Paralympic Heroes

by Cathy Wood

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  Lee Pearson has nine Paralympic gold medals to date. He is the most successful Paralympic Games rider in the world and remains unbeaten in any Paralympic competition since his first win at Sydney 2000. He’s been awarded an MBE, OBE and CBE in recognition of his achievements and visited Buckingham Palace more often than he’s bought horses – seven invites so far. He once, famously, offered to give HM the Queen a riding lesson, should she ever find herself passing through Staffordshire to which, allegedly, she replied by saying she might just take him up on the offer.

  He’s sung live on BBC television to raise funds for Sport Relief, been immortalised in a special bronze statue to commemorate the Games, talked openly about being gay and how the news at first shocked his family, and been invited to a string of award ceremonies and celebrity parties. Lee is one of the best-known faces of today’s Paralympic athletes. Yet despite being in the limelight, he feels nothing but terror every time a Paralympic Games approaches. As the medals and titles have racked up too, so has the expectation of winning. And no one puts so much pressure on Lee Pearson as he puts on himself.

  At Sydney 2000 few had ever heard of Lee when he won the first of nine gold medals. In London, the pressure on him will be immense as he goes for another clutch of golds. But then Pearson loves being in the top spot. He’s not involved in a sport which puts a huge strain on his body to travel the world or collect another Paralympic participation medal: he’s in it to win and to remain the number one Paralympic rider in the world. No more, no less.

  Surprisingly perhaps, considering he’s the best in the world at what he does and has entered (and won) non-disabled competitions, there are many days when he thinks he can’t ride at all. ‘Horses never allow you to think you are any good: they can make you feel the best person on the planet one day and that you couldn’t ride one end of a broomstick the next day,’ he explains.

  And such are his pre-Games nerves, he can’t even bear to watch his horses being bathed, plaited and tacked up in the hours before the Dressage events begin. Instead he must take himself off to another part of the venue to get away. And he’s only happy to watch others competing if they are riding in a different classification to his, otherwise he decides his direct competitors look better than he does.

  So, while others prepare his horse Lee gets changed and then once he’s ready, he spends the last few moments making final adjustments and calming his frayed nerves before the serious work begins. Unlike other sports, he never forgets he is competing with an animal in an environment where anything can, and does, happen. And while he knows the significance of the next few moments and how they could change his life, the horse may have other ideas.

  Once the bell sounds to signal the start of the competition, it’s a question of total application and concentration on the job in hand. In Lee’s case, as he usually competes in both team and individual events, he has three competitive Dressage Tests to complete – the Team, Championship and Freestyle Tests.

  Lee Pearson has an engaging and entertaining personality, so it’s hard to imagine him doing clerical work in a backroom at a supermarket in Staffordshire while on Prozac to keep his feelings of depression at bay. Yet that was his life as a young man, disillusioned by his disability and the lack of opportunity open to him because of it.

  As is so often the case, life-changing events are all about timing. Who knows how long he would have tolerated his former life had he not, in 1996, been sitting at home in Cheddleton, Staffordshire, watching the Atlanta Paralympic Games? As he looked on, he thought: I can do that. So he rang the RDA and with typical directness, told them he’d like to be part of the Great Britain team competing at the Sydney 2000 Games in four years’ time.

  Whether they thought he was joking or not, someone was sent to assess Pearson’s condition and as he rode around the field at the back of where his parents lived, they could hardly believe what they were seeing. And Lee Pearson couldn’t quite take in what they were saying. ‘They told me I was really disabled,’ he says. And yet, as far as he was concerned, he had always led a pretty mainstream life, driving his car, holding down a job and going clubbing.

  With his classification established as the most severe on the then classification scale, Pearson began dressage the following year, in 1997. The office job he found so limiting was no more. Not that riding was a particularly electrifying experience to start with. ‘The first couple of years were so boring,’ he explained. ‘It would be a bit like me asking you to do gymnastics on the floor. It’s all about improving balance and power, and until you improve those skills, it is a bit dull. But as you learn to do more, it becomes more interesting and then suddenly, you get the bug.’ And what a bug it turned out to be. From his first Games in Sydney to his most recent in Beijing, Lee Pearson has won every Paralympic event he’s entered and there are not many athletes who can say that about their career.

