Paralympic Heroes

by Cathy Wood

  The attitude of the coach at the holiday park could not have been in starker contrast to the welcome he was given by coach Bill Furness when he asked if he could transfer from his local club to Nova Centurion Swimming Club, where Furness coached. This was a far bigger club with more experience and pool time on offer. ‘He was one of the best coaches in the country,’ Reddish explains. And if he wanted to be the best, he needed to surround himself with like-minded individuals.

  Years later, Bill Furness achieved recognition of his own. Today he coaches Rebecca Adlington, the swimmer no one had heard of before Beijing, who went on to win two gold medals and break the longest-standing world record in swimming, the women’s 800m Freestyle.

  ‘We were honest with each other,’ says Reddish. ‘We decided to give it a go and see if, between us, we could make it work.’ In fact, he says, Bill Furness saw him as an asset to his squad because of the example he set. ‘I never missed a work out,’ he recalls.

  Perhaps today’s elite athletes could learn something from the attitude of Tim Reddish, Chris Holmes and other athletes of that era. ‘It isn’t about kudos for us,’ Tim says. ‘We went out and made things happen in a positive way.’ And they did so without a big fanfare and usually on a shoestring budget.

  Reddish lived out his dream and went on to compete at two more Paralympic Games: at Atlanta 1996, where he won silver in the 200m Individual Medley and bronze in the 100m Freestyle, and at Sydney 2000, where he won another silver in the 4 x 100m Medley Relay before retiring with five Paralympic medals from three Games.

  His dream, and ultimate successes, had a huge impact on him and his family. ‘It gave me a second chance at life,’ he admits. But none of the medals or accolades he went on to achieve would have been possible without the total support of those closest to him and years of hard work on his part. ‘I didn’t make sacrifices, because I could have stopped at any time, ‘ he says, ‘but Val and the boys did.’

  That said, no one in the Reddish family regrets the journey, or the experiences, for one minute. ‘We would do the same again,’ Tim continues. ‘The boys gained from it in life, as well as me: they loved being around the athletes and visiting places around the world.’

  There may have been sacrifices, but they all shared in the journey. And they weren’t the only ones to benefit. In 1992, Maggie Kelly-Hohmann, the Olympic swimmer who first challenged Tim to compete at the Paralympic Games, received a present – Tim Reddish’s participation medal from the Barcelona Paralympic Games.

  ***

  No parent expects to wake up one Saturday morning looking forward to a family weekend ahead only to discover, by the end of it, one of their children will never walk again. But when an event of such personal magnitude does happen, sometimes help appears from the most unlikely places. And it continues to come for years after the initial event, or so seemed to be the case with Clare Strange.

  Maybe it was the kind of friends she attracted growing up in the small Buckinghamshire village of Radnage, or perhaps it was because it was the type of place where no one needed guidance on how to look out for each other. Whatever it was, a theme running through Strange’s story is the readiness with which a large circle of friends, from all the different areas of her life, offered and delivered help when it was most needed.

  Although Clare played any sport on offer as a child what she loved most was competing in mounted games on her horse, Dudley. By the age of 13 she wanted to win the Horse of the Year Show as that was the ultimate competition – and where mounted games as a branch of equestrian sport first began.

  Fun and fast-moving, mounted games is an exhilarating sport, which involves riders and their ponies competing in a variety of obstacle- and relay-type races. Excellent riding skills and good hand-to-eye coordination are essential. The concept was originally inspired by Prince Philip, who asked the then director of the Horse of the Year Show, Colonel Sir Mike Ansell, if he could come up with a mounted competition so that ordinary children could enjoy the thrill and excitement of competing without necessarily having to own their own expensive pony.

  In 1957, the inaugural Mounted Games Championships took place at the Horse of the Year Show competing for the Prince Philip Cup. It was a huge success but as Pony Club rules state riders can only compete until the age of 14, there was no progression for older riders. This led to the founding in 1984 of the Mounted Games Association of Great Britain, which enabled riders over the age of 14 to compete. There are three categories: Minis (under 12), Junior (under 17) and Open, for any age, and today, more than 25 years later, mounted games are enjoyed throughout the world.

