Paralympic Heroes

by Cathy Wood

  As Helene returned to her car, interest pricked, she saw an athlete with a disability wearing a Great Britain rowing top and wondered how on earth someone without the use of their legs could perform in a sport known for its need for balance and for the strength and power required from the lower body.

  Paralympic Rowing includes boats which are both single-sex and mixed gender. The sport was first introduced at the World Rowing Championships in Seville in 2002, when 38 rowers took part. It is included at London 2012 for the second time in Paralympic Games’ history and has grown since it was first contested – 96 athletes are expected to participate in four medal events.

  In the months that followed, Helene decided to try rowing as a way to stay fit in the build-up to the new wheelchair basketball season. ‘I actually really liked it,’ she recalls, ‘although I was utterly useless.’ She then attended to the 2005 National Championships in Nottingham and after just six months of rowing, won her category – the Arms Only Women’s Single Sculls (AW1x). ‘The vibe was so different from wheelchair basketball, it was exhilarating,’ she says.

  Her technique and experience may have been found wanting in the early days, but being in a boat gave her something she thought lost for ever. ‘There are no similarities in terms of physique between a rower and a ballet dancer,’ she explained, ‘but in terms of attention to detail and learning how to move a boat in what appears to be a fluent, effortless and graceful way, they are very similar.’

  As 2005 closed and a new year beckoned, Helene decided to set clear intentions. The World Championships were coming to Eton Dorney in 2006 and for the first time Helene’s class, the Single Scull, was included. The possibility of competing at the World Championships was within her grasp.

  She took a picture frame and placed it on a wall at home. In the frame was the medal won from the National Championships and then, next to it, a gap which she intended to fill with a gold medal from the World Championships. In the meantime, she placed a postcard, advertising the event at Eton Dorney, in the gap. ‘Whenever I had to get up early and go training before work when it was cold and wet outside, I would look at that frame and tell myself the reason I was doing it was so I could put the gold medal in the empty space. It was a way to motivate myself.’

  Whatever the psychology, the approach was devastatingly effective. Helene gained selection for the World Championships and went on to win the Single Scull Adapative Rowing title by a massive 12-second margin – the kind of margin that’s almost unheard of. Britain’s newest World Champion was enjoying a new lease of life. In a boat, the differences between disabled and non-disabled athletes are not immediately obvious. ‘In some ways the joy of being in a rowing boat is that I’m not sitting in my chair,’ she says. ‘It’s a step towards normality and the movement you get in a boat is liberating. I really like training in a natural environment and when I am rowing, I don’t feel I am doing disability sport.’

  That normality was helped by the approach taken by British Rowing, which has been highly successful in integrating the relatively new Paralympic Rowing squad into a well-established, and successful, Olympic one. This means Paralympic Rowers learn from the outset what is expected in terms of performance and behaviour, and it has positive knock-on benefits for both sets of rowers. ‘One of the things that appealed to me about rowing was the way British Rowing integrate it. It’s a very good system and we work as hard as an Olympic athlete,’ Helene says.

  And hard work was certainly what she took on in the period between winning the World Championships of 2006 and going to Beijing in 2008, where Paralympic Rowing was featuring on the Paralympic programme for the first time. Despite continuing health problems, which almost ruined her Paralympic debut, she repeated her World Championship performance and added Paralympic Gold to the World Gold now sitting in the picture frame at home.

  Whatever else happens in Helene Raynsford’s life she will always be the athlete who won the first-ever Rowing gold medal at the Paralympic Games. ‘No one can ever take that away from me,’ she says, ‘and there was huge excitement at the enormity of that achievement.’

  But it wasn’t until Helene and her teammates returned to the UK and took part in the joint Olympic and Paralympic parade in October 2008 that all the hard work and effort really sank in. ‘It was nice to meet Gordon Brown and go to Buckingham Palace, but for all the people we got to meet it was good for them to be seen around the athletes. But the parade was on a really cold day and the streets were absolutely crammed. I remember one old lady standing on a stool by the side of the road with a huge flag: that’s when I realised we really had gone out and achieved something,’ she continues.

  And she’ll probably never forget the moment the floats had to stop and people lining the streets called out her name and shouted their congratulations. ‘We had missed the build-up to the Olympics at home because we were training in Spain and until that day, we had no idea how much the nation were behind us. It gave us all such a sense of recognition,’ she adds.

  Helene’s delight was short-lived, as she had to take 2009 off because of illness. In 2010, with eyes on London, she decided to prepare to race again. The lure of a home Games and the rapturous public reception were factors too important to ignore. ‘I would love to defend my title in 2012,’ she says.

  For Helene, who will be 32 by the start of the London 2012 Games, it’s a strong pull, not least because Eton Dorney was where she was first introduced to rowing, to an experience she will never forget and to an event that changed her life. ‘As a dancer I was classed as elegant. When you have a disability, especially a movement disorder like I have, you are not classed as elegant any more. And yet when you are in the boat, the movement to push it through the water is very elegant.’