  Like all great athletes, he puts his success down to a number of factors. For a start, he works hard at a daily routine which involves riding three horses in a specially constructed arena, complete with mirrors so he can check his movements, in his yard. But if he rides too much, he runs the risk of being in severe pain the following day because of the extent of his disability.

  He also has an uncanny ability to bring out the best in the horses he works with: exceptional balance, an understanding of what a horse can feel from the rider and what is needed to get a response. ‘Able-bodied people over-use their limbs,’ he explains. ‘I can’t kick a horse hard, so I have to make them respond to a light kick. It’s enough – a horse can feel a fly on it.’

  And there’s another ingredient central to his success: resourcefulness. His house has none of the adaptations you’d expect for someone who is not very tall. There are no cupboards fixed at low heights so he can reach them. Instead he places a cushion on the floor to create a landing pad for items he needs and uses one of his crutches to pull down the can of beans or whatever else he requires, hoping they land safely in the designated spot.

  Like many disabled people he’s learnt to be adaptable and not to accept the view of those who only see what cannot be done rather than what can. ‘We don’t need someone to come along and say you can’t do that – we know what we can do,’ he says, adding, ‘I have been problem solving all my life.’ Indeed, being adaptable is an essential skill to master the different personalities of each of the horses he rides.

  But when the Paralympic event is finally over, the tack packed away and the long hours of hard, repetitive work have been rewarded with the knowledge that a gold medal will soon be hanging around his neck, what does Lee savour most? Is this a moment of pure pleasure and utter relief? Or a chance to soak up the atmosphere and watch the distinctive red, white and blue flag rise to the top of the pole accompanied by an anthem that must mean more to him than most after so many meetings with the Monarch?

  Perhaps surprisingly, victory is not the time when Lee can let the emotions go and wave joyfully to his friends and family while simultaneously grinning at photographers, media pundits and cameramen. It’s anything but that. The immediate moments after winning at the Paralympic Games are neither as relaxing nor so enjoyable as one might think: he’s emotionally and physically exhausted, and the last thing he wants to do is get back on his horse for a mounted ceremony, which is when riders receive their medals on horseback.

  While others wrap themselves in the Union Jack flag, do a lap of honour or embrace their nearest and dearest, elite horsemen and women have other responsibilities to tend to. ‘I’m sitting on a live animal,’ he explains. ‘You really want people to cheer but the problem you have is, will your horse freak out if everyone does that?’

  And will the horse dutifully comply and move forward just as the dignitary of the day appears to present the medals, or will it become overly excited by the noise, the clapping, cheering and endless camera flashes and ruin the presentation for the rider and everyone else? ‘I am still in work mode,’ Lee says, �
��so I can’t relax.’ Added to that is the hidden reality that sitting motionless on a horse creates constant, grating pain for him, which only moving around will alleviate. When it’s a mounted ceremony, moving just isn’t possible until it’s over.

  After hours spent perfecting the smallest movement, years of dedicated training in an outdoor ring regardless of the weather, endless time spent planning and competing in build-up competitions to qualify and prepare the horse, and then days of high anxiety in the run-up to the Paralympic Games, the celebrations for these magical moments in Lee Pearson’s life have to wait just that bit longer.

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  While Lee Pearson was coming to terms with victory during one part of Athens 2004, across town, at the Olympic Stadium, Tanni Grey-Thompson was having no trouble at all in celebrating her first victory of the Games.

  Although more than two-and-a-half years would pass before she officially retired at the Paralympic World Cup in Manchester, in May 2007, Tanni already knew this – her fifth Games – would be her last. There would be no Beijing in 2008 for her.

