Unconquerable

by Boris Starling

  I go back inside: past another poster, this time quoting Sebastian Coe: ‘There is a truth to sport, a purity, a drama, an intensity, a spirit that makes it irresistible to take part in and irresistible to watch.’

  The swimming pool echoes with the coaches’ instructions and the splashing of the water. On the far wall, kayaks are racked upright in line like sentries. There are two dozen Invictus Games swimmers here, many of them in Help for Heroes swimming caps. They do drills at their own pace, and that pace varies widely. Zoe Williams is among the first to do every length, scything through the water with a dolphin’s grace. Mike Goody follows her. ‘When I’m in the water I feel free,’ he says, ‘free with my thoughts. Alone with the water rushing over my ears, it’s a unique sound. For me, that’s just heaven.’

  The pool does a pretty good job of hiding impairments: a one-legged swimmer is a lot less obvious than a one-legged runner. But this only goes so far. Bringing up the rear of the armada is a triple amputee. It’s so hard to envisage swimming with just one arm and no legs that it takes me a moment or two to compute that he’s doing just that. He lurches half out of the water with each stroke, a technique designed to keep him going in a straight line rather than crabbing off to one side. The strength, the skill, the mental fortitude to do this – not just one length, but the entire training session, swim and rest, swim and rest, swim and rest, no exceptions – is extraordinary, even by Invictus Games standards.

  It seems fitting that the next poster I see is one quoting Arthur Ashe: ‘You are never really playing an opponent. You are playing yourself, your own highest standards, and when you reach your limits, that is real joy.’

  You can hear them before you see them – the hum and hiss of two dozen ergometer rowing machines, lined up facing each other in one section of the sports hall. Ergometers are brutal, offering all the pain of actual rowing with none of its pleasure. A screen pitilessly charts all the important numbers as the competitor pulls: split time per 500 metres, stroke rate, distance travelled, time elapsed. The machine never lies, and the machine always wins.

  Hannah Lawton, a coach with the GB Paralympic programme, prowls between the machines, chivvying the rowers on: ‘Breathe! Keep going! Doing really well! Last 10!’ When the session’s finished, the rowers slump forward over their handles or reach with shaking hands for their water bottles. ‘Blimey,’ one splutters. ‘I only came for a weekend away!’

  ‘OK,’ Hannah shouts. ‘Ten minutes’ break and we go again. Don’t be late back.’ She eyes a man at the far end of the row and smiles. ‘Especially you, Lamin.’

  Lamin laughs; he laughs a lot. He joined the Irish Guards from his native Gambia, and lost both legs and an arm in an IED blast in Afghanistan. When you’re a triple amputee rowing isn’t much easier than swimming as one. Rowing is a legs sport – the powerful quadriceps muscles usually provide about 60 per cent of a stroke’s power – and, on the rowing machine at least, a symmetrical one. Doing it the way Lamin does – fixed seat and one-handed, his body and back twisting with every stroke – is very difficult. Yet he hammers away with rhythm and determination until the session’s over and he can laugh again. His very presence in the room lifts people: a smile here, a joke there. It’s no wonder the producers of BBC1’s DIY SOS featured him and his family (he and his wife have five children) moving into a specially adapted house in Manchester in 2015.

  While the competitors are taking their break, Hannah and her fellow coaches rearrange the ergos into different configurations. ‘We get all kinds of different impairments here,’ she explains. ‘For Invictus Games purposes they’re assigned to one of three categories. There’s LTA, legs, trunk and arms: a full range of motion, more or less. Then there’s TA, trunk and arms, for those who can’t move their legs, whether they’re paralysed or have prosthetics. And then there’s A, arms only. Competitors in TA and A usually need to be strapped onto their seats.’

  Break over, Lamin gets back on the ergo. He’s in a group of four, with each ergo set at 90 degrees to the next so they form a cross. Hannah sets them a simple programme: go ‘round the clockface’ doing 500 metres as fast as they can, one at a time. The three who aren’t sprinting have to keep rowing gently while encouraging the one on test. The moment one person finishes, the one to his left takes it up.

