot Wilkie from Kelty then, a champion Highland dancer and the fastest 17-year-old girl in Scotland. But not for long. She left for Edinburgh to study PE. She abandoned running for netball. She fell head-over-heels in love at a disco one night and married the Scottish indoor long jump champion. It was 1974. She was 21.

Life as Mrs Allan Wells revolved around running. His running. “He used to say to me, ‘I can see you on a Friday night or a Sunday afternoon because the other days I am training’. I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. If I am standing here at the track I may as well train’.”

She started training again, and winning again, and pondering an old conundrum. She called her dad one day, breathless with excitement. “Dad, do you remember I used to ask you why I could run faster?” She was beginning to work it out.

“I just had this thirst to know why,” she explains. “If you watch a race, you see a race. If I watch a race I see arms, legs, body positions, feet, everything. So, on the way home Allan would say to me, ‘What was my pick-up like in the third set?’ And I could tell him. ‘What was my knee-lift like?’ And I could tell him.”

In 1978, they travelled to Edmonton together for the Commonwealth Games. Allan was transforming himself from a jumper to a sprinter and would return with two gold medals. Margot was transforming herself from a sprinter to a coach and would underperform. “I should have made the final of the 200,” she says, “but I was too worried about Allan. I had the ability to be world class, but I wasn’t world class. I wasn’t born with a sprinter’s head. You can make the body. You cannot buy the head. I have a coach’s head.”

The Moscow Olympics loomed; Margot should have made the team but her inner coach was taking over and she shelved her personal ambition and joined her husband’s support team. “I got more pleasure watching him run than running myself,” she says. “His dream became my dream. In fact, I wanted it more for him than he wanted it for himself.”

His quest to become the fastest man in the world consumed them. “The intensity for me was, at 28, you are only going to get one shot at this. Before you go you think any medal will do, but when you get there, and you have the chance of winning the gold medal, that’s the only one you want.”

The build-up to the 100m final was the most stressful of her life. “When he left to go to the actual track I just fell to bits completely. I remember sitting in the loo, crying my eyes out, praying to anybody that would listen, \ to win this gold medal. Shallow though it may seem I did say that, ‘Please, if I can have one wish let it be this’.”

Her wish was granted, but not quite in the way she had imagined. Allan Wells did indeed become the first British sprinter since 1924 to win the 100m gold at the Olympics. But it was Margot who proved the star of the Games. A BBC film crew had put a camera on her for the final and we watched, enthralled, as she screamed and wailed like a tortured animal: “COMOAAN ALLAN!” It was a performance matched only by the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally; the purest ode to love and commitment the Games had ever seen. Margot was a household name. Was it love? She hadn’t married Allan Wells to win an Olympic medal. How did it affect the chemistry of their relationship?

“Terrible,” she says. “As a married relationship, it \ is the worst thing anybody could ever do. Because, he just takes… you become secondary.

‘I want to go to the cinema.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘I want to go for a meal.’

‘No, we are not going.’

‘So and so is getting married; can we go?’

‘No.’

“You know, he completely… it is not a healthy relationship. Luckily we both had full-time jobs or I think I would have killed him. My PE department \ were absolutely superb. They allowed me to be normal. That was my outlet. That was where I was Margot Wells. We had a different relationship at home and at the track; we were not husband and wife on the track but it was difficult to switch, or to learn to switch. So looking back at it I wish I’d kept a piece of me.”

“How many years have you been married now?” I ask. “Thirty-four in June,” she says.

“So it hasn’t hurt you,” I suggest.

“Well, I think it did,” she says. “I had to make a lot of changes… well, not changes, but when the kids came that changed the balance to a certain degree. I mean, Allan only ran for \ three years. Zoe was born in 1985. Simon was born in 1987. So then I could just be mum. But it’s like any marriage… things change in 34 years. It would be weird if they didn’t.”

I quote her an extract from an interview her husband gave two years ago. “He was asked if he would have gone on to have the career that he had had without you. I don’t know if you remember what he said.”

“No, I don’t,” she says.

“He said, ‘What can I say? At times, in a good way, she was a gofer. But that was a job I didn’t take lightly. She played a major part in being my eyes’. It didn’t read like a huge endorsement of you as a coach. I thought ‘gofer’ seems a bit harsh.”

“Well,” she smiles, “maybe we had had a row the night before, I don’t know. What you have to realise is that at the time it wasn’t just me. There was a team of people. Now there is just me… Allan’s role was to run. I took care of everything else. He never answered the phone. He never went shopping. We never had a shower at the track. We arrived at the track, we trained, we went home.”

“You described him once as the most selfish person ever,” I observe.

“He is narcissistic — and you have to be,” she says. “I will tell you a laugh. At the Jesse Owens memorial, they had 10 or 12 of the last Olympic 100m champions, and all the wives were arguing whose husband was more selfish than the other. But it is beyond selfishness. It is narcissism. And it has to be. That’s the head that you are born with. I have a daughter born with the same head. She wasn’t brought up like that. She was brought up totally different to her father, \ exactly the same.”

