Paralympic Heroes

by Cathy Wood

  It was too good an opportunity to miss. ‘It was brilliant,’ said Pearson. ‘He knows what he is doing; he is a leader. And we get on really well.’

  Inevitably the transition from a team environment to an individual one took some adjustment. ‘Initially it was strange because I was so used to being surrounded by a team,’ she explains, ‘but I knew it was the right thing and I’ve never regretted it.’

  Pearson was selected to race in her first major event, the IPC World Athletics Championships, in New Zealand in January 2011, and is now focused on London 2012.

  Although Olympians who have switched sports, such as Rebecca Romero, who won a silver medal in the Quadruple Sculls for Britain in Rowing at Athens in 2004 and then switched to Track Cycling, winning gold in the Individual Pursuit at Beijing four years later, are extremely rare, this is not the case in Paralympic sport. If successfully selected for London 2012, Josie Pearson will join a long list of competitors who have successfully switched sports at the highest level, including Sarah Storey (Swimming and Cycling), Jody Cundy (Swimming and Cycling) and Richard Whitehead (Ice Sledge Hockey and Athletics).

  At London 2012 Pearson intends to drop the ball and concentrate instead on the 100m, 200m and 400m on the track.

  ***

  Sometimes it is an inexplicable accident that propels the person affected into a life they or their loved ones never imagined, as was the case with Tom Aggar and Josie Pearson. Other times a cruel twist of fate has the same effect, which is what happened to 14-year-old Chris Holmes.

  Born in Peterborough, Chris and his family moved at the age of three to Kidderminster, Worcestershire, where he grew up. Educated at the local comprehensive, Harry Cheshire High School, it was obvious he had a natural aptitude for sport. It was in the swimming pool he excelled and where his parents, Margaret, a part-time bookkeeper at the local cattle market, and Michael, who worked for the County Council, would happily take him to and from training.

  Unlike most 14-year-olds, though, Chris went to bed one night and woke the following day to find he was almost totally blind. What little sight remained eventually also disappeared as the result of a condition called Familial Exudative Vitreoretinopathy, or FEVR. The disease varies both in intensity and effect, but in Chris’s case the folds in his retina failed to grow in the usual way and instead tore, which caused at first partial and then total blindness. Although genetic, there was no history of sight problems in the family background, which meant his blindness came as a bolt from the blue.

  Today Chris Holmes is one of around 370,000 people registered blind or partially sighted in this country according to figures released by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNID).

  Losing sight permanently and unexpectedly would be difficult enough for any young teenager, let alone one with a gift for swimming and a burning desire to be good enough to compete for his country. Supported by his parents, two elder siblings, and his school, Chris made it clear that with or without his sight he still intended to swim for Britain and achieve good enough A-level grades to read Politics at Cambridge. ‘It changed the practicalities but the fundamental approach remained the same,’ he explains.

  Three months after going blind, he was back in the pool training alongside his sighted teammates. A year later, he travelled to the Junior European Championships in Moscow, where he was well and truly beaten by better swimmers. It wasn’t an experience he enjoyed, or a performance he was happy with, so Holmes decided to employ the same training methods as Olympic athletes and to do that, he needed to up his game, change to a different swimming club further from his home and adopt an entirely new mental approach to his desire for success. ‘The Europeans were a real baptism of fire for me as I realised, for the first time, how hard it was going to be to be a world-class swimmer, so I had to ask myself what I needed to do to take my swimming to another level,’ he says.

  By the following year, less than two years after darkness had descended, Chris Holmes was on a plane to South Korea for the Seoul 1988 Paralympic Games, the first of four he would leave his mark on. This was only the fourth time blind athletes had competed at the Paralympic Games since their inclusion, for the first time, at Toronto 1976, then at Arnhem 1980, and New York and Stoke Mandeville (the year the Games were split between two countries) in 1984.

