Unconquerable

by Boris Starling

  In between those two events came one of the Games’ most enduring images. With a few hundred metres to go in the men’s IRECB1 recumbent road race, three Britons – Rob Cromey-Hawke, JJ Chalmers and Paul Vice, the man who the previous day had fired an arrow with his teeth – were clear of the field. They were eyeing each other up, knowing that timing was key for the sprint. Go too soon and they’d burn themselves out while letting the others slipstream them and come past; go too late and the race would be over before they’d fully launched their attack. Three men playing cat-and-mouse with each other, trying to work out not just which one of them was freshest but work out the terrain too. Taking a tight line through a corner or hammering a slight uphill might make all the difference.

  And then, as one, they decided not to race it out. It wasn’t prearranged and it wasn’t a stunt, it just seemed the right thing to do at the time. They linked arms and came across the line as one. Those with sufficiently long memories may have recalled Dick Beardsley and Inge Simonsen, joint winners of the first ever London Marathon in 1981, who had also decided on the spur of the moment to cross the line hand in hand after being unable to pull away from each other. Their gesture, like that of the three cyclists, had been an instinctive show of sportsmanship: respect not just for the opponent and the event, but the very spirit of togetherness which is at the heart of sport.

  The Games were also alight for Mike Goody. Not because of the four gold medals he won, though of course he was proud of them, but because of what both swimming and the competition gave him. ‘When I’m in that pool all my worries, all my negativity, just disappears. I’m at peace swimming side by side with my fellow comrades. The Games were great, everyone giving everyone shit the whole time. You make friendships all over the world, and of course you then connect on social media and keep those friendships going after you all return home.’

  And they were alight, if that is not too inappropriate a word given what he had suffered, for Stephan Moreau. Competing in all three sprints in the IT6 (minor non-permanent injury) category, he’d failed to qualify from the heats of the 100m and 200m, but in the 400m final he was leading coming into the home straight only to have four other competitors run him down. But after a decade of illness and recovery – ‘I didn’t have hope, or I didn’t think I had hope’ – even being here was enough.

  ‘It was unbelievable, the whole thing. From day one when we arrived at the airport, where we had our own special lane straight through the airport and police escorts right past all the traffic, we had people coming to us, introducing themselves to us and helping us. We were amazed by how well organised it was and how nice people were as well – it was a totally different level to what we expected. When I got together with the other athletes it was like we were friends straight away as you didn’t have to explain your situation to each other. We understood each other well and it was really easy to be open with everyone here.’

  Stephan also competed in the cycling, where he got one of the biggest cheers of the Games – ‘It was the IRB3 road race. There was one British guy way off the front and he was gone for gold, but there were a few of us looking for silver and bronze. I was feeling good and in a group with a couple of guys from the Danish team, so we all decided to work together. Then I touched wheels with someone and went down.’ He quickly got back on his bike – hence the crowd’s cheer – but his chance of a medal was gone: ‘The cleat on one of my shoes was broken so I took off that shoe and rode barefoot on that side.’ Without the cleat to lock his foot into the pedal, Stephan couldn’t apply as much power to the pedals, and found himself being overtaken. ‘I was crushed, and I started crying – tears of frustration, yes, but also determination. Just keep going, I told myself. Just keep going.’ Having been in the hunt for a medal, he ended up 17th, but there was some consolation at the end: the five Danish guys who had finished ahead of him enveloped him in a group hug.

  That was the spirit of the Games right there: everyone looking out for each other and everyone equal, no matter who they were. Earlier on in the proceedings, Stephan had walked into one of the public toilets and been taken aback to see Prince Harry and Prince William in there. ‘I couldn’t believe it! I thought they’d be like rock stars, you know, with security clearing out the restrooms so they could use them in peace. But no, there they were, just – you know, normal. I really wanted to meet them, but I didn’t think I could just introduce myself standing next to them at the urinals! So I thought “I’ll hold it” and waited outside till they came out and I could introduce myself. And it was worth it. You can tell when high-profile people are there just to be there. Harry’s not one of those – he’s there because he really wants to be. It was serious and really mattered to him. It was personal, and to do it was a real mission for him. He’s a great guy. I’ve got this picture with him and what I’ll always remember was how he was just one of the guys.’

  Mike Goody agreed. ‘Harry was an absolute legend. He was everywhere. You know, we couldn’t get rid of him if we tried. He was literally boosting everything, pumping everything, getting everyone going, really encouraging. He’s proper sound.’

  Wherever you looked over those four days in east London, there were remarkable people doing remarkable things, and perhaps none more so than Israel Del Toro. It wasn’t his placing – 15th in the men’s powerlifting with a lift of 80kg – which caught the eye. It was that DT – everyone calls him DT – could lift anything at all, having lost the fingers on both hands in an IED blast which also left him with burns to 80 per cent of his body.

  His story is so extraordinary that Hollywood should make a movie of it, if only because no screenwriter would dare make up anything even remotely resembling the reality. DT lost both his parents before the age of 13: his father to a heart attack, his mother to a drunk driver. The eldest of four, he had to provide for his siblings while still trying to work out what he wanted to do with his life.