Dr Ledingham, who was still in general practice in Edinburgh in 1995, has admitted supplying the steroid Stromba to at least half-a-dozen top internationals, including Drew McMaster, a member of Scotland’s gold-medal winning 4x100m relay squad at the 1978 Commonwealth Games. “What I was doing it for was that I knew bloody well that the bloke standing next to you in the blocks was taking the stuff,” the doctor told McMaster.

— Running Scared: How Athletics lost its innocence

THE conversation has turned to the state of modern athletics and its tarnishing by doping. “It hasn’t happened overnight,” I suggest. “What’s your take on how it has evolved?”

“Unless somebody’s caught in a drug test, then you assume he’s clean,” she says. “That’s fair. Everyone says ‘All athletes take drugs’. I say ‘Well, that wasn’t my experience’. \ somebody being caught was a shock. It wasn’t a regular occurrence. Recently, maybe the athletes just got too clever. Or the chemist got too clever. I have not been in it so I don’t know. I just think athletics is being tarred by ‘they-all-do-it’, and I don’t think that is fair. You can do it by hard work. It just takes longer.”

“What about the problem in the 1980s? Were you aware of it?”

“Well, you had to be. But you didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t a topic of conversation unless somebody got caught and then you talked about it.”

“You competed against the East Germans?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you aware of it with them?”

“No . . . I mean, they didn’t sit at the table at the Olympics and have a pile of drugs on the table. And even if they did have, I would have assumed they were vitamins. You had to be prepared to beat everybody who was there on what you assumed \ . . . I mean we had speedball.”

“Speedball?”

“Yeah, we trained with \ speedball. Did it give us an extra edge? Yes. Was that illegal? No. They’ll be making training illegal soon because it makes you better! All you can do is go as fast as you can and hope you get there first.”

“What about David Jenkins and Drew McMaster?” I ask. “They raced with Allan on the 1978 relay team \. Both have confessed to using steroids.”

“Drew McMaster was Scotland’s leading sprinter before Allan came along,” she says. “I think he saw us with an athletic lifestyle that he felt could have been his and so . . . I don’t know, maybe he thought if he took the drugs it would be a shortcut. You can’t influence what somebody else does . . . \ maybe, in a funny sort of way, we did.”

“What do you mean by athletic lifestyle?”

“Well, us flying around, going to major meetings, Allan winning medals. The press wanting to talk to Allan, not him — that kind of athletic lifestyle. So whether it was that, I don’t know.”

“And Jenkins?”

“David was the most naturally talented athlete. I mean, he won the Europeans at 19, as did Roger Black. When Allan won the Olympics, he \ left a note on the bed which said ‘The Big One’.”

“The big one?”

“The gold medal. You won The Big One. Maybe that was his motive. He was a phenomenal athlete but he never won the Olympics. So whether it was the push to try and make the difference between being nearly there and winning it, I don’t know.”

“Did you have any involvement with Jimmy Ledingham? Did you know him?”

“He was a friend of ours because he was the Scottish team doctor. He was the Olympic team doctor. He lived in Edinburgh. And at one point we were training in his garage because we didn’t have any facilities to hit the speedball. So, yes we did.”

“He was an accomplice to McMaster. Why wasn’t he proposing the same stuff to Allan?”

“Because we never asked him to, plain and simple. I didn’t know that McMaster had asked him. He didn’t tell us he had asked him. He was a doctor.”

“What was your response when McMaster confessed?”

“McMaster caused us a lot of problems; to be honest with you, I didn’t care. I thought, ‘It’s your life, your decision’.”

“When you say he caused you problems?”

“Yeah, he did in that in order for him to get publicity he would say things about us. At the time it drove me insane because I had enough problems trying to get us sorted. I didn’t need this angst.”

“Since then we’ve had Ben Johnson and Linford Christie and a succession of tarnished champions,” I observe. “What’s your opinion on the Dwain Chambers controversy?”

“This is going to sound a bit strange,” she says, “but unless it affects my life, I don’t care. My beef about it is that they keep changing the rules. Carl Myerscough \ is allowed to compete for Britain and nobody gives a monkey’s chuff. What is different about Dwain Chambers? Is the law different for a sprinter or for a shot-putter?”

“That’s a fair point,” I concur. “So should the British Olympic Association bring Chambers on board for Beijing?”

“I think they \ should not be allowed to compete in the Olympics.”

“But if there are different standards being applied to Myerscough and Chambers,” I say, “then surely there is also different standards being applied to Linford Christie \ and Chambers?”

“Yes, there is,” she agrees.

“And that’s not right, is it?” I suggest.

“That’s not right, no. Dwain shot himself in the foot with that interview \. I think that’s what has turned everybody against him. If he had come out and said, ‘Look, I am really, really sorry, I have misled everybody, I have not given kids an honest vision of what you have to do to be the best’, people might have reacted to him differently.”

“You can’t tackle what you can’t catch.”

— The Tao of Margot Wells

HER MOBILE phone rings. It’s Haskell. The 23-year-old Wasps flanker is one of the toughest nuts in rugby. But not with Margot. Margot slaps him around. “Be quick, I’m in an interview,” she snaps. “I got your text but the answer is I don’t know.” What’s the secret you wonder? How has this fragrant but prickly 55-year-old become such a hit with the boys?

