A Different Kind of Hero

Paralympic Mascot Tom (if I'm honest I preferred Mandeville...)

I’m sure I’m not alone in having watched, open-mouthed, as Paralympians from around the World pushed themselves in sporting endeavours that defy belief.

How do you find the courage to sprint as fast as you can, trusting someone else to lead you safely because you have little or no vision?

How do you control a horse in a dressage routine, when you have such little control over your own body?

How do you swim without arms? Or legs?

And how on earth do you control a wheelchair with one hand and accurately wield a tennis racquet in the other?

It is a real testament to the human spirit, and a lesson to all of us who grumble about a minor ache or pain.

The Paralympians are justifiably lauded, successful or otherwise, and rightly proclaimed as heroes. They have all overcome significant difficulties or life changing events to strive to do their best in the field of sport, and should be admired. 

As the successful Team GB Paralympians have returned to Britain, it has sparked a debate on whether their success has raised enough awareness to have a positive impact on the daily lives of ordinary people living with disability. We need to remember that, for every Johnny Peacock or Dame Sarah Storey, there are thousands of others who live with disability, not on a World stage, but within the mundanity of daily life. Their struggle is not against the clock, but against a society that does not seem to make anything easy, and that doesn’t understand how to treat people that are different from the norm. 

So I am applauding a different kind of hero - the person who defies the odds to succeed in their career, despite visual impairment or living with cerebral palsy; the person who struggles to  recover from a life changing stroke in order to hold their grandchildren again; the student with autism who struggles to cope in a mainstream school, with some staff who understand their particular needs and some who simply can’t appreciate the dilemma of being told to hurry to class, and yet being told not to run! 

All of those people are striving to achieve against the odds, in a much less public arena. Not always recognised as such, they really are heroes too.