  More than any of the other Games Holmes attended, it was Seoul which forever changed his outlook, goals and ambitions. It was his first Games and as he stepped off the first-ever long-haul flight of his life, he suddenly found himself rubbing shoulders with thousands of athletes who had travelled from a hundred countries across the globe. There, he met other swimmers, archers, shooters and blind football and judo players from different cultures and backgrounds, with vastly different experiences of disability. It expanded his horizons and ambitions in a way nothing had ever done before: it would be an experience he would carry with him throughout his career and into retirement. ‘I was just a boy from Kidderminster,’ he says. ‘We never went abroad on foreign holidays and to find myself on the other side of the world, in South Korea, was extraordinary.’

  Many say it was the Seoul 1988 Games which marked a sea-change in attitudes towards Paralympic sport. From this moment on, the Paralympic Games have always been held in the same Host City as the Olympic Games and this new parity was profound. Those athletes who did compete in 1988 were overwhelmed by the experience of using exactly the same gleaming facilities the Olympians had a few weeks earlier. ‘To be swimming in the pool that had just been used by the Olympians was fantastic,’ says Holmes.

  Returning with two silver medals and a bronze, Chris knew what he now needed to do if he wanted to be the best in the world by the time Barcelona came round in under four years’ time. And that, together with successfully gaining entry to Cambridge, was the plan he put into action with spectacular results.

  Chris Holmes went on to become one of the most successful British Paralympians of all time, winning nine gold medals in the pool in a career spanning 14 years. This included six gold medals in a single Paralympic Games (Barcelona 1992), a feat which, to date, has never been equalled by another British Paralympic athlete.

  After retiring in 2002 following a short career working in commercial law, Holmes accepted a post as Director of Paralympic Integration at the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. His job is to ensure every aspect of the Paralympic Games is embedded in the ethos of the organising committee in a way which has never been done before. That means whether it’s the food being served in the Athletes’ Village or the way athletes are transported from Village to venue, the needs of the Paralympians must be as much a part of the planning as those of the Olympians.

  If successful, this legacy, while considerably less visible than the sell-out crowds, church congregations and screaming schoolchildren seen in South Korea, will remain one of London’s biggest and most far-reaching gifts to the Paralympic Movement.

  ***

  But for a cruel twist of fate neither Chris Holmes nor Tom Aggar would have ended up as Paralympic athletes, let alone the best in the world at what they do. Their route to the top of the Paralympic podium came about through illness and accident respectively. And while both categories are represented at the Paralympic Games so too is another, unrelated group of athletes – those who are struck down by war.

  Right from the beginning war has had a major impact on Paralympic sport. It was the fear of an influx of casualties from the push on the Second Front in spring 1944 which led to a special spinal unit being opened at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and it was ex-servicemen who took part in the first disabled competition in 1948.

  Today Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan has seen more than 360 soldiers die so far, a figure that will be out of date from almost the moment it is written. In addition, according to figures released by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) from 7 October 2001 when data began until 31 January 2011, 1,608 soldiers were wounded in battle. Of those the greatest number of casualti
es occurred in 2009 and 2010, when a total of 1,026 soldiers were wounded.

  These figures show that while there has been significant loss of life from war, a large, remaining issue is the repatriation, recovery and rehabilitation of the hundreds who now survive, albeit often with horrific and life-changing injuries. Thanks to improvements in medicine and the quality of the British field hospitals in theatres of war – according to the MOD in 2010 alone there were 76 amputations.

  With an ever-increasing number of wounded and maimed military personnel to account for and take care of, a military initiative called ‘Battle Back’ was launched on 28 July 2008, 60 years after Ludwig Guttmann started the Stoke Mandeville Games with two teams of ex-service personnel participating in Archery.

  Battle Back was formed by Lieutenant Colonel Fred Hargreaves with backing from the Help for Heroes charity and £50,000 from the Defence budget. ‘There wasn’t anything in place like this before,’ he explained. ‘Until now, some wounded Service personnel have managed to arrange their own activities through existing programmes, but there has never been a sort of “bespoke” nature to it.’

