Grey-Thompson - Aim High

AIM HIGH

TANNI GREY THOMPSON

ACCENT PRESS LTD

Published by Accent Press Ltd 2012
ISBN 9781908917720

Copyright Tanni Grey Thompson 2007

The right of Tanni Grey Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High St, Bedlinog, Mid-Glamorgan, CF46 6SA.

The Quick Reads project in Wales is a joint venture between the Basic Skills Agency and the Welsh Books Council. Titles are funded through the Basic Skills Agency as part of the National Basic Skills Strategy for Wales on behalf of the Welsh Assembly Government.

Introduction

Im glad to be able to share my experiences with you and I sincerely hope that they will be useful in helping you to Aim High, in your own life.

Aiming High has been one of my own personal mottos throughout not only my sporting life, but my personal life as well. In simple terms it is all about trying to be the best that you can.

This book is divided into two parts, firstly my early life, how I got started in sport, and what inspired me (and still inspires me!). Secondly how my sporting life has developed, the secrets behind my success and the lessons I have learned along the way. If these lessons help you, this book will have achieved its purpose.

Sport is one of the biggest loves of my life, but I am also passionate about reading my husband laughs at me because I really will read anything! I hope you enjoy reading Aim High. It was a challenge to work on it, but one of my beliefs, linked to Aiming High, is that if you dont try you never know what you can do finishing this book is proof of that!

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Growing Up

We have a picture in our family album of me sitting in my first little red wheelchair wearing a Brownie uniform, with little knobbly knees and wearing some dodgy trainers. The picture was taken not long after I started using a wheelchair and we were on a Brownie pack holiday in Swansea.

The strange thing about this picture is that I am trying to skip. It looks funny, as all the other Brownies are behind me (all non-disabled), skipping away with different levels of ability.

The reason that this picture is really important to me is that it shows that no one ever told me that I shouldnt skip, and no one ever told me that I shouldnt try. It confirms that, as I was growing up, my parents never told me there were things I couldnt do solely because I was a wheelchair user. There were plenty of times that I was told off for doing something (possibly naughty), but I was never told off simply for trying.

If my parents had been different, if they had had low expectations for me, I could have grown up thinking very differently. But for me it was about having the chance to try, and seeing what I might achieve. If someone had told me that I couldnt skip I might have found this out a little sooner than I did, but then I might have spent the next five years thinking what if. My parents were both only children, and had quite restricted upbringings, and I think this is part of the reason why they always encouraged us to go out and try things.

The reason that I became a wheelchair user has never been particularly important to me. I was born with a condition called Spina Bifida, and to begin with my disablement wasnt obvious. I had a tiny lump on my back. After spending a short time in an incubator I was sent home and everything seemed OK. My elder sister Sian, who is eighteen months older than me, hadnt had an easy time of it. She was born with a heart condition that was fixed with some fairly major surgery (these days it is through a key-hole procedure near the groin). It was then found that she had been born with dislocated hips, which resulted in eighteen months in a frog plaster, and after only a couple of days out of that, she fell and broke her leg. My parents certainly had their hands full for a couple of years!

I could walk till about the age of five or six (I dont remember exactly). But as I grew, my legs couldnt support the increase in my body weight, because of my condition, and I slowly became paralysed. So I didnt, unlike others, have to suffer some dramatic accident, or spend months on end in a spinal unit. For me, becoming a wheelchair user wasnt an awful experience. Although I had stopped walking I didnt feel that something had been taken away. Having said this, the last few months when I was walking were pretty tough this was the only time in my life that I have felt really disabled. I couldnt do the things that I wanted to do like run away from my mum!

Having a wheelchair gave me a renewed sense of freedom. Because many people think that the life of a wheelchair user is pretty miserable, they make judgements about it. But the wheelchair allowed me once again to do the things that I wanted to do, such as trying to run away from my mother, chasing after my older sister, and being with my friends.

I was born on 26th July 1969, and had the good fortune to be born in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. My sister Sian and I were brought up in the house my dad grew up in. Mum is also a Cardiff girl and Cardiff, a great city, is very much my home town. Im very proud of being Welsh and that Ive been voted Welsh Sports Personality of the Year on three occasions.

Dad is an architect; hes a very organized person, who likes to know what he is doing and when. I hope some of this has rubbed off on me, but in temperament Im more like Mum if we decide that we want to do something, then we want to do it right now! I have a tendency to think quickly about what I want to do, sometimes making rash decisions as a result.

Sian was a great sister to grow up with; she wasnt that interested in taking part in sport when she was young, although she watched a lot, and has always been incredibly supportive, often travelling with me to events and helping to pay for stuff (as did my parents).

Shes not as competitive as me, but then very few people are! I always knew that I wanted to do sport, and that I had to compete as hard as I could.

Unfortunately, I didnt really get to know my grandparents, also all from Cardiff, who died before I was old enough to remember them well. My dads father was a very good motorbike rider, who competed in the TT races. He was unable to turn professional, though, and had to get a real job.

My primary school was really inclusive in terms of letting me take part in PE lessons. It was different in secondary school because the rules were different. There were a number of disabled children in the school and it was felt that we should do our PE at the special school next door. It wasnt that I didnt really want to go to the special school, but I didnt know anyone there. I had some good PE teachers who let me join in with my friends as much as possible.

To be honest, I didnt really know what Spina Bifida was until I was about ten years old. I didnt actively try to find out because it didnt matter to me what had stopped me walking. I just knew that I couldnt walk, and that there was nothing I could do to change that, so I just had to get on with it. This wasnt a conscious decision. There were simply lots of things that I wanted to do, and I wanted to spend my time doing them, not sitting around thinking about what I couldnt do.

Many people who become wheelchair users dont feel this way, and I know that some of them find my attitude challenging. For many young people, a tragic accident which is sometimes their fault, sometimes someone elses means that they can no longer do things the way that they used to. For them, it means learning everything again from scratch, from dressing themselves to driving. But my rehab all took place while I was slowly losing the use of my legs, so it never really felt like rehab. It felt normal.