Five golden moments in British Paralympic history
With five days to go until the first competition begins at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, we look at five historic moments for British athletes at Paras past.
The Paralympics is now one of the biggest sporting events in the world, but they began in a village in Buckinghamshire at the behest of a doctor.
Dr Ludwig Guttmann believed passionately in the role that sport could play in rehabilitation and in 1948 he founded a Games for soldiers with spinal cord injuries at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.
The rest, as they say, is history and the event has grown in size and stature as the decades have ticked by.
The Games were thrown open to athletes with a wider range of disabilities in 1976 and first took place in the same city as the Olympics at Seoul 1988.
Hearts were touched at London 2012 and prejudices challenged through the ‘We The 15’ campaign that was launched in 2021 and reminded us that 15 per cent of the world’s population have a disability.
Here are five sporting moments from the Paralympics that had British fans on their feet.
1. Tanni Grey-Thompson gets it done: 2004
Now a top sports administrator and politician, Tanni Grey-Thompson was the leading British light when the visibility of the Games increased from Barcelona 1992 onwards.
The Welsh wheelchair racing ace won four gold medals in Spain, at distances ranging from 100m to 800m, and became a national favourite by repeating the quadruple at Sydney 2000.
Athens four years later would be Grey-Thompson’s final Games, and it began inauspiciously as she finished fourth in the 200m and seventh in her favoured 800m.
She came into the short sprint with a point to prove and did it with a dramatic victory in the 100m, winning by a margin of less than half a second to cement her legacy.
2. Ellie Simmonds bursts onto scene: 2008
Ellie Simmonds arrived in Beijing as a 13-year-old schoolgirl from Walsall and left as a household name.
The youngest athlete on the whole British team, the swimming star hadn’t won a medal at a World or European Championships before taking to the biggest stage.
When Simmonds put in a breathtaking performance to smash the world record in the 400m freestyle, the world of Paralympic sport would never be the same again and she won four further gold medals.
Having retired after Tokyo, Simmonds has made a significant contribution to changing perceptions of people of short stature in the UK and won a Bafta for her documentary ‘Finding My Secret Family’ in 2023.
3. Jonnie Peacock runs race of his life: 2012
Jonnie Peacock captured the hearts of the nation when, as a wide-eyed teenager, he roared to 100m gold in record time at the London Stadium.
The Cambridge-born sprinter’s life was nearly claimed by meningitis when he was five, but he showed incredible resilience to become the fastest amputee sprinter in the world.
One of the faces of London 2012 with a starring role in Channel 4’s iconic ‘Meet the Superhumans’ advert, he delivered on all the hype with gold on home soil in Paralympic record time.
Peacock, who will compete at his fourth Games at Paris 2024, became the first amputee contestant on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing in 2017.
4. Kadeena Cox does unique double: 2016
“A lot of people thought I wouldn’t be able to and there were moments when I doubted myself.”
Looking back, it’s no wonder that Kadeena Cox questioned whether she could win gold medals in both track cycling and athletics at Rio 2016.
She was attempting to do what no other athlete had done in the preceding 28 years just a few months after she was diagnosed with MS.
The Leeds-born trailblazer did exactly that, finishing first in the 500m time trial in the velodrome and then winning a thrilling 400m race to make history by the barest of margins.
5. Sarah Storey becomes the greatest: 2020
Milestones do not matter too much to Dame Sarah Storey, who has achieved pretty much everything one could hope to achieve in a sporting career.
But there was a flicker of satisfaction when she won the road race in Tokyo, her 17th gold medal, surpassing swimmer Mike Kenny to become the greatest ever British Paralympian.
Storey will feature at a record ninth Games in Paris having won five golds as a swimmer in her teenage years.
She is now following a similar path to Grey-Thompson into sports administration and was recently appointed president of Lancashire County Cricket Club and active travel commissioner for Greater Manchester Council.
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