Paralympic Heroes

by Cathy Wood

  As it happened, Stone was only in Rome as a helper after the physiotherapist who was supposed to accompany the team fell downstairs the night before departure and broke her arm. She stepped in to help and so began an association with the Paralympic Games that has seen her attend every Games since, from 1960 to 2008. ‘When I saw the accommodation I could not believe it,’ she says.

  Despite the setback the competitors took it all in good part. ‘We were here to take part in the Stoke Mandeville Games on the same fields as had been used for the Olympiads, which we had all watched so closely on TV only recently,’ wrote Malta’s Victor P. Amato.

  ‘The Olympic Village had sounded like fairy-land from afar, but it gave us a bit of a shock that first day when we found that we were going to live upstairs! How ever were we going to get up those ramps?’ he continued. ‘We had learned how to cope with difficulties, and we had come a long way, and nothing was going to be allowed to spoil our fun, so up those steps we got – wheelchairs and all – and in the end we learned to think nothing of it.’

  Getting up and down the stairs was dealt with by some in a novel way. The Americans would use their chairs to ‘bounce’ down the stairs but they, like everyone else, still had to get back up them. So the Italian Organising Committee asked the army to step in and a timetable was arranged whereby soldiers were placed at the foot of each flight of stairs to carry competitors up and down, no matter how late at night. ‘Wheelchair people are good at partying,’ Margaret observes. ‘They wouldn’t be going to bed early.’

  There were other challenges. Many doors were too narrow for wheelchair use, which meant the few bathrooms capable of accommodating wheels were occupied by many. ‘It was all very communal,’ continues Margaret. ‘Someone would be in the bath and you would be on the loo at the same time or having a wash. We all got to know each other pretty well – you had to put up and make do.’

  Another unplanned change was the announcement that the Acqua Acetosa sports ground would no longer be available. Instead, a new venue was found, which involved a 40-minute coach ride in each direction.

  Glitches aside, after the Opening Ceremony on Sunday,18 September, the Games began the following day with a programme of sports comprising: Archery, Wheelchair Basketball, Dartchery, Wheelchair Fencing, Athletics (Javelin, Precision Javelin, Shot Put, Indian Club Throwing), Snooker, Swimming, Table Tennis and Pentathlon. The Opening Ceremony took place on the warm-up track with tiered banking where spectators, including Jean Stone, stood. ‘You did get the sense it was an occasion and something different,’ she recalls, ‘but it was very much the Stoke Mandeville Games being held in Rome rather than at Stoke, and Guttmann was in charge.’ She also remembers many renditions of the Italian national anthem being played, repetitively, during the Opening Ceremony by the Italian Army band.

  Once word had filtered out about the possibility of hosting the Games in Rome there had been some apprehension about moving to another location and whether it could emulate the facilities at Stoke Mandeville. The unsuitable accommodation and change of sports ground did little to alleviate any tension, but in the end no one need have worried. Apart from a deluge of rain on the first day, the weather was kind and a few language problems aside, the athletes forged friendships with each other and relished the opportunity to be alongside those who truly appreciated what it was like to be disabled.

  As the new sports ground was so far from their accommodation all the competitors received a daily packed lunch. ‘We thought they were very lovely,’ says Margaret. ‘They each had a little bottle of wine with it. In England you didn’t do that kind of thing.’

  In 1960, just to get into the team you had to participate in more than one sport. There were no sports specialists then. Margaret was doing Archery and Swimming. The first she loved, the second she didn’t. ‘I just wasn’t good at it,’ she reveals. ‘I could only do backstroke.’