  It was in this ‘mad and crazy’ world Clare excelled, enjoying jumping off Dudley as he was galloping along and then, having retrieved the relevant item, leaping back on. And she was good, representing the south of England at competitive level and in all likelihood, going on to ride for England one day.

  It was usual for Clare to spend weekends competing and so it was something of a rarity for her to find that 10 days after her 18th birthday, she had an unexpected weekend off. It seemed the perfect time to host a belated birthday party for the extended family. With no pressure to get ready for competition, she decided to spend the morning with her younger brother Dan and friend Richard, taking the horses for some gentle morning exercise through the woods close to where they lived.

  There were trees all around and so as the three galloped along, they were careful to weave a path around the trunks. And then suddenly there was a tree trunk right in Clare and Dudley’s way. An instant decision was needed, so Clare leaned her body over to the left so that she wouldn’t be too close to the tree but her sudden shift in weight threw his balance and Dudley went right instead. Clare took a glancing blow to the side of her head from the tree, forcing her off Dudley. The impact caused the top half of her body to instantly stop but the bottom half carried on through, dislocating Clare’s spine and severing her spinal cord.

  Dan immediately dismounted and rushed to his sister’s aid. As he did so, the two saddled horses continued through the woods. When they galloped past the nearby farm, friends realised something terrible had happened and rushed to help. After the alarm was raised it set in motion a train of coincidences and acts of kindness which undoubtedly aided Clare’s recovery.

  As it was clear a suspected spinal injury had occurred, and not wanting to risk further damage by transferring Clare by road, an air ambulance was dispatched. Although Clare has no memory of the accident site, even though she was fully conscious throughout, she remembers vividly being loaded into the helicopter. She knew the pilot and he told her a joke, which, perhaps surprisingly given the circumstances, made her laugh. Instead of heading home to prepare for her 18th birthday and a houseful of guests, Clare was on her way to Stoke Mandeville. By the time she did go home, some months later, both the house and her life had changed beyond measure.

  Within hours of being admitted, she asked the doctor the question she suspected she could really answer for herself: ‘So, is this permanent then?’ ‘He told me I had done a really good job in dislocating my spine at T9. You normally only ever sever a spinal cord if you are shot or stabbed,’ she explains. So, yes, it was permanent. Impossible as it is to imagine how anyone could absorb this kind of news and adjust to a whole new way of life, let alone a sporty, competitive teenager, one more coincidence took place that eased the transition, at least in the early days.

  Clare was then in her last year at school, studying for A-levels, and her attention had been focused on what she might do next. Training to become a physiotherapist had appealed for some time. Remarkably, six weeks earlier, she had done work experience at the very spinal unit where she was now being treated as a patient, which meant there were physiotherapists, staff and even patients she knew from recent visits.

  Whether it was the familiar faces, the constant stream of visitors from horse riding, hockey or school, or the support of the unit’s staff, who only ever concentrated on what could be achieved in t
he future, rather than what could not, she was on the road to recovery.

  For Clare it was all about getting out of hospital and back home as soon as possible. She also realised very early on that it could have been a lot worse, probably because when she first arrived and was recovering in the high dependency unit, the first patient she was aware of had broken his neck so high up he was on a ventilator. It put it all into perspective.

  As the days passed and she grew stronger, visitors arrived in their droves armed with helpful information and offering what support they could, another example of the willingness of those also affected by news of the accident to help. Clare’s horse-riding coach researched the different types of sports’ wheelchairs available and how to get involved in wheelchair hockey. Whatever other sports she might try in the future, she knew returning to the hard-and-fast world of mounted games was out of the question. After the thrill of jumping off a galloping horse and then jumping back on it, being able to sit on it alone would now require the help of others and was never going to cut it.

