Aileen McGlynn

The Paisley Daily Express for Friday 22nd November 2002
carried the following article about a Johnstone Wheeler.

She's McGlynn with a Shout to be a Cycling Champion!

A partially-sighted member of a local cycling club is training hard for a couple of prestigious championships.
Aileen McGlynn joins fellow Club members at Johnstone Wheelers every weekend for training runs of up to 30 miles in her bid to compete next year in the European Championships in Prague in the Czech Republic and the Paralympics - the equivalent of the Olympic Games - in Athens, in Greece in 2002.

Competitively

Although the 29-year-old trainee actuary has been cycling since she was eight years old - and toured Germany with a cycling club this year - she turned competitively to the sport just last year when she joined Johnstone Wheelers.
She took part in trials in Manchester during the summer and so impressed selectors with her performance she was invited to join the British team. During the trials she was assisted by her pilot, Barney Storey, who rides forward in the saddle with Aileen in the rear saddle.

Aileen will be accompanied by Barney if she is selected in the mixed category at Prague or Athens for any of her favourite events: the 250-metre sprint, the 1-kilometre race and the 3K pursuit.
She will have a woman pilot if she gets picked for the female tandem competitions.
"I am enjoying my training, which includes cycle sessions on the road, and gymnasium work involving circuits and weights," said Aileen who has been partially-sighted since birth.

Cornering

She can see well enough to cycle on the roads but requires a pilot for the fast track races which involve cornering tight corners at speed.
"I joined Johnstone Wheelers because I get a lot of support and encouragement from other members of the Club.   It is a good Club and my Dad, John, usually takes me to the Club Headquarters in Miller Street where our training sessions take place.   I particularly enjoy training on some of the local roads with long straights where you can get into a rhythm on the bike.
"I know there is a long way to go but I am quietly confident of being selected for the European Championships and, hopefully, the Paralympics."

This is an inside page of the combined Menu / Order of Ceremonies of the Sportrenfrewshire 21st Anniversary Dinner which took place in the Normandy Hotel, Renfrew, on 21st February 2003.
 
The page lists the young people of Renfrewshire and the disciplines in which they participated and excelled enough to be called forward to receive trophies as having been Sports Personalities of the Month.
 
If the picture is perhaps not clear enough to read, the red ellipse draws attention to our own Aileen McGlynn who received her award for cycling.
 
From a population as large as that of Renfrewshire's, for a Johnstone Wheeler member to be highlighted in this fashion is a tremendous compliment to the Club and underlines in the clearest possible fashion Aileen's progress and prowess in our sport.
 
Well done, Aileen, well done!
 

Aileen’s Athens Dream

Aileen McGlynn’s own account of her 2004 Paralympics

September 18th turned out to be the best day of my life, so far. From that day on my life has changed dramatically!
 
After a patchy night's sleep, the mood at the breakfast table was rather subdued, with other team members in their own world, thinking about what lay ahead. I felt reasonably calm but as the time drew nearer for us to catch the bus to the velodrome, I could feel my heart starting to race.
 
We had done a dress rehearsal of our warm-up at the velodrome a few days beforehand, so I knew what to expect. Marshall Thomas, our coach, kept us right on our timing and whether the events were running to schedule, so all I had to do after my warm-up was to sit back and stay calm!
 
We had practised our standing starts loads of times on my fortnightly trips to Manchester Velodrome and it was a case of making a good start, getting on top of the gear and keeping the cadence going for four laps! I kept saying to myself “It’s only 4 laps, one and a bit minutes out of your life!”
 
We were off 4th out of the 13 tandems competing in the 1km TT and I had originally thought that going off fourth wasn't to our advantage. However, it turned out for the better!
 
Marshall positioned our tandem on the start line and we got on and clipped our feet into the pedals. The clock counts down from one minute once you have your feet clipped in. The buzzer sounds at 10 seconds to go and then the buzzer sounds on each second from 5 to 1. At zero, we were off! We got a really good start and got on top of the gear really quickly, after half a lap we sat down and drove through the pedals. Each time we came around past the start/finish line, Marshall shouted out the laps to go.
 
Our first lap was the fastest we had ever ridden, taking nearly a second off our previous best time and this is really what won the race for us because we were so far in front of the rest, on our first lap.
 