  David Shardles, who was left paraplegic after a motorbike accident, gives his 500 the full beans: arms straining, eyes screwed shut against the pain. The others roar him on. When he finishes, Lamin raises his single hand – ‘Good work, Dave. I’d clap you if I had a second hand.’ Still getting his breath back, Dave grins and makes a fist. ‘I’ll give you a fuckin’ second hand, sunshine.’

  ‘I left the Army after my accident,’ says Dave. ‘Didn’t want anything to do with it for years. But then I went to the first Invictus Games and saw what I was missing out on.’ He won a bronze in the hand cycling in Orlando, and is now hoping to be selected for Toronto. ‘I love coming to things like this …’ He indicates Lamin. ‘And seeing idiots like this one.’

  Hannah makes them all finish with 10 minutes’ alternate sprinting and paddling: one minute hard, one minute easy, repeated five times. ‘Anyone got any questions?’ she asks.

  A hand goes up. ‘Yeah, I do. Where do babies come from?’

  As the rowers go through their last piece, Hannah indicates a couple of them. ‘You have to look beyond the numbers. That guy over there, he’s giving it the chat, but I can tell he’s finding it hard. And that woman there – well, her stats aren’t great to say the least, but she’s better than she was a month ago. She’ll be better still in a month’s time, and most of all, going to Toronto would be really, really good for her.’

  This is one of the things which separates the Invictus Games from other events. Hannah is used to working on the Paralympic programme, where athletes’ achievements and capabilities are easier to quantify. Of course there’s still a subjective element, or else she could just put everyone on the ergos and take the top scorers – temperament, teamwork and personality play their parts – but fundamentally at the Paralympics you take the best personnel you have.

  The Invictus Games are different. It’s more about participation than performance, and everyone in this room I talk to wants it to stay that way. Most countries adopt variations of the same mindset when it comes to selection. They ask what the Games can do for the competitor quite as much as what the competitor can do for the Games.

  For example, the official Australian regulations require ‘particular regard to an applicant’s demonstrated ability for teamwork, work ethic and team cohesion … [the team management] may use discretionary selection powers if they feel an applicant that may not be competitive will benefit physically or psychologically (or both) from exposure to the team environment and the Invictus Games competition’. Several people from various countries who went to London and/or Orlando have deliberately withdrawn themselves from consideration for Toronto so that someone else can have their place and hopefully experience the same benefits they did.

  There’s no guarantee that all the people at this training weekend will be selected for the British team: indeed, most of them probably won’t. There are only 90 places in the team across all the events, but 770 people have put themselves forward for selection. So the selectors will inevitably end up disappointing far more people than they will please. Their hope is that disappointment will be tempered by the fact that the Invictus Games were always intended to be a milestone on the road to recovery rather than an end in itself.

  All the people who’ve come to Bath are by definition on that road already. Their stories vary in details more than in essence. In the immediate aftermath of whatever wounding, injury or illness changed their life, they were at the point which Dante famously identified in the very first line of the Divine Comedy: ‘midway through my life I found myself in a dark wood’. They found it easy to wallow and hard to motivate themselves. The less they did, the less confidence they had. Pulling themselves out of that
stage was like pulling a foot out of deep mud.

  The first trip to the gym was the most important: they lifted a few weights, they got a sweat on, they felt the joy and pain of working their body again. Then they began to progress, and with that came the discipline: stick with a programme, set goals, achieve those goals, set new ones. All these things exist for the competitors, whether or not they go to the Invictus Games, and all these things feed through into other aspects of the competitors’ lives too. Yes, they’re wounded, injured or sick, but they accept who they are and find a new normal.

