Alex Waters’s life changed one day in the early summer of 2005. He was 18 and
going full throttle towards a career as a racing driver. He was new to the
Formula Ford circuit, “the breeding ground of champions”, as it calls
itself, and was doing well. Oh yes, rather inconveniently, he had a bunch of
A levels to take. But if, back then, we had heard of Lewis Hamilton, then we
might have been calling Waters “the next Lewis Hamilton”. The A levels
aside, he felt he was in a pretty good place.
That summer, though, a lump the size of a mole grew on his left arm; it hurt
and it oozed. He had it removed and was led to believe that he need worry no
more about it. Cancer? Eighteen-year-olds don’t get skin cancer. At least
that was what he thought, and that is what he kept on thinking all the way
back to the doctor’s surgery in Bath, having been asked to report back to
hear some news.
He went with his mother. He had a race that weekend and was looking forward to
it. He certainly did not need a medical problem to interfere. But that was
where the bottom fell out of his life. Eighteen-year-olds hardly ever do get
cancer; he was right there. Yet he was the tiny, unfortunate minority.
Why? There is a reason and his health issues postcancer led him to discover
it. After having another operation within the week to remove the remaining
traces of the cancer and then being given the all-clear, he got back in his
car a month later and started going full throttle at the racing driving
again. Then he contracted meningitis. “It was so bad I spent five days in
hospital,” Waters says. “Really horrible, unbearable pain, a much worse
effect on my body than the cancer.” Then last year, along came glandular
fever. Throw in shingles, too, and sufficient evidence had accumulated to
suggest that he was suffering from more than bad luck.
“The illnesses were all linked to a type of virus I have,” he says. This is a
strain of the herpes virus, though not, he emphasises, the sexually
transmitted type.
Herpes viruses are extremely common; one even accounts for chicken pox.
Waters’s virus is in his spinal fluid, though it remains the subject of
medical debate as to how badly it affects him and whether he will ever be
able to cure it.
So, as we enter a new year, you cannot help but wonder what might befall him
next. What has 2008 got to dump on him? Waters laughs at the suggestion. “I
don’t think like that at all,” he says. “That’s what a normal person would
think, I suppose. My attitude postcancer is: how depressing would life be if
I was worried what was going to happen tomorrow?”
The line above contains the key to Alex Waters. He is not arrogant or proud of
it and neither does he brandish it, but he is acutely aware that cancer
changed his entire perspective on life. It has stripped him of a certain
normality. So he is not remotely concerned that the spinal virus might
inflict further illness on his life in 2008. Quite the opposite, it has made
him evangelically carpe diem. He postponed his university degree
halfway through last year because he felt he could not afford to hang
around. So 2008, for him, is about chasing Hamilton and, just to liven
things up along the way, he is going to compete in a 3,000-mile bike race
across America.
“My first kart was like driving a rocket”
The driving really started for Waters about nine years too late. His father
owned a small car business in Bath; aged 8, Alex was able to drive round the
forecourt and soon after was allowed to park the cars away in the evening.
Pretty much the only time he got to race, though, was at his birthday
parties, inevitably at the nearest go-kart track. His friends would pitch up
with patient smiles because they all knew that the birthday boy would win.
It only became serious, though, when Waters was 14 and his father sold a car
to a man whose son raced karts. Part of the deal involved giving Waters a
run in a proper kart. “I’d never been in anything like it,” Waters says. “It
was like driving a rocket. But I was fast and I was hooked.”
Soon, he was in the Super 1 British Kart Championship and, by the end of the
year, he was finishing in the top ten every race, beating boys who had been
racing eight or nine years.
Hamilton was nine years into it, too. “At 15,” Waters says, “Lewis would have
won the world championship in go-karts, with the best equipment and best
team around him. He would have been testing in cars by then, too. A bit of a
different story. He’s the only person in the world who has had the
grounding, dedication and commitment from a Formula One team from a
grassroots level; to compare him to any other driver would be impossible.
Don’t misunderstand me, I am hugely in awe of his talent and the manner in
which he has fulfilled it, but I believe that given the same opportunities,
I’d be in the same shoes.”
But he is in hot pursuit. In 2006, the meningitis year, he moved up to the
Formula Three circuit. This was two jumps up the ladder from Formula Ford
yet he finished fourth in his first race and second in his second. At the
end of the season, he was placed fourth and wondering how much higher he
might have been had he stayed healthy.
Part of the challenge in getting to Hamilton status, though, is in raising the
funds to get you there. Formula Three is basically a rich boys’ playground
and, while Waters may have been privately educated, his father’s pockets did
not stretch that deep. So Waters has had to fund himself and, as if that was
not hard enough, he decided to give 50p of every £1 he raised to a charity.
