Golden lesson in life

Clare Balding13 April 2012

If anything is going to make you aware of your own frailties, insecurities and psychological disabilities, it is being at the Paralympic Games.

Seeing James Crisp, his left leg wasted by polio, dive into the pool and swim to a gold medal in the individual medley forces you to address how little you, as a person with all limbs in working order, have achieved in life.

Listening to Anthony Peddle explain in his nervous, stammering voice how he broke the world record and took the gold in the powerlifting as he sits before you in his wheelchair, brings with it a realisation of true strength. He looks small when he is not competing but seems to grow before your eyes as he lifts nearly three times his bodyweight into the air.

To be here is a humbling experience, but in terms of organisation it is also enlightening as an examination of what good planning and excellent team spirit can help produce. At the archery and the shooting, world records have been set that our Olympic team would struggle to match.

The standards are exceptionally high in all disciplines and despite the huge improvements that every country has made since Atlanta, the British team is out-performing everyone except Australia, who have the obvious advantage of a noisily patriotic home crowd.

Eight gold medals on Tuesday was a phenomenal achievement, many of them coming from unpredicted corners.

There is a willingness among the British team to help fellow competitors that is all too rare in modern day sport.

Bob Matthews, a gold medallist in the 10,000m on the first day of competition, took Tracey Hinton under his wing when she first started racing and told her that she should settle for nothing less than the best facilities and the fastest guide runners if she were to progress as a blind runner.

Still shy and quietly spoken off the track, she has developed a confidence on it of which her fellow Welshman Colin Jackson would be proud.

Tanni Grey-Thompson, also from Cardiff, has been raising her own standards even higher with three gold medals already and a strong chance of making it four (a feat she achieved in Barcelona as well) in the 400m tomorrow evening. She has been impressed by the support she has received from her team-mates,

"Every time I go out to race," she said, "I look up to the stands and see a whole group of other British athletes there to cheer me on. It makes such a difference and I'm just so pleased that it's going well for everyone."

Tanni has become tactically more acute as her experience has grown. She made full use of both of the large screens at either end of Stadium Australia to see where her opponents were placed as she set the pace in the 800m.

She picked up the pace with a full lap to go, 150m before she would normally accelerate and took the field by surprise. In the sprint races, she recovered from poor starts in both the 100m and 200m to come through strongly in the last 20m.

Although she suffers from desperate nerves on the morning of a race, she has developed an aura of coolness on the track that helps to intimidate her opponents. She says she is more relaxed than she was in Barcelona or Atlanta and as such, is not putting herself under so much pressure. If the fourth gold medal comes, it will come. If not, she will cope.

Mental strength has as much to do with success in any sport as physical fitness and the investment in a team psychologist by the British Paralympic Association has been money well spent. Kathy Smith, who won silver at the archery, told me that mental training has improved her performances no end.

She said: "I have learned to focus totally on my own performance, not to be intimidated and to imagine myself as being bigger than I am so that I feel stronger and more competent than anyone I come up against."

It is a lesson that can be learnt in any walk of life and in any occupation. Most of us spend far too much time worrying about what others are saying, what they think and how they will judge us and not enough time concentrating on performing to the best of our own abilities.

Combined with a phenomenal team spirit, this philosophy has been the making of this team.

Disabled or not, cheating is still name of the game

It is strange in this warped world of ours that the incident did much to prove these are determined and single-minded athletes who are here to win and some will try to do so at all costs.

Performance-enhancing drugs are not the only method used to cheat. Some athletes claim to be more disabled than they are so that they are classified into a group in which they can dominate. This is particularly prevalent among the vision impaired where some are 'less blind' than others.

There is also concern about 'boosting', a means by which competitors with spinal cord injuries cause an injury to themselves to increase the heart rate and improve their performance.

Dr Michael Riding, an International Paralympic Committee director, explained: "If a person with a spinal cord injury was to stand on a nail, they would feel no pain, but the sympathetic nervous system would still kick in. The heart rate would rise, blood would flow to the muscles and so on."

Just before a race, athletes have been known to sit on pins, squeeze their testicles and most bizarrely, block the end of the catheter so the bladder overfills. It does not hurt, but the body reacts as if it is under attack.

The European Paralympic Committee have taken the initiative and launched a campaign called Doping Disables to warn athletes of the dangers of using performance-enhancing drugs. This is not the only problem for the Paralympic movement. There are concerns Athens will be neither ready nor willing to host the Games in 2004.

There is also the worry some events are becoming less and less competitive because some athletes are so far ahead of the rest.

Technological advances means the gap between the rich countries, who can afford the most sophisticated prosthetics and wheelchairs, and the poorer ones, who have to make the best of what they have, is ever increasing. America's sprinters in Sydney are using the latest Flex-Foot artificial lower leg, which gives the athlete added spring and speed.

Men's 100m champion Marlon Ray Shirley, who is a double below knee amputee, set a new world record of 11.03 seconds. That is a comparable to any female sprinter in the world, bar Marion Jones. Shirley is very quick, but he has advantages a landmine victim from a less wealthy country could not hope for.

The Paralympics' concept was born of a desire to give everyone a chance to experience success - it would be a desperate shame if that were to be lost in a battle of finances.

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