Remarkable Steve Brown keeping his feet on the ground

The captain of Britain's wheelchair rugby team, Steve Brown, tells the Evening Standard about his hopes for the Paralympic Games.
Steve Brown, captain of GB Wheelchair Rugby, with the team in training at Stoke Mandeville Stadium
GLENN COPUS ©
Giles Lucas2 April 2012

Murderball was what wheelchair rugby was originally known as but the pain suffered by Britain's captain means he dismisses any notion of brutality as he prepares for this summer’s Paralympic Games.

Steve Brown has suffered two life-threatening injuries, one which led to his taking up the sport and the other which nearly ended his involvement in it, but he remains modest when asked to describe the intensity of wheelchair rugby.

“Dangerous is a little bit of an overstatement,” says Brown of the sport which involves ramming opponents. Players score by carrying the ball across the goal line.

“You get a lot of broken fingers and ribs and noses,” admits Brown, who will lead his 12-man squad at the Wheelchair Rugby Test event on April 18 at the Olympic Park’s Basketball Arena. “[But] every sport’s got its risks. Footballers break their ankles. It’s no different for ballerinas. They get injured. I don’t think it’s fair to say one sport is more dangerous than the other."

Brown’s route into the sport came as a result of an accident. In June 2005 he was an area manager for a holiday company when a fall altered his future.

“I was working abroad in Germany and I fell off a balcony,” recalls Brown, now 31. “It wasn’t very high, I just landed particularly awkwardly. My head went back over my shoulder. It snapped my neck. I was paralysed instantly from the chest down. And my hands have also been affected by the injury.

“I was in hospital in Germany for three weeks in intensive care. I came out of intensive care and was flown to Aylesbury hospital where I underwent my rehabilitation.”

The accident took Brown aback but the recovery time gave him the opportunity to watch wheelchair rugby before he decided to take up the sport.

“While you’re in hospital everything’s made safe, easy and flat,” says Brown. “It was completely opposite to the lifestyle I was used to. At the time I was very cautious – I’d only been in a wheelchair for five or six weeks – I was doing everything I could to stay upright and balanced. And I was watching people do everything they could to knock each other out. The contrast between where I was mentally and physically to where they were was huge. To now go full circle and be captain of the team of people who inspired me in so many ways is more of an honour than I can ever imagine.”

He took to the sport with ease and quickly developed. “I started training with King’s Crusaders [Wheelchair Rugby team based at Medway Park] after I left hospital," he says. "The more you play – the same with everything – the better you get. The more I played the more I wanted to play. I kept growing and growing [my skills]. The GB coach said to me: ‘You’ve got the potential to play for your country’. And if anybody ever tells you you’ve got the potential to play for your country, you’ve got to do everything you can to make that a reality. That’s what I did. I kept pushing, kept trying and kept training. Shaving off points of a second here and putting the weights up a bit more there, and it got me to where I am."

His demanding fitness regime has kept him in shape. “I swim two days a week. I’m in the gym three days a week. And I play rugby four times a week. It’s quite a busy schedule,” he explains. “It is intense. Swimming is about an hour and a half – I’ll do that first thing in the morning, come back, make sure I eat, get a bit of rest. And the rugby training won’t start until mid-day – I’ll be doing that for three hours. Then I’ll have time to get home and have an hour's rest. Then I’ll go into the gym in the evening to do my weight sessions. Although it’s busy, it’s feasible and very spread-out.”

With the Paralympics looming, Brown is keeping level-headed about his prospects as he knows getting injured again remains a possibility after suffering that fate in 2010.

“The worst injury I’ve is when I broke my sternum,” he recalls. “I broke four or five of my ribs when I was playing in Germany. That was quite a big injury. That put me back in hospital for as long as when I broke my neck in the first place. You always get freak injuries in sport. Nothing is safe, is it?”

Of the Paralympics, he says: “At the moment, it’s not about excitement. There’s still too much time for things to go wrong. I’m anxious, I’m still worried about my position, I’m still worried about players getting injured including myself. There are so many things that are out of my control."

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