  Coming into the Games the 35-year-old was in terrific shape and racing in the build-up had gone better than expected, as she told the BBC in August 2004: ‘I broke the 200m world record this year, I broke the 400m world record and I did a personal best in the 800m earlier on to qualify to be in the Paralympics, and I did a personal best in the 100m. So I’m racing the fastest I’ve ever done – whether it’s quick enough, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ll find out in three weeks’ time, but the way I’m pushing right now, I’m really pleased.’

  Ever since her student days at Loughborough, Tanni had sought ways to outsmart her rivals when it came to training. Before the Seoul 1988 Games, she’d used a heat chamber to ensure her body was prepared for the heat and humidity of South Korea. And in 1993, more than a decade before the Athens 2004 Games, she had approached the distinguished Australian wheelchair coach, Jenni Banks, and asked if she could join her coaching group in Australia for three-and-a-half months. When she returned to England, she continued to be coached by Banks until 1996 and although Ian Thompson, her husband, became increasingly involved after 1997. Banks’ influence would last for the remainder of her career.

  Tanni arrived in Greece in great shape and was looking forward to defending the four titles won at Sydney 2000 – 100m, 200m, 400m and 800m but she didn’t begin well at all. In her first event, the 800m, she only finished seventh. ‘The 800m was so bad,’ she says. ‘I was really flat, there was no energy or speed and lots of things went wrong.’

  Unused to losing, it was a defeat she took particularly badly. ‘After the 800m I wasn’t the most sociable person on the team,’ she admits. But if she wanted to lick her wounds in private, teammates and compatriots had other ideas. ‘What was hard was the number of people who came up to me and said to me, “Are you alright?” That was really emotional. If you won, you might get a few people saying well done. It was really hard, people saying, “I am really sorry to hear about the race.” People were being so nice. It would have been better if they had ignored me,’ she says.

  Against this backdrop, she arrived at the Olympic Stadium for the 100m final, a race which, after four years of preparation, would be over in less than 20 seconds. Throughout her career Tanni had struggled with pre-race nerves, something that became worse as she grew older. She was used to being sick before the start of the London Marathon and prior to track races, but at the Athens 2004 Games she threw up 12 times during the warm-up. And she was still retching as she went across the warm-up track to enter the call room, where athletes wait in the moments before the countdown to their final begins.

  The athletes were led onto the track by officials. It was a little before 6pm. The race start time was 1803. Tanni just sat there, shaking and looking at the clock as it moved, like a hedgehog, from 1800 to 1801 and then to 1802. Finally, the clock reached 1803 and the race was on. Even now she still recalls all of the 17.24 seconds it took from start to finishing line. For Tanni, it unfolded in super-slow motion. ‘I remember every push of the race,’ she says.

  Well down at 30m, she could see the Italian, Francesca Porcellato, at least a chair-length ahead. ‘She got an amazing start,’ Tanni says. As she pushed her wheelchair towards the advancing Italian, no noise entered her periphery, no distraction could be countenanced as every sinew, nerve and muscle concentrated on pushing closer and closer to Porcellato until, at 55m, they drew level. At 60m, Tanni edged ahead. By 80m, the finishing line was within touching distance. At 100m, she had won the 10th Paralympic gold medal of her career and the silence in her head erupted into screams and cheers, which she could now hear. ‘Technically, it was one of the best races I have ever done,’ she admits. ‘It was really emotional for me.’

  And although she would go on to win an historic 11th gold medal in the 400m a few days later, this is still the race, more than any other in her career, she remembers the most.

  After the 800m that she wanted to forget, the only emotion Grey-Thompson felt was relief. ‘I desperately didn’t want to have another bad race,’ she says. ‘I don’t care about the time: I could have done 25 seconds and it wouldn’t have mattered as long as I won the gold medal.’

  What did matter, though, in the immediate moments after winning, was looking into the crowd to spot her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Carys, wearing a ‘Go Mammy’ T-shirt. It didn’t take long to locate the familiar figure of the toddler in the stands. Carys was eating an ice cream and she had absolutely no interest in the significance of what her mother had just achieved. ‘She barely watched it,’ Tanni says. ‘She just wasn’t at all bothered.’ And yet Carys Grey-Thompson might not have been at the Athens 2004 Games at all – Tanni’s training schedule was so packed after Sydney 2000 that there was little time to think about starting a family.

