by Cathy Wood
Record:
Turin 2006 (Winter Games); London 2012 hopeful
Martine Wright DOB: 30/09/72
Sport:
Sitting Volleyball
Record:
London 2012 hopeful
Chapter One
The Beginning
‘Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.’
Henry David Thoreau, author
As the distinctive British Airways jumbo jet, with its freshly painted gold nose and matching wings, taxied towards the exclusive VIP entrance at London’s Heathrow Terminal 5, on the afternoon of Thursday 18 September 2008, life, for some of the athletes onboard, would never be quite the same again.
For 12 incredible days they had been part of a Paralympic Games that had seen the level of athlete performance reach new heights. They had participated in superbly organised events which had been held in breathtaking venues, contributed to peerless sporting moments and been cheered on by thousands of passionate supporters.
They had seen their teammates win gold in nine of the 18 sports Britain was represented in, and enjoyed the fact that their endeavours were covered by an ever-growing contingent of British media.
Back home millions tuned in to BBC television to catch a glimpse of the Closing Ceremony. In the world of elite sport for athletes with a disability, this was something few had experienced before. Better prepared (and funded) than any previous British team, the investment (and interest), had more than paid off.
In Beijing Team ParalympicsGB excelled, racking up a total of 42 gold medals, 29 silver and 31 bronze, to finish second in the medals table behind the sporting might of China.
The eventual haul – 102 medals – was the equivalent of almost one medal for every second team member on the plane home, and far exceeded the pre-Games target of 40 golds.
And one of the most exciting aspects about Beijing was the team’s relative youth. More than half, 119 athletes, were attending their first Games, which meant next time round, they would take all that knowledge, experience and expertise to a Games being held on home soil.
For the competitors every gold-winning performance was memorable, but in three sports in particular – Paralympic Cycling (Road and Track), Equestrian and Paralympic Rowing – such was the depth of the squad’s success that Britain finished top of the medal table.
The Paralympic cyclists carried on where Olympic champions like Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and Rebecca Romero left off a few weeks earlier, winning 17 golds in total, and 12 more than second-placed USA. Four were won by a single athlete, Darren Kenny, making him one of the most successful Paralympic cyclists of all time.
Kenny had been a talented teenage rider good enough to take part in the Junior Tour of Ireland. But a crash in the event itself, caused a serious neck injury which ended his career at just 18. For the next 12 years Kenny abandoned cycling before taking it up again in 2000, at the age of 30, to lose weight and get fitter. Four years later he burst onto the Paralympic Cycling scene, taking two gold medals and one silver at Athens 2004. At Beijing 2008 he added four more golds, as well as taking a silver to increase his total to six golds and two silvers.
In Paralympic Equestrian, Lee Pearson took three golds to add to his existing six, three each from Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004. He has an incredible 100 per cent gold medal-winning rate for events entered and is the most successful British disabled rider.
On the track, David Weir, one of the best wheelchair athletes in the world and a five-time London Marathon winner, finally won the first of two gold medals, 12 years after competing in his first Paralympic Games as a 17-year-old at Atlanta 1996. Success was particularly sweet for the London-based athlete because a decade earlier, after the Atlanta Games, he quit Paralympic Athletics for good, or so it seemed.
But watching the Sydney 2000 Paralympic Games at home on his television, Weir was reduced to tears as the realisation of what he could have achieved, had he been there, sank in. Before long he was back training. After a build-up to Beijing 2008 hampered by glandular fever, winning not one, but two gold medals was the best feeling in the world.
And there was success for another long-term servant of British Paralympic sport as swimmer Dave Roberts secured four golds in the pool, retaining the titles he’d won at Athens 2004. Roberts’ success had added significance, since it took his Paralympic total to 11 gold medals, equalling the number won by Tanni Grey-Thompson (née Grey and now Baroness), Britain’s best-known Paralympian athlete.
‘That’s the one I came here for,’ Roberts said afterwards. ‘To be equal with Grey-Thompson is unbelievable, it’s something I didn’t believe would ever happen.’
Roberts, who was born in Pontypridd, Wales, was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy (CP) at the age of 11 and then advised to swim as a form of physiotherapy to help him stay supple. Some of his rivals today might wish he had stuck to the advice given and only ever indulged in an occasional, feel-good dip. Instead he turned his disability into a formidable asset. Within three years he was swimming for Wales and by the age of 19 for Britain. At 20 he attended to his first Paralympic Games in Sydney whereupon he came home weighed down by seven medals: three gold, three silver and one bronze.
At the age of 28, with an 11 gold medal stash, Roberts might well have called time on his career after Beijing 2008. And had the 2012 Games been awarded to any city other than London, he probably would have. But the lure of a home Games, something that might never come around again in his lifetime, was too good to miss. And at London 2012 Roberts will have the chance to claim an unrivalled 12th gold medal, which would make him Britain’s most decorated Paralympic athlete of all time.
