Interview 1 with the wheelchair racer Tanni Grey-Thompson

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TANNI GREY-THOMPSON
a wheelchair racer’s tale

I’m Tanni Grey-Thompson. I was born on 26 July 1969 in Cardiff, to passionately Welsh parents. My mother was obsessive about Welsh rugby so I grew up in an environment where there was a lot of sport. I was born with spina bifida. I could walk until I was about six, but then, very gradually, I became paralysed. Back then, the attitude to disabled people was very different. Disabled people were locked away. There were no accessible toilets anywhere. Disabled people, you didn’t see them on the streets.

My parents brought me up to believe that being in a wheelchair was not my problem, and if somebody else had an issue with it, that was theirs to deal with. They brought me up to believe that I could do anything that I wanted. I inherited it all from my mother. I’m stubborn, I’m awkward, I’m wilful, passionate about sport, passionate about Wales, and I’m incredibly impatient. That kind of covers me, really.

My mum and dad just decided that we would be given opportunities to try things. I don’t think it was even a conscious decision; it was about us finding our potential. It wasn’t about what we couldn’t do; it was more about what we could do. It was about giving us the chance to try, and to explore, and just see what might happen.

tiny!

My elder sister, Siân gave me my name. I was actually christened Carys Davina Grey, and, when my parents told her there was going to be another baby, she was very excited. My mum and dad congratulated themselves on what amazing parents they were, that they had such a well-adjusted older child. But, when I came home from the hospital, apparently Sian stood next to the cot and went, “Uch, it’s tiny”, and tiny became Tanni, and very quickly my parents decided that it was just much easier to call me Tanni, because if they tried to say, “No, the baby is called Carys”, Sian got a bit stroppy. It was easier to change my name, so that’s where Tanni came from.

being an athlete

I got into sport really through school, through PE lessons. My junior school was amazing because we did inclusive PE before anybody knew what the word ‘inclusive’ meant. I was just encouraged to do different things. Also, outside school, I swam and I went horse-riding. We were lucky that we were in a position that we were able to do it, that mum could drive us around and they could afford to give us these chances.

I really started in athletics when I was thirteen, and again through an opportunity in school. I played lots of different sports. I was just a very competitive, driven person, but from the minute I did athletics that’s what I wanted to do more than anything else. From the age of thirteen, every decision I made was based around me being an athlete. I went to Loughborough University because of sport. It dictated who I married, an athlete [Ian Thompson]. Our wedding was based around our competition schedule; the birth of our daughter was based around our competition schedule. But it was never ever a sacrifice. If I had a pound for everyone who said, “What did you have to sacrifice to be an athlete?”, but here was nothing, because it was always what I wanted to do more than anything else.

I think – when I look at other athletes who maybe missed selection or didn’t perform at the right time – life as an athlete is so short. You have this limited time to achieve. It was never about wanting to go out, or partying, or doing all those other things. Yes, you had moments when you did that, but, for me, it was about, “What do I have to do to be the best athlete that I can, before I’m too old?”.
And the moment that I didn’t want to do it anymore, that’s the time I retired.

recognition

I had recognition, luckily, early on, because the first sets of races I did, I did pretty well in, and then I had another couple of years where I was doing okay. There was a really strong girl in my school who was very, very good at sprinting and she won everything. I remember competing at the Junior Games when I was sixteen – it was my last Junior Games – and I beat her. That was a huge shock to everyone. I didn’t know I was going to be good but I knew that was what I wanted to do. Actually, having recognition contributed to the enthusiasm to stay with the sport because, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, it’s pretty tough and, you know, back then, the facilities weren’t as good as they are now. There wasn’t funding and I was at university so there were some challenges along the way.

Over time, that recognition sort of developed and, by Barcelona, which was my second Paralympic Games where I won four golds and a silver, there was a lot more media coverage. The Paralympics was shown on TV; there was a lot in the press. I’m quite lucky really that the media profile grew over time, so I had a chance to adjust to it and learn from it, and it didn’t sort of suddenly overwhelm me and swamp me.

heroes

I had two role models. One was Gareth Edwards, who my mother brought me up to believe was the closest thing to perfection on the rugby pitch, for the way he played, his confidence and his ability to make things happen … but never slipping into arrogance. My mum always said to me, “What would Gareth do?”. My other role model was Chris Hallam, the Welsh wheelchair athlete from Cwmbran who won the London marathon in 1985. He stood out because he wore quite outlandish clothes, lots of leopard prints and dyed blond hair, quite a lively character. I watched him in the London marathon and said to mum, “I’m going to do that, one day. I’m going to do the London marathon”, and she was, “Yeah, yeah, of course you are!”. And then three years later, I was on the start line.

