The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
We are all superheroes’
At what would have been the start of the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics, a new documentary, charting the history and the success of the Games, launches on Netflix. Louise Carpenter talks to its creators, and hears the extraordinary stories of some of the athletes who found a new lease of life through sport
It’s hard now to contemplate any Olympic Games without thinking back to the overwhelming, out-of-nowhere success story of the London 2012 Paralympics.
‘Thanks for the warm-up,’ read the Channel 4 posters that sprung up around the city as the Olympics ended and the Paras began. ‘And to think I had been kind of worried about empty stadiums…’ says Jonnie Peacock, reflecting on the global success of the Paralympics, how they ignited passion in the crowds – and made him an international 100m sprint star, at the age of 19.
Now, on the 60th anniversary of the first Paralympics in Rome, and what would have been the start of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games (postponed until 2021 by the Covid-19 pandemic), there is a powerful new Netflix documentary on the subject.
Rising Phoenix (the film’s title is the nickname of 23-year-old Bebe Vio, one of the nine athletes featured) is the brainchild of Greg Nugent, the marketing director of the 2012 Games, and the film’s producer. ‘The Paralympics were incredible, better than the Olympics in so many ways,’ says Nugent. ‘I thought if the story could be made into a film it would be the most extraordinary tale of courage, bravery and brilliance. All the things that are often missing in the perceptions of disability.
‘Though the idea of filling the screen with
“disabled people” didn’t fit the [commercial] formula,’ he says. ‘I had lots of meetings with important industry people who tried to persuade me that the project was doomed. Nobody said it quite as explicitly, but it was clear where the bias sat.’
But he persisted. It took eight years, and then Netflix got on board: ‘They loved the idea and its power. They were brave.’
The idea was to tell the story of the Paralympics from their birth, as the brainchild of Ludwig Guttmann, a Jewish émigré neurosurgeon trying to help wounded soldiers, to the success of London 2012 and beyond. As the Duke of Sussex (a contributor to the film) observes of London 2012, ‘The stadiums were packed, the sport was incredible.’
The directors Peter Ettedgui and Ian Bonhôte (both of the Bafta-nominated Mcqueen documentary) came on board as a result of Nugent’s left-field vision, enticed by the dramatic narrative of the Games and the personal stories of the participants. Why couldn’t Paralympians be filmed running with cheetahs? Or be cast in statue form in the style of Greek icons? Or be shot and lit in the manner of Hollywood stars?
‘I think the Paralympics reflects all the best things about humanity,’ says Ettedgui, ‘and it reflects all our [human] aspirations and capabilities, which perhaps get forgotten in everyday life, and certainly in this awful period of Covid-19 that we’ve been living through.’
Jonnie Peacock remembers when the producers and directors of Rising Phoenix first visited him in Loughborough (where he trains and lives with his girlfriend, Sally
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