This goes back to the cancer. For him, it was caught early enough to avoid
chemotherapy. “It was just an operation on my left arm,” he says. “A week
after diagnosis I was on the operating table. They acted very fast. How much
did it hold me back? Physically, not a great deal; I was driving again
within a month, but, mentally, a lot. I was going through hell.”
Even now, he is told that he must check himself every time he takes a shower.
But what stuck with him particularly were the faces of the 5, 6 and
7-year-olds with whom he shared his hospital ward in Bristol. “I can’t
imagine what those six-year-olds go through,” he says, and so he elected to
attach them equal importance as his driving and give his 50 per cent to CLIC
Sargent, the charity that provides care and care homes for children with the
disease.
“Everyone asks: ‘Who’s in the pink car?’”
So last year, when he raised £254,000 through fundraising events, dinners and
auctions, half went to CLIC. The joker he played was at the preseason
Formula Three media day at Silverstone when the car he unveiled for the
season was pink. Not quite the pink of breast-cancer awareness but the
fuchsia pink of CLIC Sargent. “It was a real case of: ‘Oh my God!’ ” he
says. “We had the typical, homophobic comments from the laddish mechanics,
but everyone was talking about it. People loved the idea. I love it.
Wherever I race, everybody asks: ‘Who’s driving the pink car?’ ” It
therefore follows that when he cycles across the United States in June, he
will also be in pink and raising for CLIC. His entire team will be. The Race
Across America goes West Coast to East, 3,000 miles through some hellish
Arizona desert and over two mountain ranges, with a total climb that equates
to four ascents of Everest. Waters’s team, the United Eight, are an eclectic
group, which includes a former pro-snowboarder and a veteran world champion
athlete. They will ride as a relay, 24 hours a day, and hope to get from one
side of the country to the other in a week.
Waters has an appetite for this sort of thing. Last November, he completed the
Mark Webber Challenge, run by the Australian Formula One driver, which took
him through 300 miles of Tasmanian wilderness. “Day one was a 7km kayak
followed by a 19km run across two mountains and then straight into a 58km
cycle off-road,” he says. “It was physically the most demanding week of my
life.”
His work as a racing driver, he says, gives him a solid fitness base. “As a
racing driver, people underestimate how fit you have to be. Almost all my
friends have the same opinion. People think you’re simply driving a car. But
if you put a top athlete in an F1 car, they’d be finished after one lap.
They’d be knackered.
“For my racing, I do a lot of spinning, running, bodywork – press-ups,
chin-ups – and very low resistance weights. We need strong necks, forearms –
grip strength – there are specific exercises for those. All of which is
rather different from the requirements of cycling 3,000 miles across
America. This year, I just need to add a whole load of hours on the pedals.
The Race Across America will be hell, but it’s a great adventure and at the
end it will be worth it. I see events like these as lifetime opportunities I
might never get again.”
And again, this all goes back to the cancer. “When you get it,” he says,
“everything stops. It makes you grow up. You go through stages of being
incredibly upset, everything in your life has just gone wrong. But then it
changes and people start saying to you: ‘How are you so positive?’ But you
can’t not be. Being negative doesn’t help. What I perceive as important now
is probably not what my three sisters (two older, one younger) or other kids
of my age see as important. I want to go out and get going as fast as
possible; I want it all to happen now. It sounds weird, but I think my
mental outlook is different from the average person. I’m just full of the
feeling that life is too short to hang about.”
So watch this young man this year as he attempts to close in on Hamilton. On
meeting him, you wonder if cancer has not actually helped him to go faster,
if, strangely, it has been a positive experience. At this suggestion, Waters
pauses momentarily and replies unequivocally. “No,” he says. “I could never
say that what I’ve been through is a good experience. Never. For the
positives I’ve got out of it? No, I’d simply never wish it on anyone.”
Alex and his pink car will be at the Autosport International exhibition at
the NEC, Birmingham, today and tomorrow, 9am to 6pm
Owen Slot, the Times Chief Sports Reporter, is a member of Alex Waters’s
United Eight team. To follow their progress, sign up to The
Times Health Club and go to http://united8.groups.timeshealth.co.uk
SKIN CANCER: THE FACTS
The most common cancer
Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the UK. There are two types:
melanoma, which affects the skin’s pigment-producing cells and is the most
serious; and nonmelanoma, which affects other skin cells and is much more
common.
Tans come at a cost
Most skin cancers are caused by long-term exposure to ultra violet (UV) rays
from the sun. UVB rays are the most dangerous.
Shun sunbeds
Sunbed-use raises the risk of skin cancer. Cancer Research UK has called for
under16s to be banned from using them.
But don’t ban natural sunlight
A study this week suggests sun exposure may actually protect us against
cancer, by stimulating the body to produce vitamin D.
What else causes it?
Smoking, drinking, and having a particular strain of herpes, can also raise
the risk of developing some types of skin cancer.