  It was also the place she became the first-ever World Champion in her class and where Maureen and Robin saw their daughter once more brimming with the vitality of life. Add to that Helene Raynsford on top of the podium, a Union Flag around her shoulders and another rising to the top of the flagpole while the National Anthem drifts towards the thousands of expected spectators and it’s a compelling image. And surely, that’s one thing that little girls dream will happen to them when they grow up.

  Chapter Five

  It Could Happen to Anyone

  ‘Acceptance of what happens is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.’

  William James, psychologist and philosopher

  There are those who are born with a disability and others who are catapulted into it through traumatic accident, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because of illness.

  But whether it’s a random incident or a genetic condition the consequences are devastating for those whose lives change in an instant. After all, how can it be that one day a tall, fit young man walks through a door and finds, a few hours later, that all use of his lower limbs has gone? How do you explain to a bright, sporty teenager that the darkness that has closed in and destroyed his vision between going to bed the night before and getting up the following morning is both irreparable and permanent? Or tell a soldier’s mother that her son, whom she just waved goodbye to after being on leave, has stepped on a mine in a foreign land and had half his leg blown away?

  Life, with accident, illness and malice, happens but that does not make the injustice of it any easier to accept – initially, at least. Because occasionally, those who have had their life’s dreams ripped away without warning have been able to turn devastating events into huge success.

  ***

  It was Saturday 12 February 2005 and spring term was in full swing at Warwick University. Even so, it was the weekend and Tom Aggar, a 6ft 3in, rugby-playing 21-year-old, was looking forward to kicking back and relaxing a bit. After all, life was pretty good: lectures and essays for his Biological Sciences degree were well on track and after three happy years, student life was nearing an end. What’s more, unlike many young men his age, Aggar had a good idea of what he wanted to do next.
>
  As a young boy, and throughout his time at Queen Elizabeth’s School Barnet, North London, Aggar lived to play sport. He was good enough to swim and play water polo for Hertfordshire and be spotted by rugby’s Saracens Youth Development squad, which he later joined. As school gave way to university, he continued to impress on the rugby field, playing second-row forward for Warwick University’s First XV.

  Such was his love of sport and the outdoors that he felt drawn towards a life in the military after graduation and applied to be an officer in the Royal Marines. ‘I didn’t think there was a bigger challenge than the Marines,’ he explains. Motivated not by Britain’s invasion of Iraq almost two years earlier, but by a desire to face new and bigger physical and mental challenges, Aggar had attended two interviews and subsequently been invited to a Royal Marines assessment weekend later in 2005.

  In addition, he had another reason to look forward to that particular February weekend. Joe, his 19-year-old brother, was visiting from his home in Enfield, north London and as always, he knew they would enjoy spending time together. The older they got, the closer the bond between them seemed to grow.

  Aggar heard about a party a few miles away in Leamington at the home of one of his fellow rugby players and the brothers decided to attend. The house was at the end of a steep drive and next to it, at a much lower level, was a block of flats with a concrete drive.

  It was around 8pm when they arrived at the house, which was already full to bursting. By 9pm it was so crowded Tom decided to head for a side door and into the garden to join Joe, who he’d seen going out the same way earlier in the evening. Leaving the noise and light of the house behind, he stepped outside and into an experience nothing could ever have prepared him for. He was met by complete darkness and an eerie silence: it was pitch black. Without a torch, an outside light or a brightly shining moon to illuminate the way, it was impossible to see. He took a few moments to adjust his vision and then headed towards the garden. And then he did what thousands of us have done in our lifetimes and thought nothing of: he scuffed his foot. Only in Tom’s case it caused him to fall forward and down a 12-foot drop onto the concrete drive of the block of flats next door, which were at a lower level to the house. Like the path he fell off, the drive was also totally unlit.

  ‘As I fell forward I just remember losing control,’ recalls Tom, who blacked out in the fall. By the time he came round, he wondered where he was and what he was doing there. ‘I knew I had been knocked out. I tried getting up but it wasn’t working and at first, I couldn’t work out why.’ As he propped himself up on his hands he discovered the reason for his lack of mobility – an excruciating pain in his back. ‘I had been a lifeguard,’ he says, ‘and doing biology, I knew what I had done.’

  Alone, in shock and hidden from view of anyone who might have gone out to look for him, Tom sat motionless. Ten minutes passed, then another and then another. One hour became two and still he sat in silence even though help was close at hand and he could easily have accessed it. Despite the impact of the fall he had in his trouser pocket a fully charged, undamaged mobile phone with more than enough reception to make a call. But as the night wore on and sleet started to fall on the thin jumper he was wearing, the phone stayed in his pocket.

  Deep down he knew. Having studied Biological Sciences for the best part of three years, been a lifeguard and completed First Aid courses, he had a better understanding than most about the way the body moves and how it works. The pain he was in and a lack of lower-limb movement enabled him to make an educated guess about his injury, but, initially at least, shock and denial set in and he needed time alone. So he waited. ‘I didn’t want to call for help,’ he explains, ‘as then I would have to accept something pretty bad had happened.’