it’s only sport

There are lots of tough times when you are an athlete. I lost loads of races and, you know, it’s pretty painful when you lose. It teaches you so much about yourself, to be able to come back and be stronger. I was taught as a young child not to walk away; there’s no failure in having a go. What’s the worst that can happen? The failure I think is not being on the start line, is being frightened of losing. And, sometimes, people are frightened of winning. But, actually, you know, it’s only sport. Nobody dies, and when it goes right, it’s amazing, it’s absolutely incredible. But, when it doesn’t, it can be miserable.

I think, probably, the one point that was really tough in my career was when I was pregnant and a combination of people saying to me, “People like you shouldn’t have children”, meaning wheelchair users, and some people who believed that you couldn’t be an athlete and a mother, where it was perfectly fine to be an athlete and a father! It taught me so much about myself: “Think outside the box, don’t think about all the things you can’t do”. My daughter just used to come to the track in a pram or crawl around or play in the long jump pit with a bucket and spade. My daughter was born in 2002 and that year we had a Commonwealth Games, and, in my senior career, I only got to compete for Wales twice at the Commonwealth Games, so that was a challenge, coming back to be in good enough shape to compete for Wales and do justice to the Welsh vest. But it was worth it. My daughter hates athletics. She thinks it’s the most boring thing in the world. She said to me recently – because she’s doing cross country in school and I was trying to explain to her how she paces herself over a mile – she looked at me and said, “Have you ever run a mile, mummy?”. And I was, like, “No, I haven’t, but I’ve pushed a lot of miles”, and she was, like, “Oh!”. I think it’s quite a healthy relationship we have!

not rocket science

Training is, or can be, dull and boring and miserable and cold and wet, and you can be covered in snot, and it can also be, when it’s going well, it’s the biggest buzz; it’s almost the same as competing in front of 110,000 people. When you’ve done a session and you finish it, and you think you’re going to throw your guts up on the side of the road, and you know you’re pushing fast and it’s amazing, it is absolutely incredible.

I love training. It’s not just about the competing. I had an amount of natural talent – you need that to go so far – but, actually, what I had, I think, is an ability to make myself work hard, to do the things I didn’t like doing, to do the things that I wasn’t so good at. I was quite obsessive about it, so, when I had my daughter I had just ten days off from training. That is focused, that is obsessive. But, if you want to be in the best shape you possibly can be when you’re on that start line, if you want to leave as little to chance as possible, there’s no rocket science in it, it’s actually train twice a day, six days a week, fifty weeks of the year for pretty much your whole career. That’s what you have to do if you want to be good. And, even then, it still might not happen … but, if you don’t do it, you’ll never achieve.

food

Diet was always important to me in my career. I think that’s partly because of my mum who was a really good cook. She believed in fresh food and proper dinners every night, and I think that contributed towards my early success. If you’re not eating the right stuff, you can’t get the results at the other end. We were probably careful rather than obsessed. When I talk to young athletes about what you need to do to be an athlete, I tell them, “You can train really hard but if you don’t get the diet right and you don’t get the sleep right and the hydration right and the psychology, and you put all these together, you’re actually just wasting your time”.

The best bit about being retired is that you can eat a packet of biscuits. It’s great! The downside of it is – when you’re actually doing 120 miles a week training and you’re in the gym five times a week – that’s the time when you could eat a packet of biscuits and it wouldn’t matter … not when you retire. I was worried a bit when I retired about whether some of my obsessive behaviour would actually carry on into life after sport, and, actually, most of it has gone, you know. I’m still stubborn and determined and have high aspirations and am impossibly hard on myself, but there has been a change between my athletic life and life after sport.



seoul 1988

My first success would be competing at the Paralympics in Seoul in ’88. By no means was I guaranteed to go. I was an improving athlete; I was making big jumps. It was something that I dreamed that I could do and I still remember getting the letter which said, “Dear Tanni, Congratulations, you’ve been selected”. It was an amazing experience to be with the team, I mean, going out to Korea. It was a day on a plane and all sorts of things that were pretty hard work, but were actually very exciting for a girl who grew up in a very quiet bit of Cardiff where not much happened. In the little bit of free time we had, walking the streets and seeing street markets and medicine men boiling live hedgehogs to make medicine, you think, that wouldn’t happen in Cardiff!

