Unconquerable

by Boris Starling

  By way of reply, they filmed the Queen watching the Obamas’ message on Harry’s mobile and saying witheringly, ‘Oh really. Please,’ while Harry dropped his own imaginary microphone and sent a ‘boom’ back across the Atlantic.

  ‘We did one take from two angles,’ the Mirror recorded Harry as saying at the time. ‘She’s the Queen, she’s busy! You don’t have more than 90 seconds to get that right. We didn’t practise, it was just one take. Also, she’s so incredibly skilled, she only needs one take. Meanwhile, I was like a gibbering wreck. I was more nervous than anyone else. It was great fun and I hope everyone enjoyed it.’

  Great fun indeed, and more importantly good publicity for the Games themselves.

  When Harry opened London 2014, it had been a step into the unknown. Opening Orlando 2016 felt different: Invictus was no longer just a Games, it was a movement, a groundswell, a manifestation of Victor Hugo’s famous statement that ‘There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come’.

  There was no Brigade tie this time, and the suit was a little more casual. ‘I’m a long way from London tonight,’ Harry began. ‘But when I look out and I see so many familiar faces, servicemen and women, their friends and their families and all the people who have got them here, I feel like I’m at home.

  ‘I joined the Army because for a long time I just wanted to be one of the guys. But what I learned through serving was that the extraordinary privileges of being a prince gave me an extraordinary opportunity to help my military family. That’s why I had to create the Invictus Games – to build a platform for all those who have served to prove to the world what they have to offer.

  ‘Over the next four days you will see things that in years past just wouldn’t have been possible. You will see people who by rights should have died on the battlefield – but instead they are going for gold on the track or in the pool. You will be inspired, you will be moved, and I promise you will be entertained.

  ‘While I have your attention, though, I want to briefly speak about an issue that for far too many of you is shrouded in shame and fear. An issue that is just as important for many of you watching at home as it is for those of you in this stadium tonight. It is not just physical injuries that our Invictus competitors have overcome, every single one of them will have confronted tremendous emotional and mental challenges.

  ‘When we give a standing ovation to the competitor with the missing limbs, let’s also cheer our hearts out for the man who overcame anxiety so severe he couldn’t leave his house. Let’s cheer for the woman who fought through post-traumatic stress and let’s celebrate the soldier who was brave enough to get help for his depression.

  ‘Over the next four days you will get to know these amazing competitors. They weren’t too tough to admit that they struggled with their mental health, and they weren’t too tough to get the help they needed. To those of you watching at home and who are suffering from mental illness in silence – whether a veteran or a civilian, a mum or a dad, a teenager or a grandparent – I hope you see the bravery of our Invictus champions who have confronted invisible injuries, and I hope you are inspired to ask for the help that you need.

  ‘To end, can I just say thank you to all of you guys. You are fierce competitors. You are role models that any parent would be proud to have their children follow. You’ve made me a better person. You are about to inspire the world and I’m proud to call you my friends. So let’s put on a hell of a show in memory of all of our fallen comrades who didn’t make it back. We are Invictus!’

  The second Invictus Games were open.

  For Sarah Rudder, one of the high points of that opening ceremony had been seeing the Marine Corps Silent Drill Team doing their routine. It was what had made her want to be a Marine when she’d first seen it, aged 12, and two decades later, it had lost none of its thrill.

  For her, the Orlando Games were ‘a lifesaver in so many ways’. It was the first time she’d been in a crowd for 15 years, and yet she was OK – not totally relaxed about it, sure, but with enough coping mechanisms now in place to ensure that she could deal with it. A few years before, when she hadn’t been able to deal with fireworks, even the sound of the starting gun would have been too much for her. But now she could just clear her mind when competing – ‘I didn’t think about anything, just went as hard as I could when the gun went.’