  Archery, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter and the event took place on the opening day of the competition. Margaret was used to shooting three arrows at a time and then having these collected and returned for the next round, but in Rome six arrows were shot at once and quickly collected for competitors to shoot again. It was soon over and she was wheeled away to watch the other events without any idea of how she had done. When the day drew to a close, she returned to the coach that had brought her there. As usual, she was carried on board and her wheelchair folded up and put away with all the others. It was only then that an official announced she was needed and the whole process took place in reverse. ‘To my total amazement I had won,’ she recalls of her Paralympic success. ‘I had got the gold medal. It was the first for Great Britain at that event and I was the first-ever gold medal winner, in any event for Britain.’

  As she wheeled herself to the winner’s rostrum she saw the British flag unfurled and heard the National Anthem played to all present. It was a magical moment. And while her medal was the first gold, it wasn’t the only one: the team’s final total was 20 gold, 15 silver and 20 bronze.

  But it wasn’t the only highlight for Margaret or the other 400 assembled athletes. Many would never forget being addressed by Pope John XXIII at Vatican City after the Games had ended:

  Dear Children,

  Recently, we welcomed at St Peter’s Square athletes from all parts of the world, who came for the Olympic Games, and we felt a keen happiness in looking upon this ardent youth, who came to take part in these healthy and peaceful competitions of the stadium.

  How much more moving for our hearts is the spectacle you offer to our eyes today! The weakening of your physical powers has not impaired your eagerness, and you have come to take part, in these recent days, with great enthusiasm in all kinds of games, the practice of which must have seemed to you for ever impossible.

  You have given a great example, which we would like to emphasise, because it can give a lead to all: You have shown what an energetic soul can achieve, in spite of apparently insurmountable obstacles imposed by the body.

  You are a living demonstration of the marvels of the virtue of energy.

  Even this excitement was surpassed by some more personal attention, notably for Father Brendan O’Sullivan (a team escort) and Father Leo Close (competitor and unofficial team chaplain), who both had a private audience. ‘When we are old and doddering, there will be one highlight of our trip to Rome that will remain always vivid in our memories – our audience with His Holiness Pope John XXIII,’ Father Leo Close wrote. ‘It was certainly an experience,’ Stone recalls of the week-long event.

  Buoyed by the moment, the British team left Rome on a high, which continued when they touched down in London, where Margaret Maughan was among the first to disembark to meet waiting photographers. ‘It was so exciting,’ she recalls. From London she completed the last part of her journey home to Preston, where she was warned the local press would be waiting for her.

  Back then homecomings were a little less extravagant and more down-to-earth than recent times and it must have been something of an anticlimax after the excitement of Rome to board the train. Particularly as Margaret’s seat, from London to Preston, was her own wheelchair loaded unceremoniously into the Guards Van. This is how Britain’s first Paralympic athlete to become a gold medallist travelled home. Not that she was complaining: travelling for the first time since her accident, shooting against international competition and participating with hundreds of other athletes, let alone winning, marked the start of Great Britain’s success at the Paralympic Games.

  Apart from some organisational issues the Games were a resounding success, with many athletes reflecting on how inspired they felt at the possibilities the event had ignited in them and a resolve to return four years hence. There was also an overriding sense that the Games had shown, once more, how sport overcomes barriers. Many athletes left believing in a better future. Nizar Bissat, the first paraplegic to represent Lebanon, wrote, ‘To the paraplegic hope is essential – it gives him courage, patience and th
e will to live.’

  Holding the Games had, in his view, been a catalyst for far-reaching change. ‘It has made many people talk about, and follow up news of the Games – especially those paraplegics all over the world who are very depressed and of low morale, and who have confined themselves to their own homes. By these means they will be encouraged to go outside their houses, forgetting their illness, and looking for a chance to join and cooperate in these Games. Thereby the aims of the Stoke Mandeville Games will be fulfilled.’

  Ludwig Guttmann was also pleased with how the Games had unfolded: ‘The first experiment to hold the Stoke Mandeville Games as an entity in another country, as an international sports festival comparable with the Olympic Games and other international sports events for the non-disabled, has been highly successful.’