In recognition of his achievements, Roberts was selected to carry the flag at the Closing Ceremony. ‘It was the biggest honour of my career,’ he said, particularly as he’d missed the Opening Ceremony as it came too close to his first race. Despite the nerves – and fear he might trip up in front of the watching world – he fulfilled his duties with immense pride. ‘I remember thinking, “I’ve made it, my life is made up,”’ he said before joining other athletes and spectators in a colourful, extravagant celebratory Ceremony, as China said goodbye to the thousands of athletes whose very presence had been a daily reminder of the indomitable power of the human spirit.
Then came a moment of history, lost on all but a few of the 92,000 spectators looking on. During the Closing Ceremony it is Paralympic Games’ protocol to pass the flag of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) from the city ending its tenure as host to the Paralympic Games to the one beginning its four-year cycle. At Beijing 2008, Sir Philip Craven, the plain-talking Yorkshireman and President of the IPC, waved the flag aloft before passing it to Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, for safe keeping until 2012. It was a moment that perhaps encapsulated the long-held belief that, in 2012, the Paralympic Games really are coming home.
Britain’s name will forever be intertwined with the birth of the Paralympic Movement and yet, in more than 50 years, this country has never been the official host. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier, in 1984, Stoke Mandeville jointly hosted the Games with New York, but this was only after previous arrangements to stage some events in Champaign, Illinois fell through. But Britain as outright hosts? Never, until now, that is. Fittingly, Philip Craven is one of the few people involved for long enough to appreciate the significance of the handover moment.
As the Paralympic Flame was extinguished and the night sky returned to normal after a spectacular fireworks finale, there was time for athletes, of all nations, disabilities and backgrounds, to reflect on the extraordinary bonds and friendships made. Many didn’t want to leave.
‘Beijing was insane,’ said Roberts. ‘It was bigger, brighter and louder than any Games I have ever been to. So when the Paralympic Flame goes out it’s horrible. It’s over, it’s finished. And it’s going to be another four years until it comes round again. The Games aren’t normal, so when the Flame goes out it’s time to go home. Reality
bites.’
Not surprisingly then, many partied long into the Chinese night, hoping the experience would last that bit longer. After all the hard work and dedication, these were the hours to treasure and celebrate. So it was a rather bleary-eyed team that boarded the 11-hour flight home only to discover that as one party ended, another was just beginning. Extra bottles of champagne had already been loaded into the galleys, together with some very British nibbles. And if the team thought being fêted on board was special even that would fade into insignificance when the plane arrived at its final destination.
There to greet them was a welcoming committee like none other, including then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and friends, family and supporters, who clapped and cheered as they wheeled or walked into the Arrivals Hall, an array of gold, silver and bronze medals clinking round their necks. Against a backdrop of camera flashes and microphones came press questions and requests, interviews and photo calls.
And there was more to come. Towards the end of 2008, ParalympicsGB teamed up with TeamGB for the first-ever joint Olympic and Paralympic victory parade through the streets of London, with 12 special floats travelling past St Paul’s Cathedral, down Fleet Street and into the Strand and Trafalgar Square. Thousands turned out to show support. Even for those who had been part of successful British Paralympic teams from previous Games, that late-autumn October parade surpassed anything that had gone before. Lee Pearson called it, ‘the best day of my life’, better even than the three gold medals he had won at Beijing 2008, and the nine in total from three Olympic Games.
As the months passed, many Paralympians popped up on the nation’s television screens, while a select few were named in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List. All were invited to a special reception at Buckingham Palace in February 2009 hosted by HM the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and attended by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Sophie, Countess of Wessex. Some, like young swimmer Ellie Simmonds, who won the nation over with her tearful celebrations after becoming the youngest-ever individual British Paralympic champion aged just 13, were enjoying unprecedented media interest.
For the athletes the growing warmth and recognition towards them as elite sporting athletes with a disability, rather than disabled men and women to be pitied and patronised for their efforts, made all the work, training, sacrifices and pain worthwhile. ‘There has been a stereotypical view that taking part is all that counts,’ said Josie Pearson, who became the first woman to represent Great Britain in the mixed sport of Wheelchair Rugby in Beijing. ‘But people are realising we are elite athletes and we train like any other elite athlete in the world. I don’t do this for fun: I want to be an elite athlete.’
Few experienced the new-found recognition more than Dave Roberts. During his five weeks away, at the pre-Games holding camp and then at the Games themselves, he was forced to leave his five-year-old dog, Lulah, in kennels back home near his Cardiff Bay home.
When he finally returned to pick her up, he found it wasn’t just the kennel staff and Lulah who eagerly awaited him. The local press were also there, waiting. ‘It’s Been Ruff Without You’ beamed the headline on the front page of the next day’s South Wales Echo.
But that wasn’t all. After so long away, the fridge in the Roberts’ household was bare and so he headed to his local supermarket for the usual 20-minute dash around the aisles. Only this time replenishing the essentials took hours, not helped by a special announcement over the tannoy to alert fellow shoppers of the star in their midst. ‘People kept coming up to me and saying, “Thank you for making me smile,”’ Roberts recalled.
And so, as 2008 drew to a close, few in the Paralympic Movement could have dreamed of the extraordinary progress made in such a relatively short time, or of the warm welcome athletes would receive from a proud British public.