  ‘As hard as I could’ proved plenty hard enough. Sarah won the very first medal of the Orlando Games and scarcely let up after that. By the end she had seven medals in all: gold in lightweight powerlifting, one-minute indoor rowing, discus and the 100m, and silver in the shot-put, four-minute indoor rowing and the 200m. In the last of those, the 200m, she fell near the end after her prosthetic leg, the one with ‘Wonder Woman’ on it, gave way – ‘My leg didn’t want to keep up with me’ – but she got up, crossed the line and fell again into the embrace of her conqueror, Marion Blot from France. The crowd gave them both a standing ovation.

  Bart Couprie competed in four sports: indoor rowing, wheelchair rugby, wheelchair basketball and swimming. He didn’t win one medal, let alone seven, but he loved every minute of the Games nonetheless – ‘I’d watched the London Games and followed friends’ results online. When I saw the Foo Fighters at the final concert I thought, “Oh, you bastards”, because they’re my favourite band and it would have been awesome to be there. But then I figured maybe it was just as well that I wasn’t, because to be there something pretty shit has to happen to you in the first place. Be careful what you wish for, eh?’

  It was only a couple of months later that he was diagnosed with cancer, and even once Orlando was announced as host city for 2016, it still didn’t really register on his radar – ‘I had a full complement of limbs, so I didn’t think I was eligible.’ Even when he’d been put straight and was heading for his first training camp, he was finding it hard to shake off the feeling that cancer somehow wasn’t sufficiently serious to qualify for Invictus – which in itself felt a little absurd, given the impact it was having on pretty much every other aspect of his life. The camp knocked any such doubts clean out of the window – ‘I started off thinking, “Am I sick enough to be here?” By the end of the camp the only question was, “Am I good enough to be here?”’

  From across the Tasman Sea, Darlene Brown was also loving her first Invictus Games. ‘God, it was so much fun – it was the most exciting thing I’d ever done in my entire life! For the powerlifting, we came out one by one through a smoke machine with the crowd screaming. It was like being in a movie.’ She had only taken up powerlifting a few months before, and during her very first session a TV crew had come into the gym and started to film – ‘The reporter asked me what my personal best was. I could hardly lift the 20kg bar, but I couldn’t tell them that – and out of nowhere I had this brainwave and said, “Oh, that’s a secret”, like I was some hotshot who didn’t want her competitors to know anything!’

  From struggling to lift 20kg, Darlene now lifted double that to win silver (behind, inevitably, Sarah ‘Wonder Woman’ Rudder). It was Australia’s first medal of the Games. ‘I never thought I could do anything like that. It was – it was just amazing. The whole thing was. Only when I went to Orlando did I realise how much I’d been grieving for the whole military lifestyle, for the mateship and camaraderie. And Prince Harry! I was starstruck, like a stupid teenager, when he appeared. I threw my husband out of the way to get to him!’

  For Sarah, Bart and Darlene, their first time at the Invictus Games had proved as rewarding as they’d hoped. For those who’d competed in London and were now back for another go, Orlando was no less special. ‘I really trained hard for this one,’ Josh Boggi said. ‘Two months in Mallorca, no distractions, total focus. “Let’s have this properly,” I thought.’ In London he’d won bronze and come fourth in his two cycling events. Here, he won silver in both. Franck Robin of France won gold in both disciplines, as he had in London, but the gaps were much closer this time round: four seconds in the time trial and onl
y half a second in the road race. On a whim, Josh entered the indoor rowing later that day – no point letting all that arm strength and cardio training go to waste – and won gold in both the four-minute and one-minute races.

  It wasn’t just the improvement in his own performances which pleased him, or even the effect that improvement and the training necessary for it were having on the rest of his life; it was the way Invictus forced you and those around you to reassess things. On the bus to the venue one morning, Josh found himself sitting next to Bart Couprie. They’d never met before, but started chatting. He told Bart how he’d been injured, Bart told him about his cancer. Josh sympathised and said he couldn’t even imagine how Bart was dealing with it.

  For a moment, Bart was nonplussed. Here was a guy with one arm and no legs saying he couldn’t imagine how to deal with cancer. Was he taking the piss? Was this some obscure trope of British humour? No, Josh was being quite serious. He explained that he knew exactly what he was dealing with every day: his limbs weren’t going to grow back, nor were they going to get worse. Bart’s condition, on the other hand, was still fluctuating.