  One day, he saw an Air Force advert on television, and shortly afterwards spoke with a ‘very persuasive’ recruiter. He was deployed to Iraq with the 82nd Airborne and awarded a Bronze Star for bravery in 2004’s murderous Battle of Fallujah. A year later he went to Afghanistan, where, on 4 December 2005, his ‘entire life changed’.

  It was the third day of a patrol tracking Taliban fighters north of Kabul. ‘We were crossing a creek in a Humvee [High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle] when we rolled over a pressure-plate IED. My body took the brunt of the blast and suddenly my entire world was fire. From head to toe, my body was engulfed in flames. I hit the ground and tried to pull myself out. All I could think about was that I was going to die here and never going to see my family again. Then the Lieutenant was grabbing me and dragging me back to the creek and extinguishing the flames.’

  DT’s own radio had melted in the fire, so he called over a private whose set was still working and ordered him to relay co-ordinates – not for the medevac to get him out and to hospital, but for airstrikes to complete the mission. Only once that was done did he call for the medevac. His last coherent thought before slipping into a four-month coma was a simple one: ‘I wasn’t going to let my three-year-old son [Israel III, known as ‘Little DT’] know the pain of losing a father like I had.’

  A four-month coma was bad enough; waking up from it even worse. When DT first passed a mirror and didn’t recognise himself, he became terrified that his son wouldn’t want to see him – ‘That was the first and only time that I wished I had died. My wife, Carmen, and therapists convinced me that all he wanted was a father, and they were right.’

  He was so badly burnt that Carmen couldn’t hug him to comfort him, she could only squeeze his big toe. He was being fed through a tube. Most of his left hand was amputated and the fingers on his right hand removed to the first knuckle. He had nerve damage in his right leg, inhalation burns in his lungs and diminished eyesight.

  ‘I started fighting every day to recover, pushing through the pain and the limits that I was being told defined me. My days
were filled with a gruelling regimen of surgeries, skin grafts and physical therapy, but I refused to quit. My attitude was simple: stay positive and never, ever quit. When your life changes as dramatically as mine, there’s a chance you might give up. I never let that happen to me and I never will. Everyone knows if you quit before you start, you’re done. I will never let the guy who set that bomb get the satisfaction that they ruined my life.’

  When he’d first come round from his coma, the doctors had told DT four things. First, he had at best a 15 per cent chance of survival. Second, even if he did live then he’d be on a permanent respirator for the rest of his life. Third, he’d be in hospital for at least the next 18 months. And finally, he’d never walk again.

  Six weeks after being told all this, DT walked out of the hospital. No respirator.

  In 2010, he became the first 100 per cent disabled airman to re-enlist in the USAF. Now he was at the Invictus Games, with the official rank of Technical Sergeant and the unofficial but no less accurate one of Maximum Badass. ‘I am like the legendary phoenix,’ he said. ‘I am reborn from these ashes and these flames have made me stronger.’ Whenever he went to the powerlifting bench for another attempt, he wore his lucky hat, the one he was wearing at the time of the IED blast. That may not have been most people’s idea of ‘lucky’, but it was DT’s. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t been wearing it? Lucky hat didn’t cover it; ‘Invictus Hat’ was more like it.

  In his opening speech, Prince Harry had promised that lives would be changed over the weekend. By the time Sunday and the closing concert came round, that was exactly what had happened. Every one of the 400-plus competitors had had their own Invictus moment, no matter their nationality, their sport, their gender or their placing. They’d all had the simple triumph of saying – more, of knowing – a fundamental truth: ‘I beat this and I am better for it.’

  Harry had made his opening speech in a suit and tie. Now he was dressed in jeans and a fleece. It was a time for celebration rather than formality. The Foo Fighters were waiting in the wings for their gig to start, but first the Prince had a few words to say.

  ‘What a phenomenal few days! These Games have shone a spotlight on the unconquerable character of servicemen and women and their families – their Invictus spirit. These Games have been about seeing guys sprinting for the finish line and then turning round to clap the last man in. They have been about teammates choosing to cross the line together; not wanting to come second, but not wanting the other guys to either. These Games have shown the very best of the human spirit.

  ‘We knew these Games would inspire people to overcome their challenges, whether mental or physical, and try something they thought impossible. A lady called Kara emailed us about what the Games have meant to her. She said: “I have struggled for 10 years with auto-immune problems, but now I feel like I can start seeing myself as someone new. Up until my awareness of the Invictus Games, I was living in memories and mourning for what I had lost when I got sick at 24. In my mind, my life was over and I was just waiting to be done, because I was not capable of doing or living like I used to. I’m starting to think now that my game has just begun too.”’

  As the Foo Fighters came on and the competitors danced with new friends who they felt they’d known for a lifetime, Stephan Moreau caught up with Jonas Hjorth Andersen, one of the Danes he’d been riding with in the road race before his crash. Jonas was still wearing the silver medal he’d won that day, and happily posed for a selfie with Stephan. Only later, when Stephan was back home in Canada and looking through the photos of a week he’d never forget, did he see that Jonas had been pushing the medal towards him while their picture was being taken.