Our second lap was even faster and we maintained it in our third lap but then we started to die off a bit in our final lap as the lactate acid built up in our legs. However, we drove through the pain, and finally we crossed the finish line. I suddenly felt a rush of pain to my head as though someone had hit me with a baseball bat. My eyes went blurry and my whole body was in agony! I was just glad I wasn't steering the tandem!
 
We rode around the track and I asked Ellen how we had done. She looked up at the score board and saw the 1.11.16 but wasn't sure at first if that was our time or they were showing the World Record. It wasn't until we rode past it again that she realised that we had in fact broken the World Record and our time was the new World Record. It was a fantastic feeling to know that we had gone out and done a personal best and for that to have broken the World Record of 1.11.90 by nearly 8 tenths of a second.
 
It was nerve-wracking waiting for each competitor to do their ride. I couldn't watch the others as they raced but Ellen gave me a running commentary of each lap on whether they were up or down on our times.
With only 2 competitors remaining, we knew that we had a least won the bronze!
The pressure for us really came when the USA rode last, as they were the best in the world. It wasn't until they crossed the finish line with a time of 1.11.221, only 6 hundredths of a second behind us, that we could relax.
We were totally ecstatic and couldn't believe it had really happened. We were now officially Gold Medal winners in the Paralympic Games. The first Gold medal of the GB team, the first ever Gold medallists for either men or women in cycling at the Paralympic Games for GB and the first women ever to win Gold in cycling for GB in either the Olympics or the Paralympics. So it was a fantastic achievement for us!
Once we had calmed down a bit, we received our medals. It was a surreal moment standing on the podium receiving my Gold Medal.
We were then escorted over to the crowd and it was only then that I noticed the Scottish flags that my family and friends were draping over the barrier. It was fantastic to know that my family had been there to see me win!
We were then escorted to a press conference and then doping control. Whilst waiting at doping control, my mother had somehow persuaded the officials to allow her down to doping control to give me a hug, which was fantastic, as I didn't get a chance to meet up with my family at any other time that day.
We were then asked to go to the BBC studios to do a live interview on Grandstand. Then followed a series of other radio interviews and then another TV interview. It was not the best post race recovery, but it was a fantastic experience.
The congratulations continued when we eventually arrived back at the athlete village around 8pm. However, we had a qualifying flying 200m to do the next morning for the Sprint, so there was no celebrating that night, just a quick massage and bed by 11pm.
The next day we qualified 3rd fastest for the Sprint, followed a day later by a hard fought victory against the USA in the semi-finals. However, all the exertion over the previous three days had taken its toll and we had to settle for Silver.

All-in-all, the Paralympic Games was a fantastic experience and for it to have been our first international competition and to come away with a Gold Medal and Silver Medal out of the two events we entered was awesome and something I will cherish for the rest of my life.
 
Since I returned home, I have been invited to Jack McConnell’s Bute House and the opening of the Scottish Parliament building where I met, amongst others, the Queen, Sean Connery, Gavin Hastings and Fred McAuley. I also attended the Parade of Medallists in London, which was fantastic.
 

I was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, who remembered me from the opening of the Scottish Parliament building (once seen, never forgotten!) and I have been invited to Downing Street on 29th November. I also picked up the Glasgow Disabled Athlete Award for 2004 at the Radisson Hotel last weekend, so it has been a life changing experience for me.
In between all this I am back doing my day job as an actuarial trainee for Hymans Robertson. I have also resumed training for the Paralympic World Cup and the European Championships next year and hoping to make it to Beijing in four years time!

Cycle Hero Aileen Will Never Forget Gold Glory in Athens

"September 18th turned out to be the best day of my life, so far. From that day on my life has changed dramatically!"
THERE are only nine days left to nominate candidates for Glasgow's Sports Person of the Year awards, which honour established stars, rising names and grassroots heroes.   One of the key awards is the Glasgow Disabled Athlete of the Year, which cyclist Aileen McGlynn won in 2004.
The Evening Times is once again the media partner for the awards. The deadline for nominations is 12th of August.
Aileen had double success at the Paralympics in Athens last year - and aims to take part in the Beijing event in 2008.
She talked to RUSSELL LEADBETTER, Sports Correspondent of the Glasgow "Evening Times".
 

