Paralympic Heroes

"This book is like the antidote to my first choice. Cathy has written about the Paralympics, which is obviously close to my heart, and the stories of some of the people who have been involved in it. One of the things that was important to me when [London was] bidding for the games was about getting more athletes known. I wanted to get more names out there. The public watch because they like you and they want to support you, so it is important to get more of us known. It was started in the UK by a chap called Dr Ludwig Guttmann, a doctor at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. The first organised athletic event for disabled athletes took place on the day of the opening of the 1948 Summer Olympic Games in London, and was hosted by Guttmann. If you broke your back in the 1940s your life expectancy, if you were lucky, was about seven years and you were pretty much left in hospital to die. Obviously, that was not great. But with the Second World War there were just too many people coming back injured to be able to leave them in hospital. So Ludwig decided to use sports as a method of rehabilitation, partly just to get people out. He wanted to get them fit and healthy and back into their own community, and very quickly he realised that people were competitive. The view was that if you broke your back you obviously wouldn’t be competitive. But that is nonsense. Guttmann turned the whole attitude to disability on its head. Because we like sports! The Paralympics is growing, and there still aren’t as many countries competing at them compared with the Olympics – which probably has something to do with why Britain wins so many medals. A country that has no social programmes for disabled people is unlikely to send anyone to the Paralympics, but that is something we are trying to change. Absolutely. I will pick Margaret Maughan because she is the original Paralympian. She won the first gold medal in 1960. At that time she was a 32-year-old domestic science teacher, who had been paralysed in a car accident in Malawi in 1958. Then she took up archery and went on to win the gold medal. I met her a while ago and she told me about meeting Guttmann. People might think that Guttmann was a lovely, kind, gentle man but apparently he was a bit of a tyrant, which I think is quite cool. It is funny how history paints people differently. Margaret was one of the first women to come through doing sports, and I think Guttmann didn’t allow people to sit around feeling sorry for themselves, which in turn helped her to succeed."