  Major Martin Colclough was the first officer appointed to run the programme from Headley Court (the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre, near Epsom in Surrey) and was instrumental in providing a single point of contact for wounded personnel.

  Although soldiers fighting in Afghanistan are more likely to step on an embedded IED (Improvised Explosive Device) and have one or both legs blown off rather than end up paralysed, the principles of Battle Back hold true to Guttmann’s. The aim is to use adventure training, and sport, be that skiing in Bavaria, sitting volleyball, gliding, swimming the Channel, athletics, cycling or sailing, as an integral part of the soldiers’ rehabilitation and to help them return to an independent, active life.

  Battle Back is open to all servicemen and women regardless of how they have sustained their injuries. It is based in Headley Court and other Service rehabilitation centres. As well as facilitating adventure training and opportunities to play and participate in sport for all wounded personnel, Battle Back also seeks to provide access to elite sporting opportunities through various talent-identification programmes run both by National Governing Bodies (NGBs) and by ParalympicsGB.

  When the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony takes place on 27 July, it will be the eve of Battle Back’s fourth anniversary. To date three ‘Battle Backers’, as they are known, have represented Britain in various sports. All are training with, and in contention for, the ParalympicsGB 2012 team. More than 24 others are active in winter Paralympic sports. Currently, there are more elite winter Battle Backers than summer ones, with three skiers and four ice-sledge hockey players representing Britain in 2011; another has represented England in Blind Football.

  One serving soldier who has benefited from the Battle Back initiative is Corporal Terry ‘Tel’ Byrne. Byrne only ever wanted to do one thing and that was to join the Army. Not just any old regiment, though: he wanted to be part of the elite Parachute Regiment. Whether that was because he was surrounded by five sisters growing up in Thornton-Cleveleys, near Blackpool, or he simply wanted to be the best of the best, the 26-year-old had his mind made up from the age of 12 when he told his mum, Sue (who worked in the local laundry) of his decision.

  At 17, having been something of a tearaway at school who got by academically with the minimum GCSEs required, he joined up. Twenty-six weeks later, with training at Catterick, North Yorkshire, successfully completed, Tel Byrne arrived at his battalion. Days later, on his 18th birthday, he was deployed on his first tour of duty: to Northern Ireland. ‘It was just miles and miles of patrolling,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t particularly exciting, but it was a good way to join the battalion.’

  Overseas exercises in the USA and Africa, and two peacekeeping tours in Iraq followed. He enjoyed every one of the challenges thrown at him. ‘I loved it: I got to travel the world with my mates. The job, the training, the comradeship, I loved the whole lot of it. The mates you get in the Army, you will never get in Civvy Street,’ he says. ‘You are a lot closer because some of the stuff you have done together is a lot more extreme.’

  By the age of 24 he’d found each tour had given him the chance to put into practice what he had learnt. ‘I loved being on tour because that is what you join the Army for,’ he says. ‘That is when you get to work together as a team, that is when you shine as an individual, as a battalion, as a company.’

  In April 2008, he was posted to Afghanistan. The days were long, up to 16 hours, and the work dangerous and demanding, often involving prolonged engagements with the enemy. But he relished the life, the chance to keep the enemy firmly on the back foot and the additional responsibility he had for the 20 or so men in his platoon. Once the day’s work was done, and the kit checked and prepared for its next use, he liked nothing better than a game of chess or volleyball with his mates as a way of relaxing back at camp. ‘It is hard work,’ he says, ‘but you also have a laugh with the blokes.’

  After three months Byrne was back home in the UK for two weeks of enjoyable rest and recovery before he flew back to Afghanistan. It was 10 August 2008, two days after the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games.

  On his first night back on duty he left his base on a 10km foot patrol at 2am with around 20 men. They would complete the patrol and then return to base. In front was a lead man, then Byrne, followed by the rest of the men. They were less than 500m from base when the group entered a field. The lead man stepped into a ditch and stepped out, Byrne stepped in and was blown out. He landed on the ground.