  Besides, everybody – members of the public, that was – could see what had happened to Josh, and so they made allowances for it. Bart’s ailments weren’t nearly so obvious. If you didn’t know about the chemo and the injections, you’d just assume he was a balding bloke with man boobs, and there was no shortage of those around. Bart got off that bus more enlightened than he’d been when he’d boarded it.

  There were other connections, too. Bart had never met Stephan Moreau either, but when they competed in the indoor rowing they were practically inseparable in the results table. In the four-minute race, Stephan was one place and eight metres ahead of Bart; in the one-minute race, Bart was one place and a single metre ahead of Stephan. The margins were narrow and totally unimportant in the wider scheme of things; the connections were priceless.

  ‘Orlando pretty much saved my life,’ Stephan said. ‘London had been great, but after that I went through a really bad patch. My wife and I separated. I fell off my bike and had concussion. Physically and emotionally, I was broken. Then Orlando was announced and I knew I had something to train towards again. That pulled me round. When I got there, I went to see as many events as possible, to soak it all up. Only at the end did I realise that I still had three days unused on my four-day Disney pass! I’d been too engrossed in the Games to give Mickey Mouse a thought.’

  For Mike Goody, it was business as usual: four gold medals in London, and now four more in Orlando. His opponents would surely be sick of the sight of him were he not such a palpably decent bloke.

  Mary Wilson and Maurillia Simpson didn’t compete in Orlando, though Simi was there as part of the Invictus Games Choir which sang at the opening ceremony. The choir was conducted by Gareth Malone, who had done such amazing work with the military wives of Chivenor, five years before. On the first day of the Games, still on a high from the reception the choir had received the night before, Gareth said: ‘It’s had a profound effect on me. I’m going to reassess my own life. That sounds really grand, but you come here and it’s the word I’ve heard so many times before, humbling, but I can’t think of another word. You just feel like, I am so lucky, and these people are so amazing, I must do more.’ He’d conducted choirs on much bigger stages, but few – if any – had been as special and significant as this one. ‘I’m pretty overwhelmed.’

  The Invictus Games family was growing and its members were writing their own pages in its history: none more so perhaps than Elizabeth Marks.

  Elizabeth joined the US Army aged 17 as a combat medic. Two years later in Iraq, she was badly injured in circumstances she has always refused to discuss. Her left leg is now encased in an IDEO (intrepid dynamic exoskeletal orthosis), and most of her right leg is covered in a giant tattoo.

  There’s a rather beautiful country and western song by the band Montgomery Gentry called ‘Tattoos and Scars’. It recounts the story of two men, one young and one old, who get chatting in a bar. The young guy, cocky and boastful, talks the old man through the tattoos he’s got: one from Memphis in ‘some back old alley dump’, another from Dallas when he ‘sure was good and drunk’. Then it’s the old man’s turn. He shows his ‘ragged old and jagged ordinary scars’ – one from Paris in a war long before the young guy was born, another ‘when I was half your age, workin’ on my daddy’s farm’.

  The message is clear. Tattoos are ornaments, scars are earned. ‘Tattoos and scars are different things.’

  And normally they are. But not for someone like Elizabeth. Her tattoo sits on her scars, which made the inking process much more painful than usual. And if you know how to read her tattoo, you know how to read her story. There’s a crow, battered and bruised but still alive: that’s her. On the crow’s ankle bracelet there’s a red cross – pretty much the only splash of colour in the entire tattoo – which represents being a combat medic. The dog tags carry the name of her father, James, a Vietnam vet whom she has described as her inspiration.

  Unable to continue serving as a combat medic, Elizabeth chose to continue to help her colleagues through swimming. The better she could be, the more she could do in spite of her injuries, the more inspiration she knew she could provide: ‘When I step onto the blocks, I never think, “I want to win,” I think, “I want to pour all of myself into this race because there are people who can’t physically, mentally or emotionally, do that.” So it’s my way of performing for them. Each time it starts to get painful, I know I have so much support behind me, the solidarity of all my Invictus brothers and sisters and everyone who competes in that realm.’

