by Cathy Wood
At the end of her first day’s training in Chester the coach had told everyone who attended they had a chance of going to the Wheelchair Basketball World Championships later in the year. Clare was so astonished by the suggestion she thought it must be a joke but with the very real possibility of making the squad on the horizon, she went home and considered how to put around her a support team that would help reach that goal.
The most important area she needed expert help with was basic fitness and strength so she found a local instructor to assist with that while continuing to rely on non-disabled friends to develop on-court skills. Training hard and using the expertise and goodwill of others turned out to be the perfect decision as in October 1998, just a year and a month after her accident, Clare Strange was named in the British Wheelchair Basketball Squad for the World Championships and was on her way to Australia to compete.
Soon after that the carrot of competing at the Sydney 2000 Games was dangled tantalisingly close. ‘I remember someone saying maybe you could make Sydney and me saying there will be another Paralympic Games after that and maybe I will be good enough in 2004,’ Clare says. But she was more than good enough for the 12-strong Sydney squad and in October 2000, she arrived in Australia to find a country – and a city – that fully embraced all the Paralympic Movement had to offer. ‘They love sport. The Olympic Games had finished and they just wanted more of it,’ she explains.
The Games were superbly organised and enthusiastically received and enhanced by the thousands of volunteers who make a Games possible. There were also more than a million spectators, nearly treble the number who had attended the Atlanta Games.
Strange had never been to a Paralympic Games before and so she had no idea what it would be like. ‘The place was packed every day,’ she recalls. ‘I hadn’t expected that. This is the Paralympic Games, not the Olympic Games – I was surprised. You could not get around without being stopped.’
The skill, speed and excitement of Wheelchair Basketball means that it’s consistently one of the most popular spectator sports on the Paralympic programme. It’s also one of the oldest, having been played in the first Paralympic Games in Rome, 1960. Played between two teams of five, the aim is to score in the opponent’s basket and prevent the other team from scoring. It’s fast and fun to watch and employs similar rules to Basketball, including the same size court and basket height. The scoring system is also the same: one point for a free-throw, two for a normal field basket and three points if the successful shot is taken from behind the arc of the three-point line. Unlike Basketball, though, wheelchair players can, and do, fall out of their chairs, which adds to the tension and on-court drama.
Players pass and dribble the ball and must release it to another player or bounce it after every two pushes of the wheels. All players are given a point value depending on their level of disability. Wheelchair Basketball has both male and female teams and is played by two teams of five players each. Depending on their functional abilities a point value from 0.5 (most severely disabled) to 4.5 is given to each player. Five players out of 12 from each team are on the court during playtime and throughout the game the total point value of each team must not exceed 14 points.
Although British athletes have been prolific medal winners in other Paralympic sports, Britain has yet to excel on the world stage in the women’s game. At the Sydney 2000 Games the team finished eighth, well outside the medals. The team again finished eighth at Athens 2004 and repeated that performance at Beijing 2008, and is now ranked sixth in the world.
As UK Sport’s funding is based on past results as well as future potential, the women’s team is on ‘basic funding’ whereas the men’s team is fully funded in recognition of its medal pedigree, winning silver at Atlanta 1996 and picking up bronze at Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008. Wheelchair Basketball receives a funding award of nearly £4.5m for the 2009–13 cycle to cover both the men’s and women’s teams. This is the third-highest award, behind Disability Swimming (almost £9.9m) and Athletics (£6.5m).
Today Clare Strange is one of the leaders of the women’s Wheelchair Basketball team but if you think it’s a glamorous life of public appearances and sponsorship endorsements, you’d be wrong. She first received funding of £4,000 in 2009, increased to £6,000 in 2010, and that means like many athletes who have gone before, she must work to supplement her income and fit training around other commitments.
Despite the early-morning and late-night training sessions, the requirement to work and the need to attend events to fund-raise, representing Britain for over a decade and the Championships she attended are not experiences she would ever have missed.
Like so many Paralympic athletes catapulted into an unplanned new life, her journey from the devastating riding accident, which required emergency hospital admission, to elite athlete competing at the biggest multi-sports event in the world involved the help, support and commitment of numerous supporters who will never get to wear a Great Britain tracksuit, take part in a spectacular, joyful Olympic and Paralympic parade through the streets of London or meet royalty and premiers. But, as Clare’s story shows, they are all-too often willing to play their part.
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You don’t have to scratch deep among the Paralympic community to find examples of team members, past or present, who came to competitive disability sport because of an accident. Whether it’s the story of Margaret Maughan, Britain’s first gold medallist, or Tom Aggar, one of the most recent participants, there are many similar stories.
When tragedy strikes, medical attention is first directed towards the injured individual to establish survival and then, when the immediate danger has passed, towards the long road to transition and psychological acceptance. But for the parents, who must adjust to a whole new set of circumstances as suddenly as their injured child while still continuing to act as mothers and fathers, it’s very often agonising and heartbreaking to watch. In time, a newly paralysed patient is put to work learning fresh skills to regain independence but at first, in the early days, parents can do little but wait and hope. One such parent who went through it all was Cynthia Norfolk, whose son, Peter, had a teenage motorbike crash.