I won a bronze medal. I was at Loughborough University. I was just going into my second year and again that provided the right incentive at the right time to move me on to another level. I knew before I left Seoul that I wanted to be in Barcelona. But not just in Barcelona; I wanted to be there and winning, and winning lots!

barcelona 1992

I went to Barcelona in ’92 after graduating in ’91. I hadn’t really found a great balance in my final year between studying and training, so the ’91 season was pretty hard. I did okay but not great, but the sense of freedom and relief at graduating – which I think my whole family felt, as well – meant that I had a year to concentrate. I’d been thinking about going and studying in the States at the University of Illinois. They had a very strong wheelchair racing programme. But I decided to stay at home, and to train. By the time I got to Barcelona in September 1992, I was the world record holder for the 100, 200, 400 and 800 metres, and those were the four golds that I won. And we also won the team 4x100 silver medal.

The difference between Seoul and Barcelona in terms of media coverage, it just spiralled, partly because there was an amazing BBC journalist called Helen Rollason who decided that she wanted to cover the Paralympics, just as sport. It wasn’t, “These poor disabled people” and “Aren’t they brave and marvellous?”. It was sport, and she had a huge influence on the way the Games were covered. I remember ringing home every night, having done interviews for Blue Peter and Grandstand and Welsh News and London News. It was an incredible time to be there, and to be winning, wearing a British vest.

I think Barcelona was the watershed for the Paralympic movement, in terms of the organisation of the Games. Seoul had been great but I don’t think the public quite understood what the Paralympics was about. Supporters were bussed in for the Seoul Games, whereas in Barcelona, because of the sponsorship behind it – it was sponsored by ONCE which was a charity for vision-impaired people – they got disability sport. So, every night, 80,000 people were filling the venues, watching disabled people do sport.

We all went to Atlanta expecting it to be incredible and actually, in Atlanta, nobody got the Paralympics. They got disability discrimination, access and rights to education, all the political side, but nobody really cared about the Paralympics. There was no real TV coverage in the States and while we had a lot of TV coverage back home, the Games was a challenge. So, a lot of people think, “Thank goodness for Sydney”, because that raised it to another level. Athens, we were all relieved it was built because there were rumours about whether it would be ready or not (and actually it wasn’t), and they raised it again, but Beijing did something incredible because they filled the stadiums. They did an incredible job. By that point, I’m sitting there working for the media, watching British athletes compete, and it set a really high bar for London in 2012. It’s just put the Paralympics where they’ve always deserved to be.

atlanta 1996

Atlanta was a really tough Games to be at, for all sorts of different reasons. My husband – who was my boyfriend at the time – was competing there and he’d gone into Atlanta pushing just amazingly well, in great shape, and kind of the wheels fell off his wagon quite early on in the Games. That didn’t particularly affect my performance, but there were lots of issues that dragged everybody down. I won a gold and three silvers. Actually, in terms of pure performance, I was pushing amazingly quickly. I broke the world record for the 200, and smashed my personal bests for the 100, 400 and 800.

Atlanta taught me an incredibly important lesson about the people that you have around you, because, when you’re winning everybody is your friend but when you’re not winning, you find out who your friends are. I found a small group of people who believed in me. I remember coming home from Atlanta and there were two planes coming back, and one of the team managers decided, instead of the A plane and the B plane, or the early plane and the late plane, he decided to call one the Winners’ plane and the other the Losers’ plane, which was great for team moral! Originally, because the team thought I was going to win four golds, I was on the Winners’ plane, then I got demoted to the Losers’ plane, and surprise, surprise I wasn’t hugely happy when the same team manager came and told me I was promoted back to the Winners’ plane, and, actually, all my mates and my husband to be were on the Losers’ plane.


