Unconquerable

by Boris Starling

  Three military bands, each representing a different service – the Band of the Irish Guards, the Central Band of the RAF and the Band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines, Collingwood – played the national anthem together. The Red Arrows performed a typically spectacular fly-past. The Queen’s Colour Squadron gave a rifle demonstration, the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery a display. The actor Idris Elba recited Henley’s poem, with the final lines – ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul’ – reflected in the ‘I AM’ badges, which so many were wearing. The competitors paraded in by nation, with the home team coming in last to wild applause.

  Michelle Obama sent a video message from Washington, DC. ‘Some of the most inspiring moments I have had as First Lady are when I’ve met wounded warriors like so many of you,’ she said. ‘You tell me that you’re not just going to recover but that you’re going to thrive. You tell me you’re not just going to walk but you’re going to run marathons. So to all of the competitors here today I just want you to know how incredible you are. You’re inspiring all of us, especially our young people. Inspiring them to believe that if we dig deeper, if we work harder and confront the adversity in our own lives with just a fraction of the courage you show every day, there is nothing we can’t achieve. To all the family members and caregivers in the audience, I want you to know that your courage doesn’t go unnoticed either. These heroes wouldn’t be here today without you. And while I can’t hide that I hope that Team USA won’t bring home a few gold medals, I want you all to know how proud my husband and I are of you and how humbled we are by your example. So good luck, everybody, and have fun out there.’

  Have fun out there. No one tells Olympians and Paralympians to have fun out there. It was just one of the ways in which the Invictus Games were different.

  And now it was Harry’s turn. He strode to the lectern wearing a dark blue suit and a Brigade tie. The crowd applauded. Some of the competitors gave him good-natured barracking. He smiled. It was that kind of evening, and it would be that kind of Games, exactly as he’d always wanted it to be. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Over the past eight years, I have witnessed the whole cycle of life-changing injury. Evacuating soldiers and local Afghans to hospital, flying home from Afghanistan with some of those critically injured, meeting others in hospital coming to terms with life-changing injuries, and finally trying to keep up with 12 wounded veterans on our way to the South Pole. I can only begin to imagine how challenging the journey of recovery is, but the admiration I have for these men and women, to move beyond their injuries, is limitless.

  ‘Last year I visited the Warrior Games in the United States. Seeing people who only months earlier had been told they’d never walk again now winning medals in front of their family and friends was breathtaking. I knew that anyone would be inspired by what these men and women had achieved – not just other servicemen and women, but all those adjusting to life post-injury. Each of them have come such a long way. Even making it to the start line is a huge achievement.

  ‘Their stories are as amazing as they are unique. However, they all share one thing – sport. Sport has been the vehicle for their recovery, allowing them to channel their passion into what can be achieved rather than what can’t. No longer are these inspirational men and women defined by their injury but as athletes, competitors and teammates.

  ‘Over the next four days we will see some truly remarkable achievements. For some of those taking part this will be a stepping stone to elite sport, but for others it will mark the end of a chapter in their recovery and the beginning of a new one. Either way, you can be sure that everyone who takes to the track, pool or field of play will be giving it their all. I have no doubt that lives will be changed this weekend.

  ‘It gives me great pleasure to welcome the 13 nations to London and to say how delighted I am that many of you are joined by your families, recognising the vital part they play in your recovery. The British public’s support for our servicemen and women has been exceptional: I know they will show you the same over the coming days.

  ‘Finally, I would like to thank you for the tremendous example you set. Your stories move, inspire and humble us. You prove that anything is possible if you have the will. Welcome to the Games. Welcome to Invictus.’

  The Games proper began the next morning – Thursday 11 September, anniversary of an event which had led directly to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and therefore to the wounds and injuries which so many competitors there had suffered. The crowds for the athletics at Lee Valley were loud and appreciative, and Maurillia Simpson revelled in it. She won a gold and silver in the IF5 discus and shot-put (competitors are categorised according to the scope and severity of their injuries: Simi’s leg was so bad that she couldn’t stand unaided during the throws and therefore had to compete while strapped to a static frame).

  Those few moments while she settled onto the frame, preparing her body and mind for one huge effort, with thousands watching her in an expectant hush, which exploded into a mighty roar when the implement flew from her hand and landed on the grass – those were moments she never thought she’d have: ‘In all my wildest dreams I never expected to end up here. When I was 10 I shouted at the Queen that I was going to come and live where she does: now I’m stood up on the podium in front of her grandchildren. Surreal doesn’t quite cover it.’

  Mary Wilson won a bronze in the IF4 (wheelchair) discus, a sport she’d taught herself from scratch the year before. As UK team captain for the athletics squad, however, her focus had been more on her teammates than on herself, just as she’d had to be responsible for all her charges’ mental health in Bosnia and Afghanistan: she was mother hen.

  ‘Even though I’m out of the Forces, I still have the mentality that we’ll always be there for each other. Even though most of us didn’t know each other when we arrived, it was like a jigsaw fitting together. It’s the unspoken rule: you look after each other, you’re friends with each other and you just get on with it. For some of the team, self-belief was at a minimum. You have to know how to motivate them.’