  ‘I heard a massive bang and I could smell explosives burning all around me. I didn’t know it was me at the time,’ he says. ‘I shouted, “Medic!”’, instinctively knowing someone nearby needed attention. Only as he stood up and his right leg crumbled beneath him, did he realise that someone was himself. Reaching for his emergency medical supplies he gave himself a morphine injection and as he did so, realised that his little finger was badly mangled. With a doctor among his party he was stretchered back to the camp they’d just left. Less than half an hour later, he was in a helicopter on the way to Camp Bastion, the main military base for the British Army in Afghanistan, and to a fully equipped field hospital.

  As Corporal Byrne was off-loaded from the helicopter he was greeted by a phalanx of doctors, nurses and surgeons, who cleaned his wounds and stablised his leg. Then he was handed a phone and asked if he would like to call his mother as it would be better for her to hear the news of his injuries from him than anyone else. After 12 hours, he was on a flight back to the UK and, less than 24 hours after being blown up, in Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham (the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine). ‘The casualty evacuation is brilliant,’ he says.

  After five days in Selly Oak and daily operations to try and save the little finger of his right hand, Byrne was visited by a doctor who told him his leg was very badly damaged and although they could save it, if they did so he would never walk properly again and it would have to be fused at the ankle. He recommended the leg and little finger be amputated. ‘There and then, I said, “Cut it off,”’ Byrne recalls. ‘I was right in my own head. Everything was okay and I was quite happy about it: I knew I would get myself a fake leg and be up and running about.’

  It was Wednesday 20 August. Three days earlier, at Beijing 2008, Michael Phelps secured gold in the 4 x 100m Medley Relay, taking his gold medal tally from Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 to 14, making him the most-decorated Olympic gold medal winner of all time. On the morning of Thursday 21 August Byrne had his right leg below, the knee and the little finger of his right hand amputated. His recovery at Selly Oak continued for another five weeks, with him passing the time working as hard as he could on his physiotherapy and watching the Beijing Paralympic games. He knew he would never be able to return to frontline soldiering.

  As he watched Britain’s Paralympic cyclists, such as Jody Cundy and Sarah Storey, power their way to victory in Beijing
, he made a decision about what he would do next. ‘I said to the nurses, right, I will be there in London,’ he recalls. ‘I chose there and then that was what I wanted to do.’

  Watching the British flag rise to the top of the flagpole day after day convinced Byrne this was what he wanted to do next, even though it was more than a decade since he last rode a bike, and even then it was only to mess about on. First, though, he had to learn to walk.

  After Selly Oak, he was transferred to Headley Court, where his injury was put into a different context. ‘When I stood on that bomb it wasn’t in my plans,’ he says, ‘but I accepted it straight away. It is the cards I have been dealt.’

  The bomb was so big it could easily have killed Byrne and the other men out on foot patrol that day. He knew he’d been lucky, a belief reinforced by his stay at Headley Court: ‘I lost my right leg below my knee which, if you go to Headley Court, is a scratch. That is the way I see it.’

  A few days after arriving at the Surrey military rehabilitation centre, he got a call from one of his Army mates telling him that flights to Australia had been booked and tickets purchased for the final of the Rugby League World Cup in November.

  It normally takes six to eight months for injured soldiers to successfully complete the Headley Court rehabilitation process: Byrne had six weeks. ‘In my mind I had to be walking, running again, off the sticks and out of the wheelchair so I could go to Australia and be as normal as possible,’ he says.

  And so, six weeks later, he left Headley Court with about enough time to pack his bags for Australia. ‘I could walk, run and hop on my right leg. I could do everything, so they discharged me completely,’ he says. He took his crutches to Australia as back-up, but when a friend dropped a boulder on his foot and broke it, Byrne handed the crutches over to him. ‘I was on my own then, but it was the best way to get on with my new leg,’ he says.