So, it was a tough time because, although I’d performed really well, the perception was that I’d failed and that I hadn’t achieved my target. And I hadn’t, because I wanted to win four golds, but in three out of my four events there was somebody who was quicker and there is nothing you can do about that. I spent a long time answering questions, people saying to me, “Are you going to retire?” or saying “You should retire”. “Why?” “Because you’re past it!”. And this small group of people around me just said, “Do what you want to do”.

sydney 2000

I decided very quickly that I wanted to carry on with the dream of competing for Great Britain, and winning gold medals and breaking world records. I went away, kept my head down for four years, trained really hard, trained harder and, by the time I got to Sydney, won four gold medals. Again, that was a really interesting learning curve because from winning my first gold medal, a few more people on the team would speak to me, and my second a few more, and my third a few more, and by the fourth, lots of people were saying nice things. But I will never forget that group of people who were around me, who believed in me as an individual, and who were honest – and sometimes you don’t want to hear that honesty.

Sydney was great because of the public understanding of Paralympic sport. Australian Paralympic athletes have huge recognition, so, to be there competing in front of 100,000 plus people, winning medals, racing well, as well – because sometimes you can win races but you’re not the best in the field, or you win with a slow time – but I was pushing fast. For me, winning Sydney was great.

athens 2004

So, another four years later, we get to Athens and I think, in my heart of hearts, that that would be my last Paralympic Games. Beijing wasn’t going to be for me.
My first final was the 800 metres and I just spectacularly lost it. I made a split second decision about 120 metres into the race which was the wrong one, blocked myself behind the slowest girl and couldn’t get out. I knew with about 420 metres to go that that was it, my race was done. I’d been in a position for a number of years where I’d been at the front, controlling. From that far out, I knew I was just going to come nowhere, and I was devastated, and my husband was there and he was devastated, and my team manager was devastated, and I overheard a journalist say, “That was rubbish!”. “Thanks very much!” I remember eventually just packing my bag and being so upset, leaving the track, and loads of British supporters outside saying, “That was rubbish!”. “Yeah, I know. I was there”.

The thing that you have to learn as an athlete is, you need a thick skin, because people don’t mean it personally. They are just telling you because you’re kind of part of their family; they’ll talk to you like a family member, they’ll be really straight with you. So, you just go, “Thank you very much. That’s great”. But, there must have been about ten British supporters all telling me how rubbish I was, and I remember getting to where my family and friends were sitting and most of them were crying, probably thinking, “We could have stayed at home and watched this”.

It was actually my daughter who was amazing – she was two and a bit at the time – and I said to her, “Did you watch Mummy’s race?”. And Carys said, “No, I was eating a hotdog!”. “Fairplay”, as my mother would have said, “Fairplay!”. And that kind of put it into perspective. One bad race doesn’t make you a bad athlete.
I had three days before my next final, got my head together and eventually won two golds. You know Ian’s response to it: “Well, it adds drama!”. Yeah, but I still would have rathered take a bronze in the 800 or a silver. I’d have settled for fourth place, but actually, do you know what, you can’t look back because you have a hundredth of a second in a 800 metre race to make a decision and that’s just how it is. I learnt so much about myself again, so much about racing. It was a good way to finish my Paralympic career. It would have been nice to have had a little less pain and suffering … but that’s sport.

retiring

I went to the Commonwealth Games in 2006 but didn’t have a great race. I came fourth, the second Commonwealth Games I had come fourth. In 2002, it was a good fourth; in 2006 it was just a bit of a half-hearted fourth. I didn’t want to compete for Wales or GB feeling that I’d not given every bit of me, so it was actually early 2007 that I retired. I wanted to pick my retirement, I wanted to pick the race, I wanted to retire in the UK, not at the Commonwealth Games not at World Championships or in Holland, so I retired in Manchester, and the last day was hard. My old coach, Jenny Banks who was an Australian, she came over to watch my final race which was quite emotional. My family were there and I spent most of the day crying. Ian kept saying to me, “You can change your mind, you know, if you don’t want to retire. You don’t have to do it”, and I just remember saying to him, “I never, ever, ever want to do this again!”, because when I competed, I used to throw up before every single race. The squad used to think I was hysterical with nerves and it never bothered me until that final race. It was just what I did. I remember sitting with my head in a bin, thinking, “I don’t want to throw up any more, I don’t want to be scared, I don’t want to be ...”, and I’d never really felt it until that point, but it all just came home and I was, like, “I’m done, I am absolutely done”, and it was the best thing I did because, I think, if I’d carried on, then Beijing wouldn’t have been right for me as an athlete. I wouldn’t have fulfilled my contract to the GB team.