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FOR as long as she lives, Aileen McGlynn will never forget her double Paralympic glory in the heat of Athens last year.  The partially-sighted 32-year-old, partnered by her sighted pilot, Ellen Hunter, surged to victory in the 1K tandem time trial on the Games' opening day.   Their time of one minute 11.160 eclipsed the existing world record by more than three-quarters of a second.   They were the team's first gold medallists in Paralympic cycling - and became the first women to win cycling gold for Britain, either in the Olympics or the Paralympics.   No wonder Aileen, from Cardonald, describes it as the greatest day of her life.

"You just go out and give it your all, and hope it's enough," she said. "We had to wait for at least 15 minutes after our turn to learn whether we'd won the medal. The wait was more than worth it in the end, though. We were absolutely ecstatic."
Aileen and Ellen went on to take the silver in the tandem sprint event.
"To win two medals in our first international competition was incredible. It was something I'll remember for as long as I live. I also hope that that success has shown that there are opportunities for disabled sportspeople out there."

Her achievement was rewarded with the high-profile Disabled Athlete of the Year title at the Glasgow Sports Person of the Year awards dinner last November. "I didn't expect to win but I thought I had a good shout at least," Aileen said.   "There were a lot of good athletes there that night, and it was really good to be acknowledged."
Aileen's award was just part of the post-Athens recognition that was showered on her - she was invited to attend the opening of the Scottish Parliament in October, where she chatted with the Queen and Sir Sean Connery.

Aileen, a former pupil at Uddingston Grammar, was born partially sighted. She has 10% vision in one eye and 6% in the other.   She's been in love with cycling since she was eight years old.   "I can be quite persuasive. I got my parents to buy me a bike when I was a child," she said.   But it wasn't until she was 18, and had started studying at Strathclyde University, that she finally joined a cycling club, and had more time to take part in competitions and in time trials.   "I wanted to see what was out there for disabled cyclists, and to take cycling as far as I possibly could," she says.

A few years ago, she and her then cycle partner, Barney Storey, broke the mixed tandem world record. They were told that they had gold-winning potential.   It was only about four years ago, while browsing on the internet, that Aileen discovered that there was Paralympic cycling for the visually impaired "I wish I'd known years ago," she says.

Her two-year-old partnership with Ellen, from Wales, has proved consistently successful - but Ellen has had to overcome the odds, too.   She was left with a broken back after a cycling accident in the summer of 2003, and a consultant told her that she would never ride again. She has proved the experts wrong.  

Prior to the recent Visa Paralympic World Cup in Manchester, Aileen suffered an accident in Glasgow when her foot slipped off the pedal and she went over the handlebars.   She almost broke her collar-bone, and needed a few head stitches.   "It's not going to stop me competing," she said shortly afterwards. "I'm just going to block out the pain."   She was true to her word, and she and Ellen were again in top form, winning two golds.

Aileen loves cycling, even if a shortage of female rivals dictates that she and Ellen often have to compete against male or mixed teams.   "We don't fare so well against them because basically they're a lot stronger, but in a handicapped race in Newcastle-under-Lyme recently we finished before everyone else.   There aren't too many female teams in Britain. Apart from one or two names, it's hard to get a good female sprinter, and a good sighted pilot on a tandem."
She works out in the gym three nights a week and rides between 40 and 50 miles on the tandem with the Johnstone Wheelers every Sunday. Once a fortnight she trains at a cycle track in Manchester. Away from the track, Aileen is in training with the Glasgow firm Hymans Robertson to become an actuary.

GB cycling team coach Marshall Thomas said: "Aileen trains and acts like a full-time athlete, while holding down a full-time job. She's incredibly dedicated.   She has worked hard to improve since Athens and I think she's become a better and more rounded athlete."   Aileen is gearing up for the European Championships in the Netherlands later this month, and October's national championships. Beyond that, she is aiming for the 2008 Beijing Paralympics.
"It'd be nice to win two golds there as well," she said. "But we can't be complacent - we have to keep striving to be better. We know that someone will try to beat our record, so we need to continue to improve our times.   The Australians and the Americans are the closest to us, but I'm sure the Chinese will put up a strong performance.  We came out of the blue to win in Athens, nobody knew about us. I'm sure that can happen again, from another country."