As a child he liked nothing more than kicking a football around. The youngest of three children, with an older brother and sister, Peter started school life near Twickenham rugby ground before moving on to boarding school in Southampton at the age of 12. He participated in everything on offer, from diving to squash, and excelled at most, although somewhat surprisingly given that years later it would be the sport in which he dominated the wheelchair world, not at tennis.
Having spent more time playing sport than studying, Peter left school to work in the hotel and catering trade, initially as a trainee waiter at the prestigious Hyde Park Hotel (now called the Mandarin Oriental Hotel) in London’s exclusive Knightsbridge. Peter loved his job and the environment, but he was commuting from his parents’ home in Surrey to the hotel on his bike and the days, already long, were made harder by the journey. That year, 1979, was also a long, cold winter and he kept falling off his bike. In the end he decided it made more sense to take a job closer to home as an assistant manager in a restaurant.
With time off at Christmas Peter decided to make the most of the break from work and his new three-week-old motorbike, and head over to see his girlfriend on Boxing Day. As he rode through the pretty Surrey country lanes, quiet thanks to the holiday period, he didn’t even see the raised manhole cover in the road. He hit it full-on, catapulting forward over the handlebars and into the road. The bike carried on moving and struck him in the back.
The bike had barely a scratch on it. Peter, on the other hand, was seriously injured with a broken back at T4/5 and a broken shoulder blade, collarbone, sternum and two ribs.
Appalling as his injuries were, they could have been worse. A woman who lived close to the road thought she heard something and came out to investigate, as did her boyfriend, who happened to be an off-duty ambulance driver. This meant bac
k-up arrived almost immediately. Nevertheless, 19-year-old Peter Norfolk was in a pretty bad way and after a few days in a local hospital, he was transferred to Stoke Mandeville.
Even there, surrounded by specialist equipment and knowledge, there were problems and setbacks. On more than one occasion, Peter stopped breathing. In the midst of it all, however, one person was there throughout: Cynthia Norfolk, Peter’s mum, who gave up her job to make the 100-mile round trip from their Surrey home every day to be at her son’s side. The accident, though, was much harder for his father to handle: after the Christmas break was over he had to go back to work. ‘In those days, you had no choice – you did not take a day off,’ he says.
So, while Peter’s father came at weekends, his mother visited him every day. ‘There was a stage when I wasn’t going to last and she was holding my hand. It was as well she was there, for sure,’ says Peter. ‘There are times when you lie there and think, what is the point? You are in all this pain and have all these things wrong with you. That’s when you need your support. You don’t need them to say much, you just need them to be there.’
Whatever inner anguish Cynthia Norfolk was going through, including the shattered dreams for her son’s future she was wrestling with, she never showed it. Instead she did what she instinctively did best: she sat with her son through 10 months of pain, anger and adjustment, and being told the news – two months into his hospital stay – that he would never walk again. Without doubt her support, more than anything, is what pulled him through.
By the end of 1980, Peter was home from hospital and sleeping in the study of his parents’ house as they all got used to the change. And then, within two months, he was offered his own bungalow and moved out.
After that he went back to work at the same local hotel he had been employed at before the accident. Angry and frustrated by what life had thrown at him, as well as the restrictions of a new life in a wheelchair, he found the distraction of being at work really helped. ‘In those days there was a lot of discrimination,’ he says, ‘but working was fun and new and I was different. I always wanted to go back because I wanted to do something with my life irrespective of being in a chair.’
He also had no illusions about a miracle cure or a return to the life he once led: ‘I realised I was never going to walk again.’ And that only left him with two choices: ‘Either your life stops, or your life stops and starts again. If it starts again, you get off your backside and go and do something.” He opted for the latter.
Much as Peter enjoyed working in the hotel trade, the long hours and lack of a career path got him down. In the 1980s, in a very different age of disability awareness (or lack of it) he was never going to achieve what he really wanted, which was to run his own hotel restaurant bar. It just wasn’t going to happen, and so he left.
In the summer of 1989, Peter did two very important things in his life. First he went to watch Wheelchair Tennis at the Stoke Mandeville International Games. Quite why anyone watched tennis at all in those days is a mystery since the courts were placed next door to the hospital crematorium. If smoke appeared above the courts, everyone knew the reason why.
Human mortality aside, Peter sat there and watched as two of the then best players in the world competed in front of him. He came to his own conclusion. ‘In my own arrogance and pig-headedness I thought, you are not that good,’ he said of the players. But then he himself went out on court and found out it was much harder than it looked. It was just the incentive he needed to take up the game: he was nearly 29.
