The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘My mum said, “Maybe I can stop worrying about you now”’
York. Assuming she qualifies again, she will take part in the postponed 2021 Tokyo Paralympics, aiming for gold.
Vio’s life sums up Nugent’s early vision of the film as a weapon against prejudice and discrimination. ‘This feels like a moment when storytelling can change the world,’ he explains. ‘What I hope the film can do is prove that this story of ability can be judged on the same merits as any other, not less than.’
The emotional, extraordinary stories of the athletes are woven into the journey of the Games, from their unofficial village-fetelike beginnings on 29 July 1948 in the garden of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where Guttmann practised, through to the first official Games 12 years later in Rome, where 23 countries took part. There followed years of Games as well as resistance from various countries, such as Russia and China, in which disability was traditionally hidden away. Even in Rio in 2016, after the success of London 2012, the Paralympics nearly collapsed when money ran out. Funding was found at the last minute.
Not even Olympians like Peacock knew this before watching the film. But it was the personal stories that moved him most. He was particularly touched by seeing what Vio’s parents had gone through, and the parallels with his own life, back when he was five and his mother carried him into A&E wrapped in his Power Rangers duvet. ‘Children are like rubber, in a way, you move on and deal with it,’ says Peacock. ‘As a parent, it’s always harder because you know what is going on – you understand everything.’ He emerged from the operating theatre without a leg below the knee.
When Peacock was 10 years old, his positivity inspired a local man, recovering from an amputation, to carry on. The man’s daughter told Peacock’s mother of Jonnie’s affect on her father. ‘“But I’m just a kid!”’ Peacock recalls thinking when his mum told him. ‘But she said to me, “Jonnie, it’s what you are showing people.” Everyone has it within them. It’s the choice they make.’
Peacock, who always refused to use a
His training continues in these Covid-19 times, and he will be working his way towards another 100m gold next year. In fact, the postponement has worked well for him as he is still recovering from knee surgery: ‘It just means we don’t have to push the knee on quite so quickly.’
Not all of the Paralympians featured were household names in their countries. The story of Jean-baptiste Alaize, whose voice opens the film, came on to the directors’ radar by chance when Bonhôte saw him at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, before shooting for Rising Phoenix began, and felt like it was ‘a sign’.
‘He was this slick black dude with a really cool leg and I remember thinking, “Look how that guy carries himself!” He had this palmtree top and shorts and it was like, “F—k you!” He was just going ahead and living his life.’
Alaize is a long jumper who came fourth in Rio in 2016, and a refugee from the Burundi civil war. Aged three, his mother tried to flee with him, but Hutus caught them. They delivered four machete blows to his body, head, back and arm, and then they swung the blade at his leg, chopping it off. After that, they murdered his mother in front of him.
‘Sport saved me,’ Alaize explains in the
film. ‘I lived through the worst as a child and I was haunted by this one nightmare. I run to escape. It’s as if I’m trying to escape what happened. Falling, getting up again, falling, getting up again, that’s life and this is relevant to many people.’
He was put in an orphanage and then adopted in France, taunted through childhood as ‘a dirty cripple, a Negro’, he recalls.
Alaize articulates the film’s message about life: ‘We are all superheroes because we have all experienced tragedy, lived through something that didn’t allow us to succeed. And that’s where our strength lies. Life is a fight.’
Ettedgui sees this message as sitting at the heart of the Games’ beginning. Guttmann had witnessed persecution under Hitler: ‘We always wondered if seeing persecution in Germany informed [his] life’s mission. He says it in footage we use in the film and [watching it] makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. He came to the UK and rediscovered a sense of humanity and positivity in life.’ Guttmann understood the healing power of sport. ‘I dream of the time when disabled people will take part in the Olympic Games,’ he said.
One of the brightest stars of this year’s cancelled games would have been Ntando Mahlangu, now 18, from rural South Africa. Four years ago, aged 14, he flew to Rio and ran on double cheetah blades, picking up a silver medal in the 200m.
‘I was the underdog,’ he says, laughing. When he returned to South Africa, the arrival terminal was full of people holding up banners and screaming his name. Feted as the ‘new’ Jonnie Peacock, watch out for him next year, when he’ll be going for gold
Mahlangu was born with a condition called hemimolia, meaning that his lower legs hadn’t fully developed: ‘It’s seen as a curse where I am from,’ he tells me. ‘My family supported me, but I went to a disabled boarding school, where I was a big guy who liked fatty food, and was stuck in a wheelchair.’
Mahlangu’s options were severely limited and he remained in a chair. But at the age of 10 his life changed, thanks to a pioneering doctor and the Jumping Kids charity (which helps children with disability in South Africa). After the bottom halves of both his legs were amputated, he was raised up and out of his wheelchair and straight on to cheetah blades. ‘They gave me this vision,’ he remembers. ‘They said, “You should do it!”
‘There is this small video where I am walking and everybody is holding me up. It is a great feeling. They gave me a gift and I appreciate it every day.’
He moved to Pretoria as the charge of his benefactor, Johan Snyders, chief executive of Icexpress Progressive Prosthetics, and almost immediately began to run on his blades: ‘I just wanted to run.’ Then came the brave move of switching to mainstream school. The weight fell off him: ‘I started training and moving. I developed muscles, became stronger – physically and mentally. It changed me so much.’ He looked people in the eye. When he ran – really fast – he could hear the wind rush in his ears.
His recent 800m time (he runs a variety of distances) is 1:43 minutes, ‘putting me in number one ranking in South Africa, Africa and the world,’ he says proudly. At just 18, he will almost certainly qualify for Tokyo next year, then he plans to train to be a lawyer.
For Mahlangu, there is the same ripple effect Jonnie Peacock articulates. Now, children with disabilities like his want to wear