  And he was quick to establish his view on certain points that others had raised, during and after the Rome 1960 Games. In particular, he came under increasing pressure to open the Games to athletes other than those with spinal-cord injuries but he was adamant the Games would remain as they were and that new disability groups, and events, would not be admitted. Guttmann felt that if other groups joined the Games there would be fewer competitors with spinal-cord injuries; instead, he suggested they set up their own events.

  ‘It is quite impossible to open the Stoke Mandeville Games to other forms of disability, such as amputees and the blind,’ he wrote in The Cord. ‘This really would be at the expense of the paraplegic sportsman, as it would immediately reduce the number of paralysed competitors who could be accommodated.’ But by the time those IX Annual International Stoke Mandeville Games ended on 25 September 1960, change was in the pipeline. Today, just a half-century on, the Paralympic Games have become the world’s second biggest multi-sports event after the Olympic Games. This has been, by any standards, a meteoric rise. Today we take for granted that every four years the Olympic Games will be held somewhere around the world and around a month later, the Paralympic Games will be held in the same city, using the same venues and accommodation.

  Guttmann lived in an age with no wheelchair-accessible transport or public conveniences, no Disability Discrimination Act or political correctness and no equal opportunities. What is so remarkable is not just his commitment to changing society’s view of the disabled but that he had – and held onto – his sporting dream, despite the prejudice.

  Of his belief to create a Games that would, one day, be parallel to the Olympic Games there is no doubt, but in 1948, could anyone have envisioned that the Paralympic Games of the 21st century would have their own international stars, performing cyclically on a worldwide stage watched by a global audience eager for more? No, never.

  Chapter Two

  The Changing Games

  ‘Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.’

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist

  Such is the pride that local people take in that fact Stoke Mandeville Hospital is the birthplace of the Paralympic Games that road signs have been erected along the county’s borders informing motorists that they have entered ‘Buckinghamshire – Birthplace of the Paralympics’. But from the moment the first Archery competition ended on that July day in 1948, the Games quickly evolved in terms of direction, understanding, athlete participation and sporting content.

  At the first fully international Paralympic Games in Rome 1960, 400 athletes took part in nine sports. By the time London 2012 comes round, 4,200 athletes are expected to compete in 20 sports. This tenfold increase in athletes in just over 50 years is immense by any measure. Part of the progression has come about because of the role of certain individuals as innovators, administrators and athletes – or all three.

  Ludwig Guttmann is the obvious early innovator, but there have been others with visions of their own. As time has passed, the Games have become less about medical rehabilitation and increasingly about sporting excellence, until the Games of today which are, exclusively, about sport for elite athletes with a disability, held in the same facilities around the world as the Olympics.

  But it’s not just the gigantic, multinational Olympic and Paralympic Games of the modern era that take years of planning and coordination. Fifty years ago, when the Paralympic Movement was in its infancy and there were hundreds, not thousands of competitors, the need to organise and look ahead was no different. In fact, it was arguably more challenging, since long-distance air travel was neither as accessible nor as affordable as it is today, particularly for disabled travellers. And the next Paralympic Games would certainly test travel endurance limits to the max.

  The 1964 Olympic Games were scheduled for Tokyo and Guttmann was keen to build on the success of the Rome 1960 Games and ensure the pattern of following the Olympic Games with the Paralympic Games continued. According to The Cord of 1964, even as events were unfolding on the sports ground at the Rome 1960 Games, discussions were taking place between Guttmann and Japanese delegates who had come to observe. Holding the Games in Asia would be another milestone, taking them outside Europe for the first time, and after the problems experienced in Italy, where the athletes had had to be carried up stairs to their accommodation, the International Stoke Mandeville Games Committee wanted to make sure that in Tokyo everything would be accessible.

  In 1962, as dialogue between the two countries continued, two Japanese paraplegics made the long, arduous journey to Stoke Mandeville to compete in the 11th Annual International Games for the first time.