I’d lost the will to train. In terms of age, I would have been fine; there were athletes there who were older than me, who were winning. Physically, I was in pretty good shape, I mean, a few niggles, shoulders, elbows, but if you’ve been training that hard for twenty-odd years that’s what happens. What stopped me wanting to train was just in my head. I didn’t have that drive any more. I was never an athlete that particularly looked back or said, “Right, okay, that’s what I did, so that’s okay”. I always looked very critically at what I’d done and was always looking forward to how I could go faster, how I could be better, how I could try and win by more. I came back from Athens and I was, like, “That was okay”. And I remember thinking, questioning myself, “What do you mean that was okay?”, and I knew that was the point that I should stop. I probably could have made Beijing by training eight or nine times a week but actually that went against everything I believed. You should be there training absolutely heart and soul, and for me that had gone. I didn’t want to do it anymore.

beijing 2008

When I went to Beijing, there were lots of people who were very careful around me because, you know, I’d only actually retired eighteen months before. There were people thinking they shouldn’t ask me about how I felt about being there in case I burst into uncontrollable tears, and, actually, it was great. I loved it. It was an amazing experience watching the girls that I competed against for twenty years. It was really cool watching them race and win or not win, and going through the emotions. There’s a teeniest, teeniest, teeniest part of me that might, and only might, have wanted to be there if I’d been fit, but actually I knew, by Beijing 2008, that my fitness had gone, everything had gone.

I didn’t want to be there competing and being out of shape and coming in 150 metres behind the rest of the girls over 800. I didn’t want to get to the end of my career and think, “If only in Atlanta I’d done that bit more”, because, when I look back, for 99% of it there was nothing more that I could have done. So, that’s why sitting in Beijing, watching, having the privilege to watch athletics all day, every day, was a pretty good place to be.

from sprints to marathons

One of the questions I am most frequently asked, even now, is how does a sprinter do marathons and, actually, no, Linford Christie would never have run a marathon, Sally Gunnell wouldn’t have run a marathon when they were at the peak of their physical fitness. As a sport, we are far more similar to cycling than to running. We’re using equipment and it’s about overcoming momentum not gravity, so once you get to your top speed, there’s lots of ways that you can play with the design of your chair, your push rims, the way you push and your technique to keep that top speed going. Virtually all the technology we’re using is from cycling, and the way we train, the way we race, the tactics on the road or on the track come from cycling. So, I think, with marathons, I was like one of the sprint specialists in the Tour de France. You kind of hang on the back of the pack for dear life for twenty-six miles and if I was still there at twenty-six miles, I could pull a sprint out of the bag; and if I got dropped a mile into the race, I was pretty much stuffed.

Actually, very long and very short distances are complimentary; the stamina and technique that you need for sprinting only comes from doing lots and lots of miles on the road and on the back of that you can do a few good marathons. I was quite careful; I picked my marathons carefully; I picked the courses that suited me. London marathon was one of the courses that suited me, flat marathons.
My marathon career was probably about fourteen, fifteen years, and I won the London marathon six times, and I came second and third in a few other marathons around the world, in Berlin and other big cities.

But, London was the course that suited me and, as much as it pains me to say, it’s at a miserable time of year. You’ve had the real hard slog of winter before the London marathon in April, and there’s loads of twists and turns. When I was doing it, it had the cobbles in it, but lots of British support which made it a fun one to do. I probably had more bad London marathons than I had good ones, but, actually, I’m probably more well-known as somebody who competed well at the London marathon than on the track but, actually, you know, was I a really good marathon racer? I had some good races but what I was actually really good at doing was racing on the track.

focus

I think I was a good athlete because I was focused and I trained hard and I was stubborn. I didn’t let much stand in my way. When you think about how few people who are trying to compete for either Wales or GB actually get to wear a British tracksuit, it is a huge privilege. If I added up the total length of my Paralympic career on the track, you know, for the minutes and the seconds I was racing, it’s about twenty minutes of my life, so it’s this tiny little bit at the top of the pyramid. You have to do all those other things, your training, winter and summer, and qualification, and you do all that to build up to the Commonwealths and Europeans and Worlds. But Paralympics for me was at the top.