  There were the ones who were so jumpy that they needed calming down. Then there were those who were so overwhelmed by the whole occasion that they had withdrawn into themselves. Mary got them back to where they needed to be: in the right state of mind to go out there, do their best and, like the First Lady had said, have fun.

  It wasn’t just her own teammates she helped, either. Where the British and American teams were large and equipped with all kinds of kit, the Afghan team comprised half a dozen members of the Afghan National Army ‘with almost nothing, no decent clothing’. Mary saw that one of them was shivering – September in London might have been mild to an Edinburgh girl, but not to an Afghan man – so she gave him her fleece: ‘After that he would always smile at me.’

  The crowd cheered for everyone. They cheered for Ricky Furgusson, who came last in the IT2 (above-knee amputee) 100m final after having trouble with one of his artificial legs. He had lost both legs, five fingers, his left eye and suffered severe facial disfigurement in an IED blast in Sangin, Afghanistan. ‘I used to look like David Beckham back in his youth but unfortunately they took that away from me!’ he said. ‘I don’t recall the five days before [the accident], let alone the day it happened. I’m not too fussed. Afghan’s not the nicest place to remember anyway. It’s been great to compete here. I was cheered to the line and cheered back, which was fantastic but I felt like a bit of an idiot – them cheering me even though I hadn’t won!’

  They cheered for Andy Grant when he won the IT1 (below-knee amputee) 1500m final. A die-hard Liverpool fan whose nickname in the Marines had been simply ‘Scouse’, he had had the Liverpool motto ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ tattooed on his leg. When the surgeon amputated his leg, he’d given Andy some good news and some bad news.

  Good news: the amputation had been a success.

  Bad news: he’d had to cut through the middle of the tattoo, so it now read sim
ply ‘You’ll Never Walk’.

  For Andy, of course, that had merely been a challenge. Now he wasn’t just walking again, he was winning gold in the metric mile, and in a time faster than most people with two legs could manage. Canada’s James Macintyre finished last, almost a minute behind Andy, and the crowd cheered him just as loudly. Both men crossed the line with their arms aloft and their faces wreathed in smiles: that was the Invictus spirit for you.

  The athletics took place all Thursday, and Friday saw the archery competition – the latter also featuring a special exhibition match for three archers whose injuries were so severe (they each had to use their mouths to draw back the bowstring) that they’d been unable to compete in the main competition. Daniel Crane of the USA beat his compatriot Tatiana Perkins and Briton Paul Vice by firing a 10 and a nine with two of his three arrows.

  A 10 and a nine … with his mouth.

  Like the athletics, the archery (both main and special competitions) had been great, full of sportsmanship and generosity amid the striving. But there was still a sense that the Games needed something truly spectacular, an event which would set the place aflame as a sporting spectacle in its own right.

  On Friday evening they found it.

  Much of what anyone needs to know about wheelchair rugby can be found in its one-word nickname: murderball. Players smash into each other with enough force to tip either their opponents or themselves clean out of their chairs and onto the floor. The wheelchairs themselves are specially made, sometimes of titanium, and are so bashed and dented that they look as if they’ve flown through an asteroid belt. Wheelchair rugby may be the only sport where a welder sits alongside the physio on the bench: one to repair the competitors, the other their machines.

  It’s emphatically not a game for the faint-hearted, and that’s just the spectators. For the competitors, the brutality of the game is exactly what they love about it. Wheelchairs tend to bring out well-meaning infantilisation towards their users from the able-bodied – ‘You all right there? Can I get you anything? Bless, you’re so brave.’ That kind of thing. Having some lunatic smash into you like a demented dodgem driver is the best antidote to this cotton-wool world.

  It’s called ‘wheelchair rugby’, but in fact the sport contains elements of several different other disciplines too. It’s played on a standard basketball court (though with no baskets and slightly different markings), and like basketball, the players must either bounce the ball or pass it within a given period (they can pass it forwards, not just backwards as in normal rugby union). The ball itself is a regulation volleyball slightly over-inflated to provide a better bounce. Players score by crossing the goal line between two cones with the ball in their possession. Contact between wheelchairs is permitted – not half! – but contact between players is not. As in American football but not in rugby, teammates of the player in possession may block their opponents but may not hold them. Players are graded according to the extent of their disability and assigned a value from 0.5 (the lowest functional level) to 3.5 (the highest). Four players are on court at any one time and the total of their values cannot exceed eight. Women and men play together – the women are given no special treatment and certainly don’t expect any.

  The Invictus Games final pits the British against the Americans. More specifically, it pits two very different but equally talismanic captains against each other. The British captain Charlie Walker – ‘Yes, it’s rather an ironic name in the circumstances’ – contracted meningitis in 2006 while training to be a bomb disposal technician. ‘I nearly died and all that sort of business. But once I got better, my legs were still a mess. After about two years of operations trying to fix them, they amputated them both below the knee.’

  Walker is stocky and bespectacled. His opposite number, Ryan McIntosh, has a close-cropped haircut and the muscle definition of the athlete and American footballer he was before stepping on a landmine in Afghanistan.

  Walker is 34; McIntosh is a decade younger.