  This is what the competitors find now, and it’s what they found before London and Orlando. That summer of 2014 before the first Invictus Games, Stephan Moreau trained like a professional: ‘I was in France when I got the call saying I’d been selected for the Canadian team, and I didn’t pick it up for days as I didn’t have a roaming package. But when I found out, I was just so excited. I was doing two or three sessions at the University of Victoria. A friend owns a sports clinic and was treating me three or four times a week – physio, sports massage, that kind of thing – and all for free, because I was representing Canada.’

  Even for those few months, Stephan lived the life of a full-time athlete, totally focussed on the upcoming Games. And the white heat of that focus, together with the way he could measure himself becoming physically stronger, made him feel better about himself all round.

  The British contingent for those first Games were having similar experiences. Maurillia Simpson trained for three seated throws – shot-put, discus and javelin. ‘To have something to turn to because I’d lost my dream of being a soldier and to be able to turn to sport as my main focus was really astonishing,’ she said. It wasn’t just that she had world-class training facilities right there on her doorstep, or that the Invictus Games were literally home turf for her, it was also thoughts of what had happened at the Olympic Park just two years before.

  Places carry memories quite as much as people do, and at some frequency beyond the ken of human ears the Olympic Park still echoed with the roar of one-legged sprinter Jonnie Peacock tearing up the track en route to his 100m Paralympic title, and with the apotheosis of Super Saturday when within 45 minutes of each other a Somali immigrant, a mixed-race girl from Sheffield and a ginger lad from Milton Keynes had all won gold for a land of vibrant hope and multicultural glory.

  Josh Boggi was cranking out the miles on his handcycle, fuelled by the memories of the Battlefield Bike Ride the year before and what that had meant to him: the triumph of finding he was better than he thought he was, the joy of being part of a team again.

  Mike Goody was excited about the message the Games were giving out – ‘The idea of the Invictus Games is to get people motivated. To be frank, if that message is going across it doesn’t matter if I podium or not.’ But he still wanted to be standing up there with a medal, make no mistake, and he was training like fury to give himself the best chance of ensuring that. To do otherwise would have been to sell not just himself short but the Games themselves, because it was the input which counted rather than the output. Everyone trained and only a few got medals, but no one got medals without training.

  Mary Wilson had been one of the few British competitors at the 2013 Warrior Games, which had given Prince Harry the Invictus idea in the first place – ‘I’d really enjoyed those Games. The Americans were competitive, but they had fun as well. I couldn’t wait for Invictus, for drawing together all those nations.’

  Stephan with his post-traumatic stress, Maurillia with her leg injury, Josh with his three amputated limbs, Mike with his missing leg and his post-traumatic stress, Mary with her MS – none of them were what they had once been. But they were what they were now: they were all adjusting to the new normal.

  And for them, just as for all the men and women at Bath on the training weekend, that new normal is nearer the old normal than perhaps they first thought. Despite the severe nature of the impairments some of these men and women face, the principles behind their training are largely the same as for able-bodied athletes. The basic building blocks of general preparation target strength and endurance through methods such as overload, variation and specificity.

  The pre-competition phase is high-intensity and technique-oriented, and gives way to ‘peaking’ for competition itself, with a tapering off in the days before to maximise rest and therefore performance. Of course there are many specific aspects which have to be tailored towards impaired athletes, but then again even the most elite able-bodied athletes have limitations: there is a ceiling to what the human body can achieve.

  In the final analysis, it comes down to one simple principle: you train people by their ability, not their disability.

  COMPETITOR PROFILE:

  AMY BAYNES, NEW ZEALAND

  Amy Baynes joined the New Zealand Navy by mistake. She was at an unemployment centre in her hometown of Invercargill and ‘the recruiter just kind of talked me into it. He was very persuasive.’ Within weeks, she was sent to Devonport for basic training – ‘I was only 19, it was a complete culture shock.’

  Over the following years she was deployed as a combat medic to the Arabian Gulf, Bougainville, Afghanistan and Banda Aceh, the closest major city to the epicentre of the earthquake which had caused the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Working out of a damaged field hospital with Australian Army medics as part of a joint ANZAC team, Amy treated Indonesian locals who’d been injured in the tsunami or during the aftershocks – ‘It was pretty hellish. There were people who’d lost everything: their homes, their families, their livelihoods.’

