“You could say I’ve had my fair share of bad luck,” Ali Jawad suggests on a quiet and reflective night in Rio de Janeiro, “but, actually, I love having no legs. For me that’s normal. I never considered myself as disabled until I got Crohn’s disease eight years ago. I like to think that in 20 years I will look back and say: ‘You know what? I’ve become a far better person – in the way I live, after all I’ve been through. You need these situations to test how strong you are.”
The 27-year-old British powerlifter, who will attempt to win a Paralympic medal this Friday in Rio, has endured adversity throughout his tumultuous life. When he was born without legs in Lebanon in 1989 his father was asked by a doctor whether they should end his apparently doomed life. Lebanon was then ravaged by war, and there seemed no hope for a legless infant.
His parents escaped with their children to Britain where, growing up in Tottenham, north London, little Ali showed the same tenacity. His sporting talent was soon evident in judo classes – and when he was enticed into a gym his immense upper body strength became obvious.
Jawad emerged as an impressive force on the junior powerlifting circuit and, aged 19, he qualified for the 2008 Paralympic Games. The night before he was due to compete in Beijing, Crohn’s disease took its first, terrible hold of him. He would be almost as unlucky four years later when, at London 2012, his certainty that he had won a silver medal was curdled by controversy and he ended up with nothing. It seems incredible that, from a point of “hating” his sport and his life, with Crohn’s controlling him, Jawad would become a world champion in 2014.
He is now in Rio and, just before we move deeper into the darker corners of his story, Jawad talks serenely. “When I first started lifting I was loud and aggressive – but I’ve learned to channel that aggression into a sense of calm. I know what I’m doing. I’m experienced. I just need to execute under pressure. When I was young it wasn’t focused. Now I have this calm, quiet, channelled aggression – so I’ve changed a lot these last two Games.
“On Friday, I will remind myself I am in the best place I’ve ever been in my career. I’m the most relaxed I’ve ever been going into a Paralympic Games. I’ve done the work and I know that if I perform to my best I should come away with something. Eight years ago, Beijing was different. I wasn’t aiming for a medal. I was only really there for experience because I was so young. I was just very happy and excited to be there. But training was incredible and two days before the Games I lifted a weight which would have actually won me bronze.
“But I was unlucky, I got sick 24 hours before my competition. I didn’t realise it was the start of Crohn’s. I just thought I’d got a bug so I went out and lifted the next day. I finished ninth. I had no idea how serious it was until I got back home and felt really sick. I was collapsing because of the pain. I was seeing blood in the toilet. I was really fatigued. I couldn’t get out of bed. I lost 25kg in eight weeks. I knew then something was seriously wrong.”
Had he begun to fear cancer? “Exactly,” Jawad says softly. “That’s what they thought. I was being checked for loads of cancers and that got really scary. Luckily, it wasn’t. It was Crohn’s – and for me Crohn’s disease meant nothing. I just thought I’d take a pill and be better. But the doctor said this is an incurable life-long disease – and it is a disease that can hit you at any time. He explained that no Crohn’s sufferer had ever won a medal at the Olympics or the Paralympics. I was so ill that I retired for six months.
“It was devastating. I was only 19 and I thought I was living the dream but to crash down like that affected me. I got really sick and I had an operation in 2010 to remove part of my intestines. It was life-threatening and I could have died. But I came through it and I knew I’d been given a second chance. So I had to embrace it. Obviously my friends and family weren’t happy I wanted to come back but London 2012 was only a couple of years away and I thought I could make it. So two weeks after the operation I went to the gym – which is mad.”
Jawad laughs incredulously at the memory. “At first it was very up and down. One day I am fine and happy and the next day I am depressed and in pain and sick. There was never any consistency. But, luckily, five months before London the training picked up. I got to the point where I had not only qualified but could go in as a dark horse for a medal.”
Competing in his home Paralympics, Jawad felt inspired. “I am British and so to represent my country in front of my friends and family was surreal. It was like a dream and I knew how hard I’d had to work to get back from being so ill – and that everyone had written me off. So just getting to London 2012 was a massive achievement.”
