IHEEM WALES 2024 AWARDS
Adam Mierzejewski (right), Regional director of AECOM, accepted the Apprentice of the Year Award from Deputy Director at NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership – Specialist Estates Services, Simon Russell, on behalf of the winner, Megan Thomas (inset), who wasn’t able to attend the dinner.
you, he’d soon tell you. He was a fantastic person, who liked to lead from the front.” Mark Furmage added that he wouldn’t be in his current professional position, and qualified as an Authorising Engineer (Decontamination), if it wasn’t for Graham, and owed him ‘a lot’. He said: “I think all of us at NHS Wales are in a better position thanks to the work that he did. He was an absolute gentleman, and a credit to his family. John and I spent time with him last year at an AE(D) event, and had a fabulous evening. Graham spent time at sea in his younger days, and was a fabulous storyteller. I would like everyone to rise a glass to Graham and his family.” John Prendergast said: “It is great
to have David, Nicola, and Leo from Graham’s family attending this evening.” He explained that after dinner, guests would hear from after-dinner speaker, Colin Jackson, ‘for a talk on sport and his experiences within life’, dubbing the athlete ‘an icon of track and field’. He said: “To all of us of certain age, he, Linford Christie, and Sally Gunnell, were among our sporting heroes back then.”
On the dance floor When Colin Jackson spoke, he told dinner guests that ‘in professional sport, there’s lots of different, and sometimes unexpected, things that happen in one’s life’. He told guests: “I can remember that when I was just about to break a world record you never quite projected yourself forward to the future. Now, when I think about it, standing on that line just before I broke the record, if you’d told me 30 years’ later I’d be on the Strictly Come Dancing dancefloor, I would never in a million years have envisaged that could happen.” He continued: “When you were a kid and
you thought about a top sportsman, the TV show you knew they wanted to be on was the BBC’s Question of Sport; appearing on it would have made the individual an icon. That’s certainly changed now; unless you’re
24 Health Estate Journal August 2024
dancing on a Saturday night, you’re not impressing people all that much.” When he was asked to appear in the
ballroom dancing series, Colin Jackson said the reason he agreed was that one of his close friends was the show’s producer. Having initially declined, after being further ‘badgered’ to appear on the show, in January 2005 he agreed to take part. Having not given it much further thought in the following months, he was telephoned by the show’s producers in September 2005 and asked to meet his dance partner, New Zealand-born professional ballroom dancer, Erin Boag, who – due to her self-confessed ‘no- nonsense’ approach – he subsequently named ‘Miss Whiplash’. The pair came second in the 2005 series, being pipped to the title by England cricketer, Darren Gough, and his dance partner, Lilia Kopylova. In 2006, however, the athlete became the first competitor who had not won the main series to win the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special.
Are you nervous? When, after numerous rehearsals, it was time to appear on the 2005 series, Colin Jackson recalled Erin Boag asking him if he was nervous. Having competed in track and field events worldwide, he had said: ‘No, not really.’ “When it was time to compete,” he explained, “Erin took off a head scarf, and dropped her house coat. She was wearing a skirt this high, and an even shorter top. She looked at me, and all she said was: ‘Concentrate!’ She then added: ‘If my dress gets caught when we are dancing, or anything like that, rip it, and I’ll just continue dancing.’ Then,” he continued, “the music starts, and we are doing a cha-cha. So, I swing her one way, and then the other, and then I drop on the floor, and then she lays across my leg. Right as she does so, her dress catches in my belt. My heart stopped, because first of all, I was thinking, ‘Her name is Miss Whiplash. If I I don’t do what I’m told, I’m in trouble.’ However, if I push her and her dress comes up, I am in even more – what a dilemma. The music re-started, and she said: ‘Colin, Just push me upwards.’ I gave her the biggest push, and she spun beautifully off my leg as if nothing had happened. We did alright, with a couple of good high marks, and as we were walking off, she said: ‘Why didn’t you just rip my dress?’ I answered: ‘I think my Nan is watching.’” As ‘an ordinary kid from down the
road in Cardiff’, Colin Jackson went on to explain to the dinner guests, he simply wanted ‘to do the best I could at whatever I did’. However, he decided quite early on what success was going to mean for him. He explained: “As a youngster, what does success mean? It means you can buy a fast car, a big house, and then have lots of wealth after that. That was what success was for me back then. Now, on reflection, I realise you’ve got to go full circle. What you leave behind – your positive legacy – is
Nigel Hill (centre) receives the Estates Champion of Champions Award from Tilbury Douglas Regional Operations director for South Wales, Chris Edmonds, and Colin Jackson.
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