drugs

In Paralympic sport, it’s not taken over the way it has in Olympic sport. I think there are a few different reasons for that. If I’m being brutally honest, if you’re going to be a very successful drugs cheat, it costs a lot of money, not just to buy the drugs and buy the agents, but also to have somebody who understands it, and there is not as much money in Paralympic sport. Are disabled people any different from non-disabled people? No, they’re not. Will disabled people cheat? Yep, they will, but I think where we’ve been lucky in the Paralympic movement is that we’ve learnt a lot from the Olympic movement in the International Federations as they’re going through their processes of finding and testing athletes, and catching them. There are, occasionally, disabled athletes caught for taking drugs but we’re in a pretty good place. We still need to make sure that we do a lot of work with young athletes, not to tell them to not take drugs because I don’t think that works – saying, “Don’t take drugs” is naïve. It’s explaining to athletes about the decisions they’re potentially taking. Athletes make thousands and thousands of decisions every year without thinking about them. You wouldn’t believe the propensity that athletes have to screw up their own careers, and I think we have to educate them to understand the consequences:
“If this is a sport you really love doing, this is the consequence if you get caught … and you will get caught. You might not get caught straight away but it will happen!”. I know going into London and beyond that the testing criteria and ways of catching athletes are just getting better and better. There’s no place in sport for drugs cheats and, if I had my way, I’d life-ban them. You shouldn’t be allowed to do it again.

I was never personally in a race where I thought an athlete was taking drugs. There were potentially other athletes around that I looked at and thought, “Oh, I wonder”. But I was in races with athletes who had lied about their classification, which is a different way of cheating in Paralympic sport – significantly cheaper, not terribly detrimental to your health, and, if you get caught, there’s no ban from the sport. You just get moved to a different classification. There are a lot of checks and there are a lot of balances and, occasionally, people slip through the net.

When I retired from competing I was asked to join the board of UK Athletics and I took a long time to think about it. Ultimately, a very good friend of mine said to me, “Tanni, you’ve got two choices. You either join the board or you shut up, and you never mention athletics ever again, because you can’t turn that opportunity down and then slag off athletics from the outside”, and I go, “Okay, yeah, you’re right”, so I joined. I realised there was no way I was ever going to be able to stop talking about athletics.

As part of that process I was asked by our Chief Executive to look at our anti-doping procedures and policies and the various steps that athletes were taken through.

In sport, when we talk about drugs, we always think about the end result, we always think about somebody getting caught and the length of their ban and what that means for their future career. But, when I started looking at it, looking at it slightly more holistically, it’s actually about not wanting British athletes to be banned, not wanting them to be out of our sport. We want them to be competing and competing to their potential. You then need to take that all the way back to what do we do with our athletes from their induction into the squad, through their training, their education, to updating them about what they should be doing, to guiding them in a positive way about the choices that they make within sport. And then, if they make a bad choice, yes, you get on to the consequences.

So, my review was a year out of my life. I loved it, really challenging, but hopefully we’ve put some things in place that will guide and support athletes. You can’t stop people making bad choices but we’ll help them, guide them and support them, and if they do make bad choices there’s a different type of support. If they get addicted to recreational drugs, rather than just throwing them out of sport and ignoring them, we actually support them to get back on track. It’s a fine line between wanting to remove an athlete who’s broken the rules and supporting them through what is a very difficult time in their life, but, I think, actually, the sport owes them that.

dai the fish

I find this whole competition about who’s got the most gold medals really funny. For a while, I’ve been the most-medalled British athlete and then the most-medalled female British athlete. If someone’s going to take it, I want it to be a Welsh person. But, actually, I never competed to be the person who wins the most gold medals because, if I’d done that, I would have spent most of my career disappointed.

I competed to win as many races as I could, to beat the girls I was racing against, and to be the best athlete that I could be. All the other stuff is really nice but it doesn’t matter that much to me. I think it matters to other people; I think it probably matters to my family because for them, you know, that title of being the most-medalled is really important to them. For me, it’s like world records, they come and they go, they’re only yours for a bit. You have no right to hold on to them. You’re lucky if they last a few months after you’ve finished your career; if they last any more than that then you’re a really privileged athlete.