It started in 1981. One year after their triumphant return to Edinburgh in an open-top bus, they couldn’t shake the sense that attitudes had changed. “I remember coming out of Meadowbank \ once,” she says, “and going like this \. Allan said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m picking the knives out of my back’. Scots are a nation of self-destruct. We like you to get there, but once you get there, we like to chip away at your image.”

They moved south to Guildford and worked at Surrey University. Zoe and Simon were born. Allan retired from athletics. A new phase of life had begun. “Allan stepped out of the limelight when he stopped running. Looking back on it, maybe I should have had an input and said, ‘Maybe you should do this’. But it was his decision. He learnt to play golf and started doing charity golf games. I was happy just being mum.

“And then in 1988 London Scottish asked Allan if he would work with the team to make them faster. He was also working with the Parachute Regiment bobsleigh team. He left me with the rugby when he was doing the bobsleighs and then it just became… I was doing it more than he was doing it.”

She spent three years working with London Scottish and decided she had had enough. The kids needed her time. She had a good job teaching. She came home and put her stopwatch away but the phone kept ringing. London Scottish: ‘We’ve a great full-back here Margot, but he’s not quick enough’. Surrey University: ‘We’ve had Dan Luger and Dominic Chapman in and they want to do some sprint work’.

Word spread. Damian Cronin brought Derek White. Kenny Logan brought Andy Gomarsall and Alex King. “It just evolved,” she says.

“Okay, so I’m Danny Cipriani,” I announce. “What is Margot Wells going to do for me?”

“Fuel your talent,” she says.

“How do you do that?”

“In a step-by-step manner. The first thing I do is teach him how to run properly. By doing that he immediately runs faster. And then I look at his body and say, ‘Right, where are all the weaknesses?’ And then I go about fixing them. Bad spelling jumps out to some people; bad bodies jump out to me. It’s a system, a step-by-step system to follow.”

“What about supplements?” I ask.

“Yeah, you need supplements.”

“Do you give them?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of stuff? Because it’s obviously a dodgy area. I’d imagine you are hyper-conscious of that?”

“Yes, you are. But at the end of the day… The body is a balanced instrument, right? Whether it be muscles, whether it be bones, whether it be electrolytes, whether it be vitamins, it lives in a balanced world… I mean there’s this huge thing about creatine… creatine has been found guilty of god knows how many things and all it does is allow you to train harder and recover quicker.

“It’s the reason you don’t need steroids. It doesn’t do a lot of the things that steroids are reported to do but it does a lot. So, it’s people’s ignorance about vitamins and energy sources that causes the problems. Not the actual supplements themselves.”

“You obviously have to be careful?” I suggest.

“Yes,” she agrees.

“Because the worst thing that could happen to you is if Cipriani or one of the guys…”

“Cipriani has been drug-tested loads of times,” she interrupts.

“Yes, and I’m not suggesting that \. But that whole area is a minefield?”

“Yes it is,” she agrees. “It’s a huge problem.”

“Is what you’ve said an endorsement of creatine?”

“I use it.”

“You use it?”

“Yeah. I recommend my daughter takes it.”

“But surely sport, in its purest sense, shouldn’t be about that?”

A 10-minute argument ensues on the ills of modern sport.

“What about this perception of you as a dragon lady?” I ask, after peace is restored.

“It’s not really true,” she says. “In fact, a pressman yesterday, who I coached at London Scottish, said, ‘Can I tell people you’re just a giant pussycat?’ I said, ‘Don’t you dare’, because it makes my life easier. I get 45 minutes, twice a week, to make a difference to these guys. I haven’t time for them to turn up late or muck about. Sport is a discipline. What you learn on the training field is what you take into the match. I was having a go at my lot yesterday for mucking about in a sprint session…”

“Who are ‘my lot’?” I interrupt.

“My guys, the Ciprianis and the Sackeys and the Waldoucks. I said, ‘Not when you are trying to sprint. Not in my training session’. I would say, ‘If I’m talking, you’re shutting up’. We do have a laugh and a joke after it and stuff but if I am on the track, I ain’t messing about.”

The messing stops. The work begins. Phenomenal.

Margot Wells: life is a sprint

- Margot Wells was born in Fife in 1957 and is the wife of 1980 Olympic 100m champion Allan, whom she also coached

- She won the Scottish 100m championship four times in succession, from 1977-80

- Now based in Guildford, she is a fitness coach who specialises in speed and power

- Paul Sackey, of Wasps, approached Wells because he felt he had lost some of his zip. After paying Wells £400 a month for six years, he secured his place in the England team at the Rugby World Cup last year, and was quick to credit Wells for the part she has played in turning him into an international rugby player, with 15 caps to his name - James Haskell, and Dominic Waldouck and Danny Cipriani have also paid tribute to the help she has given them

- She looks after 28 rugby players and says that she is unable to take anybody else on board

- Wells has also worked with swimmers and fencers and coached a variety of team sports, including hockey