Tanni Grey-Thompson

1. Tell us about yourself and how your journey from Paralympian to Baroness?

My family encouraged me to be active and play lots of different sports as a child. It was mostly about being fit and active and also having fun and meeting other people, and learning to live in a largely inaccessible world. My parents realised that if I was going to have to push along pavements that were bumpy and there were steps everywhere then I needed to be strong enough to do it and the reality is that ‘play’ can be harder. It wasn’t about a Paralympic pathway or being an elite athlete, as that came a lot later. I think it was really good that I played a lot of sports until I was 16 as it gives you some balance in your life and lets you learn a number of different skills. I was always interested in Politics, and studied this at University, and through my time in sport became interested in athletes rights and disability rights. I started thinking about life outside sport when I was 18 and it was always part of my thought process, all the way through. I think that it is important to have other things to talk about. Through my time competing I also sat on number of committees (like Sport Wales and UK Sport) to build up my CV. When I was competing in sport there really wasn’t a lot of financial support or sponsorship so I had to work to be able to compete, but also I knew that I needed skills to apply for jobs when I retired. I was also pretty actively involved in the bid and delivery for the 2012 Games, so that was a lot of fun and hard work. I then had the opportunity to go in the House of Lords and that was something that I felt I had to take. It is a place where you can use your platform to do a range of interesting things.

2. How did you first get into Wheelchair racing?

The Comprehensive school I attended had another school next door that they called the ‘special school’ (I always hated that term), and I went to their sports day. This is where I started wheelchair racing for the first time. I was 12 and I loved it. I really enjoyed the feeling of speed and being able to ‘compete’. In some of the other sports that I did, I found it hard to compete because being paralysed in a sport like swimming meant that I was never going to be able to beat someone who could move their legs. And actually, I just wasn’t a very good swimmer but that is another story. I joined a club when I was about 14 and my first coach was Roy Anthony. He didn’t know much about the sport because it is quite different to running, but he helped me so much. It was also fun training in his squad.

3. Since you competed, how has technology and training changed to help wheelchair athletes improve?

There has been an evolution in terms of chair design. The really big changes took place in the 90’s when we moved from 4 to 3 wheel chairs and they became a lot longer and more stable. There have been a few changes in seating positions in recent years and also the materials that are used. At the back end of my career, carbon fibre chairs were starting to be used but there were issues with the weight and flexibility, but they have seen some development. There are more on the market at the moment, and the rules state that everything has to be commercially available, but some of them are really expensive so they may be available, but not necessarily affordable. There is a huge range of chairs that you can get.

I am not sure that the training has changed a lot. There are more athletes who are able to be full time which has been good and there has been more media exposure which has been great. The ‘marathon majors’ have come together to get a grand prix and increase prize money and that has been fabulous.

4. What disability changes are you currently campaigning for?

At the moment the Coronvirus legislation has taken over everything and I am working on Care Act easements, and protecting disabled people’s data. There are issues in that ‘vulnerable’ is being used interchangeably with ‘disabled’ which is not very helpful. It is the same when ‘sick’ is used. Some disabled people are sick and some are not. Many disabled people, for lots of reasons, will chose to shield longer than the Government guidelines, so the worry is that they may be forgotten. One of the good things to come out of this is that ‘working from home’ has been developed and although not easy for lots of people we are going through a time when there is greater flexibility about how people work and travel. We have to take some time to ensure that we learn from the good things that are happening now and don’t slip back in to bad practise for things that we can change.

5. How have you found coaching during lockdown?

I no longer personally coach athletes but my husband does and that is because the amount of time I spend away from home. I am involved in different aspects of the athletes sessions (like planning) which I really enjoy. Some of it has been a challenge in that the face to face contact has gone, but what we always have tried to do is help the athletes personally develop so that they take control of their programmes and what they do. In a race, we aren’t able to tell them what to do, they have to make their own decisions and it is important that they have to have independence and are able to make evaluate some of their own training. When we were able to travel, I would go to some of the training sessions and I miss the personal contact and the time we have together around training, but the situation is serious and we have to be careful and not take risks. The athletes who will come out on top next year will be the ones who have been able to readjust their training and also cope with the lockdown and training in a different way. It is hard in that there are a number of athletes for whom this would have been their last year and they may not have another years training in them. But on the other side there will be athletes who would not be in the right place this year, but will be for next year. Athletes love to compete and they are unlikely to be doing much this year, but it is also important to see it as an opportunity to drop back into winter training and have a longer period of time to work on weaknesses. The winter period feels long when you are in it, but in reality it is only about 4 months, so this is a time to do things in a different way.

6. As a Non-executive Director of the BBC, do you think disability sports are covered enough in the media and how can it be improved?

We are a nation of people who like watching sport and there is a lot of sport out there. In reality the biggest sports fill up a lot of the coverage and then it is hard to get all the sport on TV. Massive participation sports like Swimming struggle to get coverage. People need to see it to support it, and it needs to be watched to justify having it on. I think there has been a step up in the last couple of years and now events like the wheelchair Tennis matches at Wimbledon are being broadcast as well as things like the London marathon which has been on the TV for 20 years. It would be great to have more coverage, but I think sports also have to be creative in terms of how they get their sports out there. Some of the phones and editing packages now do such high quality filming that content can be put out in many different ways.

7. What are your aims for the next 5 years?

To keep working on disability rights legislation. It is hard to say which part because we are dependent on what the Government wants to do and what they introduce. We are in need of new welfare reform legislation, and Brexit pushed that back, and now the Coronavirus has done the same. If this was a few months ago, I would have said do some more holiday travelling, but I am not going to be travelling for quite a while.

8. What hobbies do you have outside of sport and have you started any new ones since lockdown?

My daughter was due to be sitting her A levels this year and it has been amazing to spend so much time with her. I read a lot (and some of it helps my work, but its about wider knowledge, not necessarily completely related), but a lot of my free time is spent with my family and the activities that my daughter wants to do. I do have more time in the working week to be physically active which has been really important for me and I try and get out on my bike, but the weather has been horrible the last few days and I must confess; now that I don’t have to go out, I am a bit of a fair weather athlete.

This is the longest that I have been home in 20 years which is amazing, but also because I am not travelling I have more time in the week to do emails etc. I have to be careful because when I am able to start travelling again I won’t be able to do what I currently do. I haven’t really been able to start anything new because I can receive many hundreds of emails every week. I have had weeks where I have received 1000 emails. I am always trying to improve my French (on and off), and that hasn’t changed. I have weeks where I can do some and weeks when I can’t, and as I am not travelling I don’t have the chance to practise it, so I think it will be worse by the end of this. For me the best way to learn is to speak it, because a conversation is never like the textbooks tell you it is going to be.

9. You started off playing wheelchair basketball but, are you still involved in any way?

I am not involved in Basketball any more. I dipped in and out a bit when I was racing (good for speed training, but you also have to be careful of your hands), but I hoped that when I retired I might be able to play for fun, but there isn’t a team that close to me and I spend most of my week away from home, so being at training sessions got harder to keep up with. I do a lot of stretching / yoga / stretchy band work and then at weekends I try and get out on my bike, but that depends on what the family is doing. I still think it is a great sport to watch and play and would love to do more. What I think I also like is that people who I knew playing 30 years ago are still playing, so it is nice meeting up with old friends. It is great that you can keep going with it.

10. How can someone reading this take up wheelchair racing?

There's the British Wheelchair Racing association, but it is also worth getting in touch with UK Athletics.