Campbell's second chance lifeline

Ian Chadband13 April 2012

Darren Campbell went home the other week, back to the tough place which moulded the fighter in him. It was a trip which made him ponder how far he'd come on a long, hard journey and one which reminded him how he hadn't reached the finishing line quite yet.

As a BBC film crew trained the cameras on him while he stood gazing around the Racecourse estate in Sale, a bloke from one of the nearby flats emerged with his young daughter and asked him if she could shake him by the hand.

"It was only a little thing but it just made me feel so emotional, the thought that I'd done something to make the people in the very place where I grew up so proud," reflects Campbell.

"I'd come off the estate and I'd done well for myself and maybe I'd given some of them hope. Here was this little girl who wanted to shake my hand because perhaps one day she wanted to be like me.

"It felt very special and just made me think even more how I really wanted to do something so much at the Commonwealth Games for the people of Manchester. You know, I see it as the chance of a lifetime, I really do."

Campbell tells this tale breathlessly at 100mph. He is on a high like I've never seen before, bubbling and babbling like a condemned man who's just been pulled off death row.

As far as his athletics goes, that's exactly how he feels.

When he lines up in Sunday's 200m heats, he feels he'll be grasping at a "lifeline, a second chance to leave a mark on the sport". At the turn of the year, his chances of being here seemed non-existent. His European 100m triumph and Olympic 200m silver felt like prehistory and he'd missed the World Championships through injury. Now, he'd damaged his ankle so badly that he was effectively having to learn how to run again.

At home in Cardiff, his personal life was in turmoil too.

"I'd never been lower," he admits. Friends, like Nathan Blake, the Wolves striker, helped pull him through. "He was always there for me in the dark times. I remember him saying once, 'Look, Darren, you can either walk beside me or walk behind me. It's up to you.' I knew what he was saying; I thought 'I'm not going to walk behind anyone. I'm going to get back'.

Finally, after some false starts, he did. On the morning of the 100m at the European Championship trials a fortnight ago, Sue Barrett, his manager, saw him "bouncing around like Tigger" and at last recognised the irrepressible Campbell of old.

That afternoon, he confounded everyone by finishing second behind Mark Lewis-Francis to qualify to defend his title in Munich and everyone could see it was sheer bloody-minded determination which saw him through, the sort which makes him sometimes so resemble his mentor Linford Christie.

"Linford's always helped me remember that you don't do it for riches or anything else, but love.

"I could probably be earning a lot more playing football but what keeps pulling me back is that love.

"As for getting written off, well it's happened so often, I'm used to it, but Jamie Baulch once said to me, 'Darren, there's something special inside you. You can always come back, nothing can keep you down.' Perhaps he's right. There's something inside me that keeps burning and even when it was just a flickering flame, it wouldn't go out."

Nor was his Commonwealth Games dream ever extinguished. Volvic snapped him up to head their advertising push, but Campbell felt a bit peeved that the Games organisers had overlooked him as one of their athlete ambassadors to promote the event.

The England team, though, recognised his passion by choosing him as their flag-bearer at last night's opening ceremony. He could not have been more chuffed.

The 200m is a tough call with opponents like the evergreen Namibian Frankie Fredericks, his English conqueror at the trials, Marlon Devonish, and Welshman Christian Malcolm in the field, but Campbell looks to have timed his comeback ominously well. But, in truth, just being here at all is enough for him.

Manchester is still in his voice and in his heart.

When he was a kid on the Racecourse estate, some of his mates who were faster than him ran the wrong way into guns and drugs. Some of them died and he'd never forgotten them. But he'd sprinted the right way and could hardly believe that it would come to this.

"Yeah, me, a Manchester boy, in the Games in my own city. It doesn't get any better than that and if I come first or last, it won't matter as long as Manchester can see me and see how I gave everything of myself.

"So I'm going to go out, look around, smile and savour it for the rest of my life. When I look where I came from, and think of all the tears and the trauma and the sweat it took to get here, I'm going to know why it was all worth it."

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