  In hospital her affinity with sport found a welcome outlet as taking part in daily physical activity is core to the rehabilitation of spinal injuries. They might not have been the sports Clare would have experienced before, or the ones she would later take part in, but they were interesting ways to do rehabilitation exercises. And they all worked different, essential areas, so table tennis helped with balance while archery improved strength. For the patient, rehab is also a full-time occupation as it takes place from 9am to 5pm. Soon her timetable was so full, friends could no longer visit when they felt like it: they had to ring up and check first. All of which meant that, four months after being airlifted to Stoke Mandeville, Clare was ready to go home – although it was rather different to the home she remembers leaving on the morning of 27 September 1997.

  By a stroke of luck, her parents already lived in a bungalow, which meant few adjustments were needed in terms of accessibility but other modifications had to be made. Unknown to Clare, a group of friends had arrived to help out. A new door to her bedroom appeared, fresh from the James Bond set where a friend was working as a carpenter. Others set about transforming the room into an en suite and creating another bathroom for Clare’s parents and two siblings to use.

  ‘It was a bit like [the television programme] DIY SOS,’ Clare recalls, ‘that is how it is in a village like that, everyone mucks in. On the day of my accident one family turned up to pick up one dog while another family picked up the other dog. People just do that – they step up.’ But that wasn’t all. By now in need of a wheelchair and an adapted car, friends from school and the horse-riding and hockey communities embarked on an extensive fund-raising campaign, which eventually raised a breathtaking £30,000 to help Clare with some of the basics required in her new life.

  While friends provided support and funds, Clare set about picking up her life where it left off, although this wasn’t without its challenges. Home from hospital in February in 1998, she returned to school with the idea that she would still complete her A-levels that summer despite a four-month absence. The plan didn’t work, however, and she ended up repeating her final school year, something she really didn’t enjoy. ‘It was horrible,’ she says. ‘All your friends are going to university, beginning work or travelling – they are doing something different. It is that key shift in life and yet for me, this chaos had happened in my life and I had to go back to school for another year.’

  Although not an easy decision, she knew that if she didn’t get her qualifications at that point she would always regret it. Besides, by spring 1998, something else had come into Clare’s life that required extra focus.

  During her months at Stoke Mandeville a few wheelchair basketball sessions for patients had been held. Although not particularly strong then, she immediately enjoyed being involved in a physically demanding sport. But there’s a big difference between trying a sport and becoming proficient at it, and Clare knew it.

  She joined her local club, Milton Keynes Aces, and went along for the first day of training. Just three girls turned up to have a try but Clare was the only one to go back: she had glimpsed something she wanted to be a part of. Once again she called upon the resources available to her and as well as club training, she would drag her friends into the sports hall during school lunch hours and have them help with basic skills. Since neither her shooting or passing was very good at that stage, she relied on her best friend, Jo Rush, to patiently join her on court, returning the ball to her day after day until she got better.

  It all paid off, though. In April 1998, just two months after leaving hospital and only six months since her accident, Clare Strange was invited to attend a Women’s Development Day in Chester, the aim of which was to introduce more women to the sport.

  At club level, wheelchair basketball is a mixed event, but at Paralympic level, the sport is single-sex, so the more women who took up the sport, the stronger the British team would be. Despite the fact she, ‘didn’t know the rules, couldn’t move my chair and was shockingly terrible’, those watching Clare clearly saw something. She was invited to return the next day and take part in a Great Britain squad day.

  For the 18-year-old teenager who had seen her life turned on its head in the preceding six months this was a surreal moment. Thanks in no small part to the unswerving support of her family and friends together with her own determination, hard work and vision for the future, the door to a new world of competitive sport was very much ajar and ready to step through.

