‘The emotion came from deep inside her, from what she had been through’

Brown, a fellow Paralympic athlete) to ask him to take part: ‘I was so excited at that first meeting,’ he says. ‘Their vision for it, what they wanted to do with it. How they were going to do it properly. I just jumped at it. It was incredible.

‘I have always been of the mindset, “Don’t treat me as disabled. I will show you what I can do and we’ll have fun with it,”’ says Peacock, who lost his lower leg to meningitis when he was five.

‘We saw the athletes almost as these superhumans, sort of Marvel Avengers,’ explains Bonhôte, ‘who come together to save humanity. By imposing on us their excellence, they make us reconsider the limitations we think we would have if we were to lose an arm or a leg or anything like this. This film has changed me as a result,’ he says, ‘and it’s changed my kids. They now admire the Paralympians more than they do Lionel Messi – and they like their football.’

‘We wanted to express that the Paralympics was a movement all over the globe,’ says Ettedgui. ‘We had to show people with different kinds of disability. We wanted to have an array of sports. And we wanted gender diversity. But [ultimately] it was asking the question, “Which Paralympian’s story really moves us?”

‘I remember very clearly watching a clip of Bebe Vio at the moment she won her gold medal for wheelchair fencing in 2016 and she just exploded with emotion.’ Vio, then 19, the same age Jonnie Peacock was when he won gold in 2012, breaks down and sobs uncontrollably in the footage from Rio 2016.

‘Watching her win,’ Ettedgui continues, ‘you understand that the emotion came from a very, very deep place inside her. It came from her entire life, what she had been through. It wasn’t just about winning the tournament.’

Of her moniker, Rising Phoenix, Vio says, ‘It was my Scout group. They called me that because they had seen me before [my trauma] and they saw me afterwards and they understood I was the same person. And at that moment I was born again.’ She continues, when we speak via Zoom, ‘And I think now, “I was so lucky. I have been so lucky my entire life.”’

Until she was 11, Vio, a fencing prodigy, had a happy family life with her parents and two siblings, with pizza and movie nights every Sunday. But one day she suddenly fell ill as a bright rash crawled across her skin. Her mother rushed her into the A&E department of the local hospital near their home in

Venice, where a triage assessment categorised her as low-priority. But fortuitously she was saved by a passing doctor who noticed something that worried him. She had, as it turns out, contracted meningitis C (her mother had been told not to bother vaccinating her), and as she explains today, ‘Ninety-seven per cent of people die in the first 48 hours.’

Vio spent 104 days in hospital. She was in a coma for a week before the disease became necrotic (when tissue starts to die), and a decision had to be made to amputate her arms to save her life. ‘When I came out, I still felt my arms,’ she says. ‘I looked down and they weren’t there. “Where are they?” I asked my parents.’

She cried and cried. How would she hold her fencing sabre with no arms? Her mother told her, ‘Don’t worry, Bebe, fencing is in your mind not in your hand. You don’t need your hands to practise and draw.’

A month later, just when Vio seemed to be recovering, doctors presented a devastating dilemma: amputate Vio’s legs to help save her, or leave them intact, in which case she had only a 50 per cent chance of survival.

‘How can you ask parents to make a choice like that?’ Vio says. The family decided together. ‘Amputate the legs! And we were all sort of excited. If you cry, everyone will cry. I was scared, but I wanted to present a situation to my family of, “Don’t worry, it’s going to be OK.”’

For two years she was in a wheelchair, but then prosthetic arms and legs were fitted. After being chosen as a torchbearer for London 2012, that same year, aged 15, she joined the Italian wheelchair fencing team. Although she walks on legs, she chooses to fence in a wheelchair for the drama of it, she explains, laughing, ‘Because sitting down it’s harder and you have to be more ready for the blade.’

She fits her training, up to 10 hours a day, around her studies for a degree in international affairs and communication at the John Cabbot International University in Rome, and hopes to study for a master’s in New

Vio waiting to compete in the World Championships in Rome, 2017; aged

Above, from left