Medals are the tangible bit of winning, and I never ever want to lose them, but do you know what, if my house was burning down, they wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the list of things I would rescue. So, I will be cheering Dave on to win more medals than me. I want Welsh athletes, I want British athletes to do well, I want them to beat everyone else in the world. I would be really happy for Dave to have that title because then it’s his responsibility to deal with. For me, as an athlete now, there’s nothing I can do, because I’m way beyond competing to have any control over that. I’m a bit of a controlling person as well, so it’s a good time to hand it over to someone else, however long that’s meant to be.

wales

There is an absolute reality that if you win you’re British, and if you lose you’re Welsh. I spent most of my career travelling the world with people saying, “You’re the English team”. “No, we’re the British team”, and the rest of the guys in the squad go, “Oh God, here she goes with the history lesson, again” where I start explaining the difference between the United Kingdom and Great Britain. For me, that is quite important. And all those little things, taking the mick, or calling you “Taff” until another Welsh person arrived and they had a crisis because they weren’t inventive enough to think of another Welsh nickname. But it kind of all contributes towards building that strength that you need if you’re going to be on that start line, in a pretty tough place.

It would have been nice to have had the opportunity to compete a few more times for Wales in my senior career, but that wasn’t to be. There was nothing I could do about it, so competing for Britain was for me the thing that I was aiming for, because that was the highest thing that I could possibly achieve as an athlete. I never won wearing a Welsh vest. It would have been incredible. Wales seriously punches above its weight given the size of our nation. If you look at the Welsh contribution to a British team, at the Welsh medals, it’s absolutely amazing, but, actually, we also benefit from being part of the British team, we benefit from sponsors that would possibly consider themselves to be English, we benefit from the support, from the camaraderie. So, I have quite split views on it.
I think we’re lucky that we have things like the Commonwealth Games. It might be nice to do that at the World Championships, too. What I always made sure was when winning in a GB vest that, at the finish, I had a picture taken with a Welsh dragon. But the rules of sports these days are also quite bizarre. You can’t just hold a Welsh or a Scottish flag, you also have to be holding a Union Jack. I always made sure there was a dragon and a Union Jack somewhere pretty close to me at the finish line.

Being Welsh is hugely important to me. I genuinely believe that, if I hadn’t been born and brought up in Wales, I wouldn’t have had the support or the career that I did, because of the media in Wales. And I’d had Chris Hallam from South Wales who’d kind of forged his way through before me.

One of the most bizarre experience I’ve ever had was moving to England, because of my husband, and then technically having English residency and so, actually, in Manchester, I could have competed for England, and somebody from the English Commonwealth Games saying to me, “So, you’re going to compete for England, then”. “No.” “But you have English residency.” “And?”. There was this sort of assumption that I would want to be English. Number one, my mother would have killed me. I’m not English. I’m absolutely not English. I’m Welsh and I’m British. I’m a curious mix depending on how I’m feeling at the time, somewhere in between. But I will never ever be an English athlete and I guess that sort of obsession carries through. Living in England but pregnant, and it’s fine because, although my husband is technically English, he’s from Yorkshire so he doesn’t believe he’s English either. But I came back to Wales to have my baby just in case it was a boy and just in case there was any vague rugby talent there. I know being a Welsh mother would be enough to qualify for Wales but I just wanted to make sure. And, do you know what, she’s not really very sporty and she thinks it’s all a bit dull.

you used to be tanni grey-thompson

I’m always completely amazed by people’s perception of me. The public don’t see how much goes in to being an athlete; the bits they see are the really nice bits, the winning, or maybe the not so nice bits of you losing. They see snapshots of your life but they don’t see that pyramid underneath. Even now, it’s amazing. Somebody walks up to me in the street and says, “You’re Tanni, aren’t you?” or “You’re that girl that used to do the marathon” or I had somebody the other week who said, “You used to be Tanni Grey-Thompson, didn’t you?”. “Well, I still am!”. And it’s amazing, it’s lovely. I get letters from young people or parents saying, “You know, my daughter’s doing sport because of you”, and that’s really touching. I hope that I never get tired of that. I see some athletes who become jaded by that, but I think it’s a huge compliment. Did I ever think when I was fourteen that I’d end up in the House of Lords? Not a chance.
It was amazing being the BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year because you don’t know, you have no clue until – or certainly I didn’t – until it’s been announced and you kind of sit down and you wait and you’re kind of trying to weigh up what everyone else has done and you’re thinking, “Oh, did Gareth have a better year than I did?” and “What did Calzaghe do this year?”. It’s just really cool but it’s also quite terrifying. It’s one of those things that afterwards you wish you could have enjoyed more, and I always wish I had done a better thank you speech.

