NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE

Climbing Kilimanjaro on his hands and knees... winning a gold medal with no funding...for Aaron Phipps and his team-mates ....

WHEN Britain’s wheelchair rugby team was told it faced mission impossible, Aaron Phipps decided he would be the judge of that.

Stripped of funding after finishing fifth in Rio, the cash-strapped Brits were not expected to survive through to the Tokyo Paralympics.

As Phipps sized up the odds, he thought of Kilimanjaro and the challenge he had undertaken months earlier.

How he trained for more than three years to scale Africa’s highest mountain unassisted in a wheelchair – only to find the chair could not cope.

He knew champions Australia, hosts Japan and superpower USA were giant obstacles in their path to the podium.

But no bigger a deal, he thought, than abandoning his trike and climbing for four days on hands and knees to reach a summit 5,895 metres above sea level. Phipps recalled the climb as he and his pals picked up the National Lottery Paralympian of the Year award in recognition of their Tokyo triumph.

He describes the gold medal as a “fairy tale”, but it is just another reallife example – albeit the most celebrated – of a remarkable group of people overcoming adversity.

Here is a man who conquered Kilimanjaro without assistance, despite his lower legs and the tops of his fingers having been amputated when he contracted meningitis C at the age of 15.

“Two days in, it was apparent the wheelchair was never going to be able to cope,” recalled the dad-oftwo. “They told me I’d have to be carried. I said, in no uncertain terms, ‘No I’m not’. Eventually I duck-taped kneepads to my legs, jumped out of the wheelchair and crawled on my hands and knees for four days to get to the summit.”

Fast-forward to wheelchair rugby’s loss of UK Sport funding and it becomes clear why Phipps and Co (below) were not about to give up.

“Some of my team-mates’ day starts two hours before those of other people because it takes them that long to get ready,” he said.

“Every training session you get the rubbish kicked out of you. But that helped us as a team because, by the time we got to Tokyo, we were rockhard from beating each other up.”

Phipps knew nothing of the sport when he tried it in 2009, but, 12 years on, a TV audience of 1.1million saw GB beat the USA to gold.

Participation numbers are “through the roof” and there is £2.6m funding for the Paris cycle.

His work is done – though he will never see it like that.

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