  And it wasn’t surprising that Jonas of all people should have so embodied the Invictus spirit. Six years before, while serving in Afghanistan, he had helped load the coffin of one of his friends onto a British military plane leaving Kandahar Airfield. The young man who had been killed, the one whom everyone had liked, had been Morten Krogh Jensen, and the plane had been the one taking Prince Harry home in a hurry – the very flight, in fact, which had given Harry the first germ of the idea which would change not just his life but those of hundreds of others too.

  COMPETITOR PROFILE:

  KAI CZIESLA, GERMANY

  Kai Cziesla had always been an adventurer. Before the Army he’d been a policeman and a firefighter. As far as he was concerned, the more action the better, so when he was posted to Afghanistan he was thrilled.

  He’d been there three and a half months when his armoured vehicle was hit by an IED while on patrol in Kundus. He was lucky not to lose his right leg, though at times in the year of various surgeries which followed he didn’t feel so lucky. When he closed his eyes he found himself back in the armoured vehicle, the blast going off and his leg shattered beneath him.

  Not that some people had much sympathy. There is probably no country in Europe whose people have such conflicted attitudes towards their armed forces as Germany does. The memory of Nazism, 12 short but seismic years, hangs over the nation’s psyche to this day, and the German Army is one of the most visible targets of that confusion. In some cities, soldiers don’t go out on the streets in uniform. In America, those soldiers would be applauded and thanked for their service. In Germany, they might be spat at or even attacked.

  Kai tried to return to active service, but his leg injury meant he couldn’t operate at full capacity. Besides, it seemed to discomfit his colleagues. Some of them chose to ignore it and made no concessions, others paid it too much attention. Kai just wanted to be normal again, but normality – at least as defined in Army terms – was gone.

  Fifteen months after his injury, he joined a three-week pilot course for disabled people at the sports school in Warendorf. They helped him work on what he could achieve rather than what he couldn’t. He set himself personal goals rather than strictly military ones – ‘For the first time, I could take my daughter to her bed in the evening from the living room. It was indescribable, a real success.’

  Kai took up indoor rowing and soon became so adept at it that he ended up not just competing, but coaching the rest of the German team too. In Orlando, he won silver in the four-minute category. That medal, and the date of his injury, are now immortalised in tattoo on his injured leg.

  8

  THE MASTER OF MY FATE

  The first Invictus Games had always been intended to be just that: the first in a series, not a one-off. Their success meant that the search for another city to take up the mantle was quickly under way. ‘It was an event that captured hearts, challenged minds and changed lives,’ said Prince Harry in July 2015 on the official announcement of the Orlando Games. ‘But for every competitor at the first Invictus Games, there are hundreds of others who would benefit from having the same opportunity.’

  In November 2014, two months after the London Games had closed, the bidding process ‘for the next Invictus Games in spring 2016 and summer 2017’ opened. The timescale was interesting on two fronts. First, it reflected the acceptance that there was not enough time left for any city to host a Games in 2015. Yes, London had managed it inside a year, but that had been down to exceptional circumstances – in particular, the nucleus of an experienced organising committee already in place and the unique qualities of public relations and access which came with being Prince Harry. Second, the stipulation of ‘spring’ implied a warm-weather venue, or at least a venue where the weather was warmer than London (which the cynic would have suggested did not rule out that many places).

  So it was with great pleasure that, in July 2015, Prince Harry announced that Orlando would host the second Games in 10 months’ time: May 2016. Orlando was a natural choice: good weather and a ready-made venue at the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex within Disney World. What better place for friends and family to come and support? There was also a strong military connection to the area: the Orlando VA Medical Center serves over 90,000 veterans.

  London 2014 had enj
oyed support at the highest level, and it was clear that Orlando 2016 would benefit from similar. Former President George W. Bush would host a policy symposium during the Games in order to discuss ways for veterans to receive appropriate care and reduce the stigma attached to ‘the invisible wounds of war’ such as PTSD, traumatic brain injury and other psychological health issues.

  ‘Invictus 2014 smashed stigma on visible injuries,’ said Harry at the symposium. ‘This can do the same on invisible injuries.’ It was a theme which he would also emphasise in his speech at the opening ceremony.

  And the Obamas, who had succeeded George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, in the White House, were bringing their own star quality to proceedings. When Harry went to Washington in late 2015, Michelle Obama introduced him to the crowd at a basketball match with the words: ‘All right, ladies, Prince Harry is here. Don’t act like you didn’t notice.’

  A week or two before the Games, the President and the First Lady sent Harry a threatening but tongue-in-cheek video message. With three uniformed service personnel in the background, Michelle said, ‘Hey, Prince Harry. Remember when you told us to bring it at the Invictus Games?’ Pointing at the camera, President Obama added, ‘Careful what you wish for’, while the service personnel made scary faces and mimed a ‘boom’ microphone drop.

  ‘I spent maybe a week thinking “How the hell am I going to top this?”’ said Harry, according to a report in the Mirror. ‘I just thought to myself, there’s only one thing I can do. I’m going to have to ring the Queen. And I think it was almost as though you could see that look in her face, at the age of 90, thinking, “Why the hell does nobody ask me to do these things more often?”’