I’m so paranoid, I never planned a thank you speech in case I didn’t win, because I can’t imagine anything worse than having a thank you speech prepared and then not having to use it. I got to co-host a couple of them, seeing the face of the person who’s won, coming up on stage and getting that trophy. It’s nice being on the other side. I think that’s what we do well in Welsh sport: we celebrate young achievement and we celebrate team sport and individual achievement. And then to be awarded a DBE, to be called Dame Tanni, I wish my mum hadn’t passed away before that happened, I wish she’d seen that, she would just have been so ... she would have told everybody in the street, whether they wanted to know or not.

2012

Going into 2012 will be really hard because there’s loads of statistical data that shows that countries competing on home soil perform above expectation. That was great until Beijing and then, in Beijing, the Olympic and the Paralympic team both exceeded the medal count, and you come away thinking, “How is this going to happen?”. But in Wales, there’s some amazing structures in place. I still believe Wales is the top home country in terms of the development of sport, in terms of feeding raw talent through the funnel to get to elite sport. We’ve got a huge amount to be proud of, that many other countries around the world can learn from. You know, even in England and Scotland, they don’t have the systems that there are in Wales. That makes me very proud to be a Welsh athlete. The Sports Council and the Assembly recognise how important it is to develop the next generation of talent.

I’m very relieved that London won the Games for 2012 – I would say that, wouldn’t I, being part of the bid team. I’m in Singapore sitting in a hall with London on this side and Paris on that side, and I’m sitting next to Seb Coe, and neither of us can pick up our glass of water because we’re both shaking, and you have this false Oscar smile on your face going, “Oh, it doesn’t matter if we don’t win” and from the moment that Jacques Rogge opened the envelope and eventually said, “London”, we all went ballistic.

It was amazing because of the commitment to two Games of equal status. The work that Beijing did sets us a real challenge but I think we can meet that. Never again will the Paralympics drift back to being, poor disabled people having a go: “Aren’t they lovely? Aren’t they marvellous?”. It will be sport, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted it to be.

giving something back

The first coach I had was a guy called Roy Anthony, at Bridgend Athletics Club. He always used to say, “If you get something out of sport then you put something back”, and that was drummed into us, and I tried to live by that, by putting something back. I know there are lots of people who wish I wouldn’t put something back, but it’s about trying to do something and making sure that the young people who are coming through aren’t fighting for some of the things that I was fighting for at nineteen. In some ways, we’ve moved a long way and in other ways we still have a long way to go.

I’ve been asked to do lots of things and that’s brilliant, whether it’s being on something like A Question of Sport which is quite cool, or being asked to visit other countries to help people think differently about sport. I’m part of a couple of organisations / charities that use sport to help people change. One of them is International Inspiration that is linked to 2012, which is looking to change the lives of five million young people through sport, through encouraging them to participate and to coach and to officiate. This is in countries where maybe sport for girls is not usually encouraged, or it’s encouraged up to thirteen but then, as girls mature and grow, it’s seen as something that’s not positive to society. It’s not about going to another country and saying, “This is what we do. You have to do it like this”. We can learn a lot, too. Fairly recently, I went to Jordan and I saw some incredible examples of inclusive PE where they were just doing things that in this country we would never do because of health and safety, and they hadn’t been on a life and handling course, and hadn’t been on this and they hadn’t been on that ... and there’s things we can learn from them.

The other organisation that I work with, and I’m a trustee of, is called Lorius, which is a Sport for Good Foundation, using sport to change young people’s lives. It’s a group of forty-two ex-athletes, all has-beens these days who were successful in sport. There’s Martina Navratilova, Boris Becker, Ed Moses, Bobby Charlton, Seb Coe. We support seventy-six projects around the world and we go out and we fundraise, chuck it into the global pot, and through sport, we help young people deal with sexual health, violence, gun crime, knife crime, poverty. It’s not going to change the world straight away, but it is going to help and it is going to make people think differently.

The most powerful visit I had was a little while ago. I went to Rwanda, didn’t know what to expect. Within two hours of being in the country, they took me to this beautiful park area; it was a genocide memorial where 250,000 bodies were buried and that was one of seven sites in Kigali where there was a genocide memorial. That was pretty tough. I came away that evening and saw young people playing sport, young people who had been injured, brutally, in the genocide, young people from different communities playing sport together, talking and learning, understanding and partly healing.

If I had to give you three words to describe myself it would be stubborn, wilful and I was going to say never-quite-happy-with-what-I’ve-done! But lots of hyphens! And always-looking-forward!