It was a very different homecoming to the one experienced in 1960 when a British team returned from Italy for what has now become known as the first Paralympic Games.
***
Although many in the British team in Beijing didn’t want the Paralympic experience to end, after little sleep and a long flight back it was, at least for another four years, over. For many athletes, elite sport has become a gateway to see and travel the world.
More than half a century earlier it was a love of travelling that propelled Margaret Maughan into a quite unexpected, pioneering Paralympic role.
Born in June 1928 and brought up in Preston, Lancashire, travel was all Margaret wanted to do. In 1949, at the age of 21, she trained to be a teacher and spent the next five years working in education in England. But she yearned for change and new opportunities, and with the opening up of Britain’s colonies, what better way to see the world than to take up a post overseas? Her first stop was the West Indies and then a job teaching Home Economics at a secondary school in Jamaica. Then, in 1958, along came an adventure too good to miss –Margaret was offered a posting to Malawi in Africa to help oversee the Government’s education programme for women.
Then known as Nyasaland, Malawi was still part of the Commonwealth and jobs didn’t come much better, or further afield, than this. It meant Margaret, now 29, would sail first to South Africa, then to Mozambique, from where she would complete the final part of her journey by train. For a young woman looking to see the world it was the perfect start to an edifying adventure.
Margaret could hardly wait but her younger sister, Ruth, wasn’t so enthusiastic. As she waved goodbye to Margaret at Waterloo station, she did so with a growing sense of unease, a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. ‘I just felt very strange,’ she later admitted.
Unaware of her sister’s misgivings, Margaret set off, arriving in Malawi in the late summer of 1958, where she set up home in the remote village of Lilongwe, now the country’s capital. Her job, as Women’s Education Officer for the Central Province, was to ensure local schools adhered to the curriculum laid down by the British Government. By day she would travel around the Province ensuring the schools were well run and the rules followed. By night she enjoyed a lively social life in the company of fellow ex-pats, who had a habit of ensuring that whatever they were doing, Margaret was invited along too.
Christmas 1958 came and went, with any feelings of loneliness or homesickness filled by the kindness and invitations of new friends. By February 1959 Margaret was truly settled, loving her African odyssey and the new experiences it was bringing. Whenever she visited a school under her care she would be greeted by the sound of children’s voices wafting through the air as they sung traditional African songs to welcome in the new day. ‘I still hear that noise of children singing in the distance,’ she later said.
Then one February evening, six months into her trip, a man Margaret barely knew offered her a lift to a party they had both been invited to. With so many mutual friends and a common goal of getting to the party, there was no reason not to accept his offer. But when Margaret’s recently acquired friend drove too quickly for the remote, dusty African village roads the car veered off, overturned and came to rest awkwardly upside down in a nearby field.
As night fell and the enormity of what had happened began to sink in, the two – strangers until a few hours earlier – faced very different outcomes. Margaret knew immediately something was terribly wrong. Her friend, meanwhile, scrambled unscathed from the remains of the battered vehicle. He wanted to walk back to the nearest village to call for help. Lying the wrong way up and in considerable pain, Margaret asked him not to, preferring he stayed close by. With no traffic or nearby houses to call upon the two remained alone together for hours until eventually, a passing lorry driver stopped and the alarm was raised.
Despite offers of help from local people who were now gathering at the scene, Margaret insisted on waiting for a doctor. ‘I wouldn’t let them move me,’ she recalled. ‘I knew something very serious was wrong.’ When an ambulance and medical help did appear, the car first had to be turned the right way up before she could be set free. But the car, and Margare
t, were precariously perched and, fearing further injury, a young policeman crawled into the vehicle and wedged his body against hers to keep it still for the difficult manoeuvre. It was, by all accounts, agonising.
From the crash scene Margaret was taken to a local hospital in nearby Lilongwe and some weeks later, to a bigger centre in Blantyre, now the country’s second-biggest city. It was here that a surgeon was flown from South Africa to operate and Margaret was to learn for the first time that her spinal cord had been severed. She was paralysed from the point of the break, at T11 in the thoracic spine, down.
The Foreign Office sent word to Margaret’s family back home but since travel was slow and prohibitively expensive, there was little they could do but wait. Visiting was out of the question. Two months later, in April 1959, she was declared fit enough to travel and a flight, paid for by the British Government, was arranged to take her home. ‘I was told I was going to a very well-known hospital called Stoke Mandeville,’ she recalls. ‘It meant nothing to me.’
First, though, she had to endure a rather inelegant exit from the plane as the cockpit was dismantled to get the stretcher out. This was then placed on a truck and moved to a waiting ambulance. From the airport she was taken the relatively short distance to Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, which had a specialist spinal unit.
And it was here that a very different journey, for Margaret Maughan and many others, would begin.
***
As an observer it’s impossible to imagine what it must be like to walk out the door at the beginning of the day non-disabled and to find, by nightfall, you are disabled. And then to face the reality that life is irreversibly changed and there is nothing you, or medical intervention, can do. We get glimpses of it, mainly through the media, of someone in the public eye whose life changed because of a random, traumatic event, but that doesn’t mean we understand its full impact.