The second thing to happen was that Peter left the hotel industry and decided he wanted to start his own wheelchair dealership so that he could sell chairs to fellow users like himself. In 1989, with an investment of £2,000, Equipment for the Physically Challenged, or EPC, was established in Farnborough, Hampshire. Peter has been mixing elite Wheelchair Tennis with running a business ever since. ‘I always tell people there is nothing you can’t do. You can’t walk, but you can do whatever you want to do. Whatever your dream, is you can do it,’ he says.
Whether Peter Norfolk was dreaming about Paralympic glory in 1989 after he’d decided that the best Wheelchair Tennis players in the world really weren’t that good, or not, he was never going to beat anyone unless he first learned how to play. When he returned home from Stoke Mandeville, he went to the tennis centre in Aldershot and with characteristic directness, got straight to the point. ‘Are you the coach?’ he asked a retired army Lt-Colonel on the courts. When the Lt-Colonel confirmed he was, Peter said, ‘I want you to teach me to play tennis.’
As it turned out, this was one of the best requests he ever made. ‘Being a retired colonel there was no such word as “can’t” – it suited my personality,’ he explains. So, for two hours every morning, from 8am to 10am, Peter made the commitment to turn up for training, as did the colonel. Afterwards, Peter would then set off on his sales’ calls, travelling up to 60,000 miles a year, selling, servicing and maintaining chairs as he built up a fledgling business. In those days he did everything himself, from selling to repairing; today, he has a team to help.
No matter how much work he had to do later in the day, or the state of the weather, come rain or shine, he would always turn up for training and relished the changes he could feel. ‘I loved it,’ he says. ‘The fitter you are, the easier it is. I played four or five times a week for two hours at a time but it was more a case of what I could afford. It wasn’t until before Athens, in 2004, I got funding.’
Wheelchair tennis first started in the USA in 1976. Today it is one of the fastest-growing wheelchair sports in the world, with more than 6,000 people now thought to be playing the game in 70 countries right across the globe. The sport was a demonstration event at Seoul 1988 before being accepted onto the Paralympic programme at Barcelona 1992. Quad events were introduced at Athens 2004.
To compete at the Paralympic Games a player must have a permanent mobility-related physical disability that results in substantial loss of function in one or both of the lower extremities. To compete in the Quad division that player must, additionally, have a permanent physical disability which results in substantial loss of function in one or both upper extremities, in three or more limbs.
At London 2012 there will be six medal events: the Men’s and Women’s Singles, Men’s and Women’s Doubles, Mixed Quad Singles and Quad Doubles. Although the rules of the game are similar to Tennis there are some key differences. For a start the ball is allowed to bounce twice and while the first bounce must be inside the court, the second is allowed outside the court markings. Matches are the best of three sets.
Peter Norfolk was initially a men’s Wheelchair Tennis player rather than a Quad, who narrowly missed out on selection for Atlanta in 1996. But over the years he had been gradually losing power, feeling and control in his right side because of an insidious build-up of fluid on the spinal column. Eventually he had a cordectomy. This is where the spine is cut in half so pressure can be released and fluid drained off. It stabilises, but does not cure the problem. The operation successfully removed the build-up of fluid but also meant Peter would have only about half the power and no finite movements or feeling on his right hand side.
And so the quad division – for those who have three or more limbs affected – was the only option if he wanted to keep playing. It took him four years to learn how to play, let alone win the biggest tournaments in the world. ‘I lost my first matches. I had to work my way up, to go to tournaments with targets and to gradually better them,’ he says. ‘First, my target would be to make the quarter-finals, then the semi-finals and then the final. Once I was in the final, the target was to win.’
After four years and a considered plan of action, Peter Norfolk wheeled onto court at the Olympic Tennis Centre at the Athens 2004 Games to face David Wagner of the USA. He won in straight sets: 6-3, 6-2. The inaugural winner of the Quad Singles title was also Britain’s first-ever Paralympic tennis gold medallist. Not bad for someone who didn’t even take
up Wheelchair Tennis until after the age of 30.
The achievement may have cost around £100,000 in terms of lost business earnings, training and travel costs, the extra staff needed to cover for Norfolk while he was away, and the minute, yet expensive, adjustments to chair components needed at this level. It certainly required mental toughness, first to learn the game and then to dedicate hour upon hour, week after week, year on year, to perfect the skills needed to play – and stay – at the highest level. And yet, as was the case with Tim Reddish 20 years earlier, in the run-up to Barcelona 1992, it couldn’t have been done without the support of Norfolk’s family. ‘They are fully behind me,’ he says. ‘It is a commitment by all of us.’
But for one particular onlooker winning in Athens meant something else. For Cynthia Norfolk, who a quarter of a century earlier, drove thousands of miles for 10 months to keep a bedside watch over her son’s progress, it was a moment money can’t buy. First she’d been there when it was just about survival, then she’d seen his transition from motorbike casualty to an independent person who went back to work. Now he was winning gold on the biggest sporting stage in the world for athletes with a disability. Victory, for her, in an ancient Greek city on a late September night in 2004 had only one value. Priceless.
Chapter Seven
Pushing the Boundaries
‘Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.’”