  And if that was hard enough before London 2014, it was nothing compared to what happened there – or rather, what didn’t happen there. Elizabeth had arrived in London for those Games in good physical shape and favourite for several titles but pretty much from the moment she landed, she felt sick. The doctors kept an eye on her, and when her condition deteriorated, she was taken to hospital, where they found that her lungs were filled with fluid and she couldn’t breathe properly.

  She was transferred to Papworth Hospital, one of the country’s premier heart and lung hospitals (Sir Terence English had performed Britain’s first heart transplant there in 1979). At Papworth the doctors put her in a medically induced coma and onto an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a system which allows oxygen to enter the patient’s bloodstream outside the body and is only used in the most serious cases of heart and lung failure.

  Elizabeth missed the London Games altogether. She has recovered, but not totally. With her lungs less efficient than they were before, she goes into such oxygen debt when she swims that she goes temporarily blind and needs her coach to tap her with a pad on the end of a stick a couple of strokes out from the end of every length so she knows when to turn.

  But swim she does, and extraordinary well too. In Orlando she won four gold medals in the ISB category: the 50m backstroke, 50m breaststroke, 50m freestyle and 100m freestyle. The last one she was particularly proud of: the extra distance was so hard for her that when she touched the wall she didn’t know she’d won and was only vaguely aware of where she was.

  It was a few minutes before she was sufficiently compos mentis to stand on the podium for her gold medal. Prince Harry himself presented it to her. She stood proud with hand over heart during the anthems, posed for photos with the two British competitors who’d won silver and bronze, and then caught up with Harry as he was on his way to the next event.

  She took the gold medal off and handed it back to him. ‘Would you do something for me?’ she asked. ‘Take this back to England and give it to the team at Papworth who saved my life.’ It wasn’t much, but then again nothing would be enough to repay what she owed them. She just wanted them to know that she’d been thinking of them, and that it was only because they’d helped her that she could continue doing her best to help others. That was why she’d wanted them to have the medal she’d foun
d toughest to win: because it had hurt the most, it had hurt so much, but it hurt in the best possible way because she was still alive.

  Elizabeth’s gesture wasn’t the only one which caught the public’s imagination. There was also Australia’s Mark Urquhart, who had been left paraplegic following two parachute accidents and had chosen to have his legs amputated in order to honour a promise he’d made to his daughter – that the day she got married he’d walk her down the aisle.

  In Orlando he dominated the IT5 wheelchair races. He’d won the 100 metres, 200 metres and 400 metres, and now he was going for the clean sweep in the 1500 metres. But near the end he could see that his rival, Steve Simmons of the US, was struggling. ‘It was extremely hot and his poor old arms couldn’t cope with the last lap of the oval,’ said Mark. ‘As a fellow soldier I just reached out and helped him. He came up beside me and he wanted to go hand in hand over the line. I said, “Yeah, mate, no worries” and then I grabbed the back of his chair and pushed him along in front of me so he got the gold.’

  And as always with the Invictus Games, those who came last were appreciated just as much as those who came first. It took Kelly Elmlinger of the USA 20.61 seconds to win the Women’s IT4/IT5 100 metres; it took Ulfat Al-Zwiri of Jordan more than two minutes to complete. But Ulfat, who had been severely injured in a car crash while on duty, received a standing ovation from both the crowd and her fellow competitors as she made her agonisingly slow but fully determined way down the track, and when she finally made it over the line it was the seven women who’d beaten her – four British and three American – who were first to embrace her.

  In the stands, her parents, Yasin and Basema, waved the Jordanian flag and choked back the tears. ‘We are very happy and very proud of Ulfat for what she has done today for herself and for her country at the Invictus Games,’ her father said. ‘It has been wonderful to see how far she has come in her recovery to be able to participate in a major international event like this. She has represented her country and herself very well.’