L'Appel du Vide

First draft for a new print project by Blind Faith Studio (final published in June, 2026)

From 1990 to 2008, the DIY chain Home Depot was the largest employer of Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls in the US. These athletes would stack shelves for 20 hours a week, train for another 40, and then repeat this for 50 weeks of the year. The professionalisation of the Olympics began just before this period. The Summer games of 1984 saw huge broadcast revenue and thereafter the new International Olympic Committee boss aggressively commercialised: corporate sponsorship exploded and athlete endorsements became the norm and “pro” athletes were ushered into the subsequent Olympics as the old armature rules collapsed. And as all this money flowed into an arena previously governed by dedication, spotty state support and the legacy of unequal access to resource, it was dispersed incredibly unevenly. So, shelves continued to be stacked.

I remember telling someone about all of this outside a pub that sat opposite a row of low houses. I explained that although now obfuscated by capital there is no athlete who doesn’t understand that we are all in it for the same reason. ‘But why would someone work in a supermarket or drop out of school when the chance of making it is so slim?’ They asked. It’s what you people call “the love of the game,” I had offered. I always forget that they don’t feel the call of the void; our rules are singular and selfish: wake up, see the dawn, and pursue the mountaintop until you can’t anymore.

Sarah was an athlete I used to know. Along with Dan and many others we trained night and day to make our way up this mountain. Sarah had a grit I had never seen, one afternoon session we were drilling sprints and she pushed until she had to push through the double doors at the top of the pool and run outside; she burst all the blood vessels under her eyes throwing up, and then she got back in and carried on with the set. Dan was national champion like me; we went to Doha together when we were still just teenagers to represent our country. I watched him cry on the podium as they played God Save the Queen and he watched me stoically raise my flowers above my head when the anthem stopped after I won gold too. He was charming and made of pure talent. And each morning I sat behind him on the bus and studied his perfect golden hair, like the chlorine and sweat had crowned him, the prince of dawn.

After it was all done, Dan saw 4am just as much as before. In the back of a car or the back of a house with the curtains drawn the hum of dawn is always the same; it sounds like dusk but in-between the birdsong its silence is more pregnant. 4am is for athletes, new parents, and drug addicts. Sarah had her first baby very young, she said she didn’t want to have sex anymore because it didn’t mean anything and she couldn’t keep tapping the dry well. The high of sleeping with someone new delivered almost nothing, it barely got her off the ground. The pain of childbirth and the scratching desperation of her brain on three hours of sleep, however, transported her up to the rocky mountainside next to the ocean.

At dawn, Dan – leaving only 11 minutes between lines now – and Sarah – rubbing one bleeding nipple while she nurses with the other which is about the succumb to the same fate – remember the old high. The ribbons and rivers of lactic acid that had ushered it forth. Coating their bodies in glory, devouring every drop of oxygen in their path and only then, oxygen-less and afraid, could their minds start to clear and from the edge of the mountainside peer down at the rocks and the waves below. When you get up this high, you’re physically pulled towards the edge, whether you want to go or not. And there you are, standing on the edge of the world about to fall off as your body and mind drift away from each other and the pain of exertion floats away too. The race is ending, the disk is finding its target, the time is perfect, you’re all alone, and all these things become one. And as you look over the edge you realise there is no further to go. You are at the limit of yourself. From this vantage only the unknown awaits beyond the cliff: this is the perfect high. Then, you feel an urge stronger than anything you’ve experienced before, and the urge says jump.

On the first day of my retirement from elite sport, I felt my distance from the mountain shift. A chasm opened and I knew base camp was now my highest peak. ‘The strangest thing of all’ I wrote about that day, ‘is that this was not the end of my life.’ I have since come to understand that the call of the void has more to do with wanting to be alive than not. In a 2012 volume of the Journal of Affective Disorders, a study into this impulse (which they called the High Place Phenomena), found that this feeling illuminates the nature and strength of human survival instinct: the urge to jump affirms the urge to live. It was also observed that this is heightened in impulsive, intense individuals, who are more likely to engage in behaviour or activities that are painful or provocative, which in turn make them less fearless of pain, and of death.

I’ve since been told that many Olympians went back to Home Depot when it was all over for them, their broken bodies embraced the end, and with no thought given to their life beyond this relentless pursuit of greatness they drifted back to the places they had come from. Having firmly closed the doors long ago to all the other opportunities they once had, they settled into unextraordinary lives. Haunted, as we all are, not by previous success (or almost-success) but instead by the strange notion of having spent so long trying to be otherwise when the low altitude of the ordinary had always been a certainty. Another certainty, as it turns out, is that is the agreement we unknowingly made in exchange for touching the void.

Dan is in prison now, and Sarah has more children and a kind of look in her eyes in the pictures I see that I know very well: a slow and settling acceptance that the perfect high is nowhere else except the first place you found it. My relationship with dawn doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories. I used to clip my cuticles until they bled, and someone once asked me what I thought about that form of self-harm; I don’t know what you’re talking about, I had replied, I just want them to be perfect. In pursuit of perfection – a lazy euphemism for the sublime – I am slowly eroding my own form.

‘So do you ever wonder if you picked the wrong sport?’ my friend at the pub had asked me. I didn’t. ‘You know, I wonder what you would have done if you’d made loads of money?’ Heroin, I replied.