  ***

  That door is now much more likely to stay open for athletes like Clare Strange than in the past. In 1997, the year she broke her back, the World Class Performance Programme was introduced and radically changed the way British athletes were funded. No longer so dependent on informal support networks such as family and friends, the introduction of the National Lottery in 1994 meant that the nation’s brightest sporting talent could now access greater amounts of cash from a formal, structured source. When Lottery funding was just starting up, the money went to the athletes most likely to succeed and that is still the abiding principle.

  Today, a transparent and effective funding strategy is in place for all Olympic and Paralympic sports. The exceptions to this are non-disabled Football, Paralympic 5-a-side and 7-a-side Football, and Wheelchair Tennis, which UK Sport do not fund as the sports are deemed ‘able to self fund’. As a result, at Beijing 2008 Britain’s Paralympic team was better funded than any that had gone before.

  Between Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008, nearly £30 million was invested across multiple Paralympic sports to achieve excellence at elite level. That sum has risen to an investment of nearly £48 million in the current London 2012 cycle.

  Money is awarded to both Olympic and Paralympic athletes in one of two ways. First, UK Sport, the body responsible for investing in high-performance sport in Britain, provides each sport’s governing body with funds to enable the sport to be competitive in the world’s sporting arenas. It is the job of the performance director of each sport to use the cash to create structures and methods which result in elite success. These include employing world-class sports coaches, developing sports science, providing appropriate training facilities, creating athlete development plans and putting in place lifestyle programmes to provide athletes with everything they need to create a winning environment.

  Typically, this support is worth around £55,000 per athlete, per year, for Podium athletes – those most likely to come back with medals from the next Games – and £30,000 per athlete, per year, for Development athletes – those who are on their way up. When making funding awards, UK Sport looks at both past performance and future potential of athletes within a sport to deliver medals, as well as the number of medals available at an Olympic and Paralympic Games. Swimming, for example, had a massive 140 gold medals on offer at the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games whereas there were just four in Rowing.

  In general, sports that have yielded the most success at Olympi
c and Paralympic level receive bigger budgets, running into tens of millions of pounds. So, for example, between 2009 and 2013, Rowing received £27 million, Cycling £26 million, Athletics £25million and Swimming £25 million, making them the four best-funded sports.

  Money can also be awarded directly to an athlete through an Athlete Personal Award (APA). Designed to contribute to an athlete’s costs in competing at elite level, the APA varies. On average, a Podium athlete receives approximately £19,500 a year, while a Development athlete receives £5,300.

  As the APA is only a contribution to costs athletes can earn additional income from other sources, including salaries, sponsorships and prize money, up to a maximum of £64,200 a year. Once an athlete’s earnings exceed this amount the APA is reduced, pound for pound, by any excess amount. Athletes who earn far in excess of their APA are ‘means-tested out’. Although there is a perception that elite athletes can name their price when it comes to commercial deals, out of about 1,200 athletes funded by UK Sport, in 2011 fewer than 15 Olympic athletes and three Paralympic athletes were ‘means-tested out’.

  Long before September 1979, when Clare Strange was born, athletes who competed for Britain at Paralympic level funded their own involvement or relied on being bankrolled, almost always by parents and friends. Caz Walton, who attended her first Paralympic Games at Tokyo 1964, remembers her parents paying for everything. ‘There was no finance at all,’ she said. It was the same for earlier athletes, including Margaret Maughan who won Britain’s first Paralympic gold medal in Archery at Rome 1960, and for those who followed her. Many had jobs and careers, fitting these responsibilities around training and racing commitments.

  ***

  Clare Strange grew up loving sport – it made her world tick. If she wasn’t dreaming of riding Dudley at the best equestrian event available to her, she was thinking of playing hockey for Britain. Breaking her back didn’t change that. And, in fact, one key factor aiding her recovery after the accident was the number of different sports she encountered during her time at Stoke Mandeville. So when the selectors asked her to attend her first Great Britain squad training day just six months after the accident, this only re-ignited a familiar flame. ‘I always wanted to compete at the highest level and this was another opportunity to do that,’ she says.