BMF CONFERENCE 2019
TANNI GRAY THOMPSON:
FLYING HIGH
Baroness Tanni Grey Thompson is TeamGB’s most successful Paralympian, with 11 gold medals 4 silvers and a bronze. She won 13 World Championship medals (six gold, five silver and two bronze), held over 30 world records and won the London Marathon six times between 1992 and 2002. She was created a Life Peer in March 2010 and was conferred as Baroness Grey-Thompson, of Eaglescliffe in the County of Durham. She told delegates some of her amazing story.
“The most important thing for me growing up was about trying to be the very best I could be. I grew up believing i could do anything I wanted. I didn’t see many people that looked like me when I was growing up, so I didn’t have lots of people telling what I could and couldn’t do. In fact one of the main things I wanted to do was play rugby for Wales. I told my mother that and she said it might be a bit difficult, not, as I first thought she meant, because I was a girl, but because of the wheelchair.
“My parents were told that I would have to wear calipers and use crutches if I wanted to have anything like a ‘normal’ life - whatever that is. However what relly was amazing for me back then was the fact that my father was an architect and he knew just how inaccessible the world was back then. He also realised that the most important thing for me growing up would be to be able to be independent, rather than looking ‘normal’. So he fought really hard to get me my first chair and that made a huge difference. I could do things on my own, I could play with my friends, I could go to school on my own. I had independence. “I do know now that my parents protected me from a huge amount of the discrimination that was around at the time. Then, disabled children were locked away in special schools, not out in mainstream education with their friends. I was thrown out of a cinema once or being ‘a fire risk’. After that my mother taught me to say, ‘but I’ve never spontaneously combusted before’. I didn’t even know what it meant, but I knew it was a good thing to say.”
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Grey-Thompson told delegates: “We are never just one thing: I am Welsh a book-lover, a Parliamentarian, a mother, a wife, and athlete, disabled: all of those things overlap: never let that one thing define you.” She also emphasised the importance of doing things that challenge you: In 2012 at the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympic Games, Gray-Thompson was floated in her wheelchair on a wire above the athletics track. In the practice, she was a couple of metres above the ground:
“I thought, yeah. This I great. I can do this. Once I’d signed the contracts they took me to the stadium and put me 65m in the air. I was petrified. It was horrific. I hate heights. Am I glad i did it? Yes I am. Would I do it again? Not in a million years. .But I am so glad that I did it because that gives me the confidence to do lots of other things.”
She said that one thing she has learned is that, despite what it looks like on the TV, athletics is not an individual sport. “It may have been just me on the track, but there was a team of 14
people who got me there. “Individual success is not always about individuals. Being the best I can be is often about getting the best team I can around me. It’s important to always be asking, how can I get the best team, how can I be the best i can?
“In life, I have lost more races than won, in the HOuse of Lords I have lost more votes than won but it’s all about trying to be the best you can be.” BMJ There will be more coverage of conference sessions in the August issue of BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net July 2019
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