  Eventually, more than two hours after the fall and by now freezing cold, Tom pulled out the phone and slowly tapped in 999. Calmly he told the operator what he thought he had done and where the crew could find him. The place where he fell wasn’t visible from the road so at first the ambulance drove right past, forcing him to call back to direct them. He still hadn’t told anyone in the house what had happened.

  As the paramedics arrived Tom told them what he thought he had done. They placed him on a spinal board before making the short trip to Coventry Hospital. Once there he was taken for a CT scan which would, in time, confirm what he himself suspected, although no information was revealed. The scans showed beyond doubt that his lower back was broken and he was paralysed from the waist down.

  As nurses and doctors came and went they repeatedly asked permission to call his parents who, along with Joe, remained unaware of unfolding events. For Joe, the youngest person affected by events that night, the aftermath was devastating. Having looked for his brother for ages and having failing to find him, he decided to head back to the Warwick campus alone, fully expecting to find Tom already in his room waiting for him.

  But Aggar was in Coventry Hospital and, despite the shock and pain, still refused each request to contact Joe, or Marion and Bob, his parents. By now it was late on Saturday night and in all likelihood his parents would already be asleep at the family home he and Joe had grown up in.

  He wanted to afford them one more night of thinking their bright, talented, fit son was on the verge of finishing his degree and about to embark on a post-university selection course, which, if successful, would see him join the Royal Marines. What possible good would be served by having a total stranger call his sleeping parents in the middle of the night with the sort of devastating news that would forever change all their lives? ‘I just could not imagine them getting that news,’ says Tom.

  Not so long ago it was young men of Tom Aggar’s age who were most at risk of sustaining a spinal-cord injury. Car and motorbike crashes were the likely cause, followed by sporting accidents, but today it’s a different story.

  Improvements in car and motorbike safety, as well as more advanced roadside treatment following collisions means paralysis is more likely to come from falls, such as the one Tom had, from ladders, trees or heights, than from traffic accidents. The number of incidences of paralysis from sporting accidents, such as diving into shallow water, falling from a horse or playing rugby remains relatively small. A more active population later in life brings its own risks as a greater number of older people sustain serious spinal-cord injuries, usually as a result of a fall. According to the Spinal Injuries Association (SIA), three quarters of spinal injuries occur to men with an average age nearer to 40 than 20.

  Definitive statistics, though, remain hard to come by. Much like the history of the Paralympics themselves, accurate data is scarce and difficult to corroborate. This is partly because spinal cord injuries are not defined as a ‘notifiable disease or condition’ by the government and so hospitals are under no obligation to keep such statistics and partly because those who do keep statistics are the specialist spinal cord centres to which patients are often transferred, from a general hospital following an accident. But not all patients go down this route and those who are not transferred are, as a result, omitted from the data.

  According to the Spinal Injuries Association (SIA), anywhere between 800 and 1,200 people will have a spinal injury each year in the UK. This takes the number of spinally injured to between 35,000 and 40,000 – still a relatively small number compared to those affected by strokes or cancer in the UK. Unlike stroke or cancer sufferers, though, those confined to a wheelchair are likely to live with the condition for a very long time, particularly as improvements in medicine and living conditions enhance life expectancy.

  When a spinal-cord injury occurs the messages that travel through the spinal cord to the brain are impaired. These messages can either be completely or partially cut off. An incomplete injury will result in some function below the level of the injury, although this function may be compromised. A complete injury is where all sensation and muscle control is lost below the level of the injury. Nearly half of all spinal cord injuries are complete.

&n
bsp; ***

  Back in Coventry Hospital, Tom Aggar finally conceded. Night had given way to day and he agreed to let the hospital contact his parents knowing, in many ways, the news would be even harder on them than it was on him.

  The call Marion and Bob received in London that morning would tell them only that their son had been involved in an accident in which he had hurt his neck and that they should come immediately. The two-hour journey north must have seemed never-ending.

  Whatever fears they had were confirmed as they pulled into the hospital car park. There to greet them was a party of nurses and the surgeon in charge of Tom’s care. It didn’t take long to realise the presence of a surgeon, so early on a Sunday morning, could only mean the prognosis was not good. As they made their way inside there was more distressing news to come. A young nurse grabbed Marion by the arm, explaining Tom would never walk again and told her to prepare herself, and her family, for what lay ahead.

  For Marion, grappling with her own shock and denial, it was far too much information to absorb in one go, particularly as neither she nor Bob had any medical background or expertise. ‘As a parent you expect them to crash your car or have to be picked up when they are out late and drunk but this was totally out of our framework as parents and I remember thinking, I don’t know how to deal with this,’ Marion now recalls.

  When the consultant showed her the scan of Tom’s back and the point at which it was broken he explained the back was very badly swollen as a result of the traumatic impact. Surely, Marion reasoned, if the injury was recent and swollen and it was given time to settle, recovery would follow? After all, broken bones, even in the back, will heal.