PARIS, Sept 1 — Jonnie Peacock’s mother Linda was once told to say goodbye to her son but 26 years later he is arguably still the poster boy for Paralympic sprinting and a contender to regain his 100 metres crown in Paris.
It has been quite a journey to becoming the vibrant, charismatic and humorous 31-year-old who spoke of being no longer “the hunted but the hunter” this week and questioned whether his rivals had the nerve to handle the pressure in a packed stadium.
Peacock won his first Paralympic title aged just 19 on home soil in front of a rapturous crowd at the Olympic Stadium in London in 2012. He repeated that feat in Rio four years later before taking bronze at the Covid-delayed 2021 Tokyo Games, a result which still rankles.
He begins his quest to rectify that blip in Sunday’s heats of the T64 100m at the Stade de France.
Such stellar achievements were an unlikely scenario when aged just five he contracted meningitis and was taken to hospital by his mum.
“They were putting lines into him everywhere,” she told Cambridge News in 2017 when Jonnie was appearing in the hit BBC series Strictly Come Dancing.
“They said: ‘If you have anything to say to him you have to say it now, because we are going to put him into a coma — that’s the only way his body can fight’.
“So I went round, right next to his head, and I was stroking his hair, his lovely blond hair.
“He was so delirious, he just said ‘Ow’, And I said, ‘That’s right darling, you fight, you stop them doing that’. Because I thought if he goes down feisty, he might have a chance to fight it.”
Ultimately he lived but Per Hall, the surgeon, had to amputate his lower right leg, something which initially cast a pall over Peacock and his mother’s relationship.
“When he came out of theatre after the amputation still groggy on anaesthetic, he temporarily blamed me, shouting: ‘You gave me the wrong Calpol,’ then blanked me,” she told the Guardian in 2015.
“He wouldn’t let me hold him, be near him or even look at him.
“It was an unbearably heartbreaking, lonely feeling.
“Then something changed overnight and he just wanted me close to him. But that moment of rejection was indescribably painful.”
‘One of the lucky people’
Peacock — whose role model is Britain’s 2008 Paralympic bronze medallist John McFall, who has been selected to become the first ever ‘parastronaut’ — is generous in his praise for his mum and pays tribute to the role she has played in his success.
“The resilience she helped instil in me has been invaluable in my athletics,” he told the Guardian in 2015.
“I can speak to her about literally anything and I know she feels the same.
“She’s followed my career from day one and sacrificed so much ferrying me to events and training.”
Not all went smoothly between them as he adapted to his new way of life, although being restricted to a bedroom on the ground floor did not stop him climbing the banisters dressed as Spiderman.
“She tried to make my life as normal as possible and never let me get away with anything,” he said.
“I used to kick my prosthetic leg off to get out of doing the washing up and she’d just pull up a chair and go, ‘There, do it on that.’”
Peacock, who has three older sisters, has treated his disability with remarkable sangfroid.
“I’ve never really thought of myself as any different,” he said in 2012.
“I’ve never thought ‘Oh, we’ve got football today, that’s going to be tricky with my leg’ — I’ve thought ‘Oh, we’ve got football’.”
He has, though, not forgotten the illness that came close to killing him and is promoting a campaign called Tackle Meningitis.
“There’s two ways to look at me — you can say I’m one of the unlucky ones in three that has long-term effects because of meningitis, I’m an amputee,” he told the BBC in June.
“Or you could say I’m one of the lucky people that managed to survive it. Not everyone is so lucky.” — AFP