  It was also a reminder that as much of modern soldiering is civic reconstruction and aid work as it is combat missions. A few months before the tsunami, Amy had been in Afghanistan. On patrol one day, she’d slipped on a slope, fallen awkwardly and landed on her hip – ‘It started to get more and more painful in Indonesia and afterwards, but I just ignored it.’

  At least she ignored it until the agony was such that she could no longer do so. In 2007 she underwent hip surgery and then a total hip replacement in 2013. Amy was 33 – most people who have hip replacements are twice that age. She also needed surgery on her back after finding out that she’d torn four of her vertebrae, the lowest of which was pressing down on her spinal cord – ‘It was miserable. I couldn’t even bend down to pick up my kids.’

  Shortly after her hip replacement, she was asked whether she wanted to be part of the New Zealand team at the 2014 Invictus Games. ‘I had no real idea what the Games were all about or what they’d be like. None of us did. There were 14 of us on the first training camp, and only two women, but right from the start it felt like family.

  ‘And then the Games themselves – my God! They were amazing.’

  In London Amy was like in a kid in a candy shop. You name it, she did it – road cycling, indoor rowing, archery, wheelchair rugby, powerlifting. She won two bronze medals, in road cycling and powerlifting, but says, ‘That was just the icing on the cake. It was the whole experience which was so great. It changed my mindset. I saw people worse off than me, much worse off, but they still got on the start line and smiled. It changed my life, it really did. People say that as a figure of speech, but I mean it literally.’

  She became a motivational speaker, telling her story and that of Invictus to schools and women’s groups – ‘You could hear a pin drop.’ And when Orlando came around and the New Zealand selectors asked if she’d go again, her reply was a big fat ‘You bet!’

  This time she won two silver medals in the cycling, one of them on her birthday. ‘Prince Harry sang “Happy Birthday” to me and kissed me on the cheek. You couldn’t have a better person pushing these Games. If anyone else had done it, it wouldn’t have the same meaning. You see how his heart glows when he presents the medals.’

  Amy also experienced the Invictus Games care for family members. She’d taken her husband, Ross, to London in 2014, who said: ‘She’s worked hard and she deserves it. I’m super-proud, I couldn’t
have a bigger smile on my face.’ In Orlando she brought her sister, Rachel – ‘She’d been there for me right from the moment I had my accident, when I didn’t even know Ross. Without her support I wouldn’t be here.’

  Most of all, Amy was inspired by her children. The morning of her birthday in Orlando, when she’d won silver, she’d thought about pulling out of that day’s race: ‘I didn’t think I had it in me, but I thought about my kids all the way round the course. I did it for them, they’re my inspiration. They come and watch me training, and they think it’s pretty cool when I come back with my medals. I’ll hold onto that thought when they’re grumpy teenagers and think that everything I do is wrong!’

  Amy is still in the Navy: she has the rank of Chief Petty Officer and is a team leader and associate lecturer at the Defence Health School in Burnham. If she doesn’t compete in Toronto, she still wants to go as part of the coaching and management staff: ‘Of course I want to compete, but I also want someone else to have the chance to change their lives. The Invictus Games means everything. It’s given me a purpose, it’s given me focus. My mind and body feel good now. I feel I can still give to my country, which is why I joined the New Zealand Defence Force in the first place. Once you’ve got the Invictus spirit, you don’t want to lose it.’

  7

  MY UNCONQUERABLE SOUL

  On a mild night early in September 2014, Prince Harry officially opened the first Invictus Games. The previous months had been a whirlwind of organisation. The Organising Committee had worked with a furious passion to make it happen in a time frame many had thought impossible. Days had blurred into nights, weekdays had elided into weekends. They had known that they could not, must not, dare not fail. And now here they all were – competitors, spectators, organisers – in the Olympic Park.