His parents were in the sold-out crowd at the ExCel Arena where Jawad’s name was chanted. “I think my mum and dad were the loudest people in the arena,” he chortles. “Six thousand people cheering and you could hear my dad above anyone else. I loved that. I perform better in front of big crowds so for me the louder the better.”
Jawad broke the European record and then beamed in jubilation after his last lift. He appeared to have lifted 189kg and to have secured silver but the judges ruled it out. His team management raised a protest against the ruling of a technical fault and the judges ordered a relift – even if his chances of success were ruined by the energy he had already expended. Jawad slipped down to a tie for third place. He felt even more crushed when he realised his Chinese rival would take bronze because he weighed slightly less than Jawad.
“That day nearly broke me because I’d had to fight so hard to get there. I was naive because I felt I was owed a little bit of luck and it turned out that I got the worst luck you could ever imagine. I was totally disillusioned. I had given up all my teenage years for lifting and I hated the sport and didn’t want to come back. I was depressed and caused myself to flare with Crohn’s. It wasn’t until December 2012 that I sat down with my team and they said: ‘Listen, in the last four years we’ve only trained eight months and for you to win a silver that got taken away is huge. Imagine what you could do with four years of being healthy.’ That made me realise I could go to Rio and hopefully redeem myself.”
London 2012 also made Jawad appreciate with fresh force how brave his parents had been in leaving Lebanon. “I never really heard the stories until I was 14. I just wondered what had happened and how we got here. I asked my dad and he said: ‘Yeah, we had to sacrifice a lot to get here. When you were born the doctor wanted to kill you off – he actually asked the question.’”
Jawad pauses as we imagine how his father must have felt in that moment – with a doctor wanting to terminate his son’s life just because he had no legs. “Disabled people back then were second-class citizens in Lebanon. My parents felt different, and even blessed I had been born. No matter my impairment and disability they wanted the best life possible for me. They knew they had to move away from Lebanon to give me a chance.
“But they never wanted to move because all our family are there. So they had to rebuild a life in a foreign county. They could hardly speak any English and didn’t have much money or education or qualifications for work. So for them to come over was a huge risk. Hopefully I’ve paid my parents back but for them to build a life in Britain and to raise me the way they’ve done is a credit to them. I get my mentality from them.”
That mentality meant that, in 2013, after committing himself to a strictly disciplined diet to control his Crohn’s, Jawad set a world record. A year later he became world champion. “Oh yeah,” he says huskily. “To be controversially denied silver in my home games and then, a year later, be No1 in the world was huge. That justified why I carried on. Being world champion was even sweeter. But I’m in much better shape now than I was for the [2014] world championships. So I should put in my best-ever performance in Rio.
“Friday is arguably the biggest day of my life but I need to treat it as another gym session – a glorified gym session. So I will be calm. It helps in a way that I don’t think I’m going to win the gold – because of my main rival [Egypt’s Sherif Othman who has won the past two Paralympic titles in the 56kg weight class and set a world record by lifting 210.5kg earlier this year].
“He is the Usain Bolt of our sport. I’ve known him 10 years now and he’s the most likable guy you could ever meet. It’s very hard to hate him! But I would love to come away with a medal this time.”
Jawad’s face has been plastered on posters in London’s underground and around supermarkets across Britain in the build-up to Rio. “I’ve had loads of messages from people back home saying they’ve seen me everywhere. I’m having to apologise to them. But it’s great. After 2012 we were put on the same page as Olympic athletes and we can build that momentum.”
Of course millions more have never even heard of Jawad or his compelling story. “When I was going to the airport to catch my flight to Rio the taxi driver said: ‘Where are you off to?’ I said ‘Brazil’ and he said: ‘Wow, what a holiday.’ I was thinking: ‘You haven’t seen the GB bags?’ But I didn’t tell him. I said: ‘Yeah, I’m going on holiday.’”
At least Jawad has an emotional holiday planned once the Paralympics are over. “It’s funny you should ask me about Lebanon because I’m going after Rio – for 10 days. It’s the first time I’ve been back in 15 years. I will see all my family again. Of course the power of social media means everyone in Lebanon can track my progress. They’re all very proud but they want me to get the medal because they think I deserve it. Hopefully I will come back happy this time.”