  Walker is a tactical mastermind, always calculating; McIntosh is raw speed and brute physical intensity.

  Walker is wily experience; McIntosh is impetuous youth.

  Walker is ice; McIntosh is fire.

  The Copper Box is packed, the crowd noise reverberating around the walls. It was ‘the box that rocks’ during the Olympics and Paralympics two years ago. It’s rocking again now.

  Game on.

  First blood to the British with Geraint Price scoring within the first five seconds. McIntosh himself levels things up inside half a minute: 1–1. Extraordinarily, there will never be more than a goal in it from start to finish. Every time one team gets ahead, the other will claw it back.

  Ben Steele is tipped out of his chair and put back in by an official. The US packs their defensive ‘key’ box near the goal line with the maximum three players allowed: the British go left, go back to the middle, go right. Walker is always at the heart of it, directing proceedings like a quarterback, searching for the way through with endless patience until he finds it. In the stands, Sir Clive Woodward and Jonny Wilkinson, two men who know a bit about able-bodied rugby, wince at some of the hits coming in. The intensity and the fitness aren’t an awful lot less than they were used to in the white heat of a World Cup final.

  At half-time it’s 7–7. The crowd sing and chant as the coaches gather their players in huddles. Still anyone’s game.

  Early in the second half, and the US have two men in the sin bin (a minute off the court or until the next goal is scored, whichever is the sooner). Four players against two for the British, and they aren’t going to pass up an opportunity like that. McIntosh, serving his bin for a foul, exhorts the crowd to give them some more noise. They don’t need asking. McIntosh comes out of the bin and then immediately goes back in for another foul. He’s playing right on the edge, and Walker, the wily old fox, is beckoning him to that edge and just a little bit beyond.

  Prowling the sidelines, the coaches can hardly make themselves heard. There is a strange but unmistakable beauty to the way the players spin their chairs on a dime or ghost through gaps made by the blocking of their teammates.

  Three minutes left. The British are 12–11 up. Stuart Robinson is in for a certain score which will put them two ahead for the first time – and as he crosses the line the ball spills from his grasp. He clutches at it, instinctively and despairingly, but it’s gone. No goal. The US go up the other end, get a lucky break from a fumble in the British defence, and Jacob Rich glides over: 12–12.

  Two minutes left. The crowd noise pulses eager and insistent, spectators feeding their energy to the gladiators in the middle and getting it back from them: an endless loop of crescendo and fade, crescendo and fade, sound and fury renewing themselves with every goal.

  British possession. The US are still playing their key defence – a solid barrier of three men back in the box at their own end. They’re not pressing the British in their own backcourt or playing a high line, they’re just letting them come and then setting them the puzzle: how do you get through the wall?

  Walker has the ball – of course he does. Once more he twists and spins, back and forth, working the angles, watching the patterns, looking for the angle, the space. There it is, there, down the right-hand side. See the gap and take it. Walker gets to the line, but he’s outside the cones. He flips the ball inside for Daniel Whittingham to score – but even as Whittingham turns to celebrate, the goal is disallowed (Walker was fractionally out of bounds before releasing the ball). The crowd groan. Still 12–12.

  From one captain to another. McIntosh is off and flying down the right wing for the US. Price tracks him back, arm muscles burning as he strains to keep pace. Hector Varela is making tracks for the US on the inside. If McIntosh can get a clean pass then Varela will be in unopposed, and that might well be that. McIntosh goes for the pass. Price blocks, and gets a slap on the back from his skipper in appreciation.

  One minute left. Next score will surely seal it.

>   Walker has it back on his own goal-line. McIntosh comes to challenge, hard and direct. Walker bounces him off and heads upfield, carving a long ‘S’ right and left to the halfway line. Ahead of him, his teammates are blocking their opponents like pirates repelling boarders. McIntosh is scrambling to get back in position.

  Two men left for Walker to get past. Forty seconds on the clock.

  He goes down the left. McIntosh, indefatigable, comes to challenge again. Walker fixes him on a collision course, and at the last moment swerves away just far enough to survive the contact. Now it’s a straight race for the line with Varela, and Walker has the momentum. He crosses amid bedlam: 13–12. It was a solo try from one end to the other, but he could never have done it without his teammates’ commitment to wheeling the blocking lines.

  Thirty seconds left. Still just about time for the Americans to level it up and take the match to extra time. They go for a long Hail Mary pass. It bounces free and Walker – who else? – collects it and runs the clock down. The British are champions.

  And the Invictus Games were officially alight.

  They were alight for Josh Boggi, one of those who beforehand hadn’t really known what to expect – ‘I was a bit cynical at times. I always thought it would be fun, but I did wonder whether it would basically be a big sports day. Then we got to the Olympic Park for the opening ceremony and we were like, wow, this is a bit bigger than we thought.’

  Soldiers are world-class blaggers, and Josh was no exception. He had talked his way into the ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower, which despite the best efforts of its owners is better known as the Helter Skelter, and found himself watching the opening ceremony while standing next to Seb Coe. Three days later, he won a bronze in the IHB1 handbike time trial and came fourth in the road race.