Twins switch sport in historic medal bid

Published on Saturday 19 September 2009 19:55

FIONA and Donna Robertson, both the wrong side of 40 and weighing less than eight stone, may look unlikely sporting heroes, but they are about to make history.

The Scots twins, who have both won Commonwealth Games medals for judo, are set to win medals again, this time for wrestling.

No other Scottish sportsmen or women have won a Commonwealth medal at one sport and then gone into another Games as red-hot favourites to pick up another medal in a totally different discipline.

For Donna the chance for the second medal will come some 20 years after winning her first. The 2010 games in Delhi come two decades after she picked up a judo bronze medal in Auckland in 1990 as a 21-year-old.

Her twin sister Fiona didn't compete that year in New Zealand because they both fought in the same weight category; with judo not featuring in British Columbia or Kuala Lumpur, Fiona had to wait until Manchester in 2002 to finally catch up with her sister by also winning bronze.

This time around, and with wrestling featuring in Delhi and judo not among the events, the smaller weight categories mean that both girls will be able to fight, Fiona in the 48kg class, Donna in the 52kg class.

The pair switched to wrestling 18 months ago. "We'd heard they were looking for women judo players to take up wrestling because the transference was so much quicker," said Donna.

"At first we just thought we'd give wrestling a go to get some (judo] coaching aids, because the Azerbaijanis, Georgians and Armenians use lots of wrestling moves in judo, and we wanted to learn some moves so that we could combat them. But it quickly became more than that.

"We never stopped training when we stopped competing, but we didn't get the competitive edge we needed; that desire to compete was still there. There was a lot of fight left in me; it wasn't long before we really fancied giving the wrestling a go, " Donna said.

"People looked at us strange, like," said added. "A lot of women have the wrong idea about wrestling – you say "freestyle wrestling" and I think a lot of them are thinking WWF or cage wrestling or mud wrestling. Now we usually add in "Olympic" so they appreciate that it's a top-level sport."

Each morning they leave their Hamilton home at 7am so that they can start a two-hour training session at the Glasgow Palace of the Arts, Monday to Friday. They train there between six and eight each evening, and spend up to an hour each way on the journey to and from their Lanarkshire home, so wrestling takes up as much as eight hours a day. "It might sound like a huge sacrifice, but it's just what you do," said Fiona.

The driving force behind their medal charge is their diminutive Ukrainian coach Vladimir Gladkov, a former Russian wrestling team coach. Since wrestling became a Commonwealth Games' sport and attracted lottery money, he has become the Scotland's first full-time wrestling coach.

"Vlad just said to us, 'Show me what judo moves you do,' and then he adapted those to use in wrestling rather than starting from scratch," said Donna.

"The techniques we had in judo were good enough, but it took a year of constant work on the technique before it began to be second nature."

The sisters also have a huge advantage in that, like the Murray brothers and the Williams sisters in tennis, their sibling rivalry spurs them on.

They even work in the same building, Donna as a lifeguard at Hamilton Water Palace, Fiona in the gym two floors below her twin's workplace.

"There's massive sibling rivalry on the mat, but not off it," says Donna. "We never get bored of each other's company and that's why we do so well, because we both have a ready-made training partner. We both want to beat each other so badly it keeps us getting better and better, and you never hold back in practice when it's your sister, like you might if it was someone else.

"If we do fall out then it's only a few minutes. A lot of twins have a normal brother-sister relationship but we're very close, that's just the way it is."

In their first British Championships last October Fiona took gold and Donna silver.

At the European Championships in Madrid, the twins suffered the frustration of being drawn against each other in the first round, Donna edging the competition and going on to the semi-finals where she was beaten by the former world junior champion, an American who went on to win the tournament.

The pair have high ambitions for Delhi."We only want to go if we're going to be in with a chance of winning medals," said Donna. "For us it's all about the medals."

In Delhi the pair will have a ready-made role model. "We were really inspired by the success Rebecca Romero had when she changed over from rowing to cycling and won gold in Beijing," says Fiona, "It just proved what's possible."

The pair are also dismissive about their age."Wrestling is a bit more attack-attack than judo, and there's more intensity because there's three two-minute rounds rather than one five-minute round like in judo," said Fiona. "And because wrestling is more technical and less about the strength, it's easier on the body.

"Our target is definitely to go through to 2014. OK, we're slightly mature athletes, but in our eyes we don't see that as a problem as long as we're fit and enjoying it. What doesn't kill you just makes you stronger."