  Their arrival took place the same year as Caz Walton (née Bryant), a 15-year-old with spina bifida, began a long and distinguished association with Paralympic sport. Selected to compete in eight Games, from Tokyo 1964 to Barcelona 1992, she clocked up 10 gold medals in Paralympic Athletics, Wheelchair Fencing, Table Tennis and Archery, was awarded an OBE for Services to Disability Sport and still works with ParalympicsGB today. After her competitive career ended, she continued to attend every Games in one capacity or another.

  But it all started when Walton was a patient at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where she was told swimming would help her condition. After taking the advice offered by her physiotherapist at the time her parents took her to Stoke Mandeville, where she ended up competing in the National Games, which took place each June. Two years later, somewhat unexpectedly, Walton was asked to represent Britain at the Tokyo 1964 Games after a girl who was to have been in the team fell ill with three weeks to go. It was in Tokyo that she won her first two gold medals, although not in the pool but on the track. Today it might seem inconceivable to see an athlete first in the pool and then on the track in the same Games, but in the 1960s and 1970s doubling up, to compete in more than one sport was common practice. ‘There was so little finance in those days we had to do more than one sport just to be considered for the team,’ recalls Caz. ‘The more the Games went on, the less there was a need to do multiple sports.’

  Before departing for Tokyo she received a letter instructing her to meet at Stoke Mandeville, where specially acquired bottle-green uniforms were distributed. Tommy Taylor and Michael Beck, two quadriplegics, reflected on their newly acquired clothing with enthusiasm. ‘Our uniform was a dark green blazer, white trousers and white shoes, not to forget the white hat! Fab gear!’ they wrote in The Cord that year. White, though, is not a good colour for athletes in a wheelchair since any splash or dirt from wet and well-used roads or pathways would, inevitably, end up on their clothing, making it almost impossible to keep clean. And, unlike today, the kit wasn’t theirs to keep: at the end of the Games it had to be returned, hung up and stored in Stoke Mandeville for use next time around.

  Still, Taylor and Beck weren’t complaining. Such was the severity of their disability they never imagined they would gain selection for Britain, let alone fly thousands of miles around the world, or be recipients of the £10 pocket money distributed to all team members by the Paraplegic Sports Endowment Fund, originally set up to ensure the Stoke Mandeville Games had a secure
financial basis. They were thrilled that any of this was happening.

  Getting to Tokyo required a major effort in itself as the chartered KLM flight had to refuel in Scotland before a journey that took around 22 hours, about 10 hours longer than it would today. And in some cases it required a huge effort just to get the athletes off the plane.

  Jean Stone, who, as already mentioned, had attended the 1960 Games as a young helper for the British team and who later became involved with the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) as technical secretary of the Sports Council, remembers the moment two members of Japan’s Self Defence Force arrived to lift one of the larger team members off the plane, only to realise they were not up to the challenge. ‘They looked at the athlete, who must have been 18 or 19 stone, and then looked at each other and they could not keep their faces straight,’ she recalls. ‘They went away and came back with reinforcements.’

  Once the team arrived, though, they found the Japanese friendly and polite towards their new guests, if bemused. In 1964, it wasn’t common for wheelchair users to lead a normal life. ‘In Japan if you went outside the Village they couldn’t believe what they were seeing,’ recalls Caz Walton. ‘When you went abroad it was almost as if you had grown horns and arrived from Mars.’

  Curiosity aside, the Japanese turned out to be admirable hosts. All the Olympic signage had gone, replaced by Paralympic signs showing a picture of wheelchair wheels. ‘I have been to three Games in Asia and all three have been excellent,’ says Caz. ‘The hospitality has been second to none.’

  The Games were opened in the presence of Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko (now the Emperor and Empress of Japan), who listened as the athlete oath, including an agreement for participants to conduct the Games in a spirit of ‘friendship, unity and sportsmanship’, was read out. For the athletes it was another memorable experience, reinforcing friendships, understanding and team spirit.