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  Tanni Grey-Thompson only raced to win. Being born with spina bifida was an irrelevance, a lens through which others looked and, perhaps, judged her. It was never the way she viewed herself. During her career, significant life events were meticulously planned and managed so as not to interfere with her chances of elite success. As any athlete will tell you, a career at the top, is often all too short. There’s no time to miss out on golden opportunities. ‘Our wedding in 1999 was based around our competition schedule,’ Tanni says. ‘There were two days that year we could get married, because of our joint racing commitments.’

  In fact the date she and her husband-to-be chose happened to coincide with a track race and initially, Tanni and Ian, considered racing in the morning and then getting to the church in time for an afternoon ceremony, much to the horror of Sulwen Grey, Tanni’s mother.

  In the end the race was cancelled, but Tanni still got up in time to go training at 7am (the wedding was at 2pm). Sulwen knew she was never going to change her daughter, so as Tanni set off for her five-mile training circuit around the streets of Cardiff, she issued an ultimatum. ‘Do not crash your chair, do not get a black eye and do not fall out! Understand? If you do, I will never speak to you again.’ And Tanni obeyed.

  In 2001, a year after the Sydney 2000 Games and three years before the Athens 2004 Games, there was, says Tanni, ‘an eight-week window to get pregnant that year. If I had not fallen pregnant, we would have waited until after Athens,’ she adds.

  Tanni and Ian had thought Carys would arrive in mid-January 2002. In fact, she was born in early February, which meant less time than Tanni anticipated to get back into shape for the 2002 London Marathon, at which, for the sixth and final time of her career, she crossed the line as the winner.

  When Carys was just two weeks old her mother went to Spain for a training camp. A week later, she did a half-Marathon and then, when Carys was seven weeks old, a 10k race. Just nine weeks after giving birth, Tanni lined up for the London Marathon and won. After the race, she found blood in her urine and went to seek medical help from the St John Ambulance team. When she told them she was passing blood, she was advised
not to worry as it happened to a lot of women after such physical exertion. So she explained she’d had minor surgery a few weeks back.

  When asked what the surgery was she explained it was a caesarian to which she was asked how long ago it had taken place. When Tanni explained only nine weeks and six days had passed the volunteer misheard and said as 10 months had gone by, there was nothing to worry about. When Tanni explained it was less than 10 weeks, not 10 months, a mild panic ensued and a doctor was called for, who promptly admonished her. ‘Are you just stupid thinking you can do a Marathon nine weeks after a caesarian?’ he said.

  For Tanni, racing in London so soon after Carys’ arrival was an easy decision. ‘That is what you do,’ she says, adding, ‘If you are going to do something you do it properly.’ Still, it might have been a welcome sight if, at Athens 2004, Carys had looked up from her ice cream for just a second.

  Throughout her career, Grey-Thompson’s motivation, was to beat the best athletes in the world. If achieving this meant doing things others believed foolhardy, so be it. She wouldn’t change a thing.

  A few days after her 100m victory at Athens 2004, Tanni won the 400m, her second win of the Games and taking her all-time tally to 11 gold medals. This figure may be eclipsed at London 2012, as swimmer Dave Roberts took his total number of gold medals to 11 at Beijing 2008. At the Athens 2004 Games, however, it made Tanni Grey-Thompson Britain’s most successful British Paralympic athlete and you don’t get to that milestone without a lifetime’s dedication, professionalism and commitment.

  Even her retirement date was changed because illness prevented her from being at her best and she wanted to retire on her terms, not anyone else’s. The plan was to finish at the World Championships in Assen, in the Netherlands, in September 2006, but the build-up didn’t go according to plan. ‘I went to the World Championships and got gold, silver and bronze, but didn’t feel I did myself justice,’ she reveals. ‘Not winning when you have done everything possible I can accept, but I came away thinking that wasn’t me doing my best.’