Neil Fachie: Refreshed champion drops thoughts of retiring after Tokyo Paralympics

Neil Fachie and pilot Matt Rotherham are the current world champions and record holders

Neil Fachie has already realised his ambition of "taking disability sports to new levels" and heads to the Tokyo Paralympics warning opponents he has found "my love of cycling again".

At 37, the multiple world champion admits that, if the Games had not been delayed by a year, he would have been contemplating retiring after competing in what will be his fourth Paralympics.

But, now that the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham are just a year away, the Scot says "it would be pretty hard to turn that one down".

In a new BBC Scotland documentary, In Tandem: The Neil Fachie Story, he reveals the Covid-19 lockdown rekindled his enthusiasm for the sport while former world champions Sir Chris Hoy and Craig MacLean are among the cycling luminaries who laud their compatriot's achievements in a unique journey to the top.

Sporting life in sight

Athletics was Neil Fachie's first love

Born and brought up in a suburb of Aberdeen, Fachie has been involved in sport since "a fairly quiet kid who was never good at making friends" was given an avenue to express himself and encouraged to use up his boundless energy by a mum "determined for me to just get out of the house".

He admits the organisers of an early sports camp were fortunate he "didn't take anyone's eye out" when given a shot at fencing considering "I couldn't see very well".

There was the rub. Fachie has inherited retinitis pigmentosa, commonly known as tunnel vision, which restricts peripheral images so much that it leaves someone with a view similar to "looking down a tube with a pair of sunglasses on".

What sight remains commonly deteriorates through time and "I face the realistic probability that, at some point in my life, I will go completely blind". There is no cure or treatment.

Blues follows Bolt to Beijing

Neil Fachie had dreams of being the Paralympics' Usain Bolt in 2008

Fachie, though, found his feet, literally, in athletics, where "the freedom and simplicity to just run as fast as you can was incredible". It was a feeling he would later also experience in cycling, but first he had to taste the pain of relative failure.

His sprinting having "all just come together" at final qualifying, the diminutive 24-year-old headed to the Beijing Paralympics in 2008 with the "mind blowing" thought of running on the same track as Usain Bolt, only for his sporting world to fall apart after failing to qualify from the heats.

Feelings of "letting my family down" were followed by a call from UK Athletics to tell him "we don't think you've got the potential to make it" to the 2012 London Paralympics.

The former university physics student was plunged into a form of "mourning" for his sporting career while spending 10 hours per day playing computer games and signing on at the job centre.

Working in tandem

Neil Fachie and Barney Storey won gold at the London 2012 Paralympics

A men's tandem event was dropped at the Olympics in the early 1970s, but for the Paralympic movement it represented a perfect opportunity to combine able and non able-bodied athletes.

Having woken up "one morning" determined to find his way to London 2012, Fachie's research into "every sport for athletes with a visual impairment" led him to a cycling taster session at Manchester Velodrome, by chance sitting beside Hoy.

The six-time Olympic gold medallist told him that MacLean had just switched from the Olympic to the Paralympic team as a pilot and trials were being held for a visually impaired partner. The rest is history.

With Barney Storey as Fachie's pilot, the pair took gold in the kilo and sprint at the 2009 Para-Cycling Track World Championships, setting a new world record in the former.

Making London after all, they took gold and silver - and, despite regular changes of pilot, Fachie has now amassed 12 more world championship golds and two each at the 2014 and 2018 Commonwealth Games.

However, having been beaten in the 2016 time trial final by the Dutch duo in Rio, Fachie - despite his successes since 2009 already being unparalleled in world cycling - set himself a goal of regaining gold in Tokyo.

Lockdown release from rut

Lora and Neil Fachie have trained together during lockdown

In January 2020, Fachie and 26-year-old Englishman Matt Rotherham, the current world record holders, regained the world title at one kilometre to secure their place at the Tokyo Paralympics, only for the pandemic to soon close in.

"I was sort of ticking the boxes, making sure we were getting on the plane to Tokyo, and I think it had just become a bit stale, we were doing the same things day in day out - I had been doing it for a decade-plus," Fachie says.

He and wife Lora, herself a Paralympic gold medallist, "had to approach training in a different way".

"I started doing a lot of endurance training along with Lora," Fachie says. "She was, of course, beating me as she always does on endurance stuff and I got really fit. But, most importantly, I really enjoyed riding my bike again.

"I just felt like a new athlete and I'm in a much better position than I was physically prior to to lockdown starting. We've got much quicker on the bike as a result."

Of course, not having competed against their opponents for 18 months, it remains a journey into the unknown but one where "I would be disappointed not to win gold".

No matter what happens in Tokyo, with Birmingham 2022, the 2023 Track Cycling World Championships in 2023 in Glasgow and Paris Paralympics 2024 to come, "the lure is pretty high just to stick around".

Watch In Tandem: The Neil Fachie Story on BBC Scotland at 21:00 BST on Friday 27 August.