Once Mam had picked her competition clothes, she headed off to the warm-up area. She had her game face on, and there was no stopping her. “Fi’n cofio pôb dim (I remember absolutely everything),” she tells me, exhaling purposefully as she goes through the pre-race routine, which it thought had been retired 40 years ago.
Her then 28-year-old rival arrived being flanked by an army. Two were doing his make-up, one was combing his hair, another’s job seemed to be to hold a mirror to allow the others to perform their duty.
At this point, you could have forgiven my mother and I for assuming we would be navigating a large ego all afternoon, who might well be, understandably, bemused by the whole concept.
We could not have been more wrong. My mother was anxious about being dismissed, but Hughes immediately put her at ease with an arm around the shoulder. And they got talking immediately about their passion for sprinting.
“I am nervous as hell,” my mother conceded, perhaps trying to lull him into a false sense of confidence. The sprinters, and Mam definitely still considers herself a sprinter, then got lost in conversation.
She chewed his ear off about her missed opportunity, and how she was the fastest woman in Wales, but never got a look in because she was growing up on a farm using her driveway as her practice track.
Hughes, listening intently and somewhat impressed, interrupted the monologue with a smile, saying: “From athlete to athlete, I love that you still love it.”
But enough chit-chat, time for the action. The conditions were simple. Hughes and Mam would go head-to-head on the Lee Valley track over the agreed distance of 80m. I can only presume Hughes feared that my 64-year-old mother would finish strong, and therefore cutting the distance by 20m would be to his advantage.
