‘I just cut off all my leggings from the knee. It’s not fancy’
Having a functional kit has not been an option for many female parasport athletes, so they are having to make do and adjust with DIY adaptations of their own, writes Yolanthe Fawehinmi
Imagine being a multiple gold medalwinning athlete, and having to take scissors to your own kit to make it fit. Sprinter and long jumper Stefanie Reid, who competes in the T44 category, was the face of the London 2012 Paralympic Games – but even fame and success didn’t mean she could access a proper-fitting pair of leggings to compete in.
“It’s unfortunate that the sporting world has been really slow in terms of adapting to diversity,” says Reid. “I’m a business person, so I get it does not make sense for a retailer to design a piece of clothing that can only be used by a small portion of the population. I just cut off all my leggings from the knee. I mean, it’s not fancy, but it works. Though places like Lululemon allow anybody to adapt and adjust the height of their tights in store, they are not a performance brand like Nike or Adidas.”
Having the perfect sports kit has not been an option for many female parasport athletes. While trike racer Hannah Dines reports spending “hours on google”, others make DIY adaptations.
That is a tough set-up for sportswomen who are already facing additional barriers. “I’ve not had a kit sponsor since London 2012,” says Reid. “I was dropped immediately afterwards because of budget cuts. Yet there were other able-bodied athletes who didn’t even qualify for the Olympics, who were kept on at a much higher rate. Things like that really sting.”
“The top 0.05 per cent of para athletes are probably making a good living, but that leaves 99.5 per cent of athletes that are not. In the Olympic world, you can have [able-bodied] athletes who may have just got on to a team, and they’ll be on contracts that are around £40-50,000 a year. But you don’t see that in the parasport world.”
When Paralympic icon Tanni Grey-thompson recalls her glittering career, she says the vast majority of her kit was custommade. Most wheelchair racers back then preferred an all-in-one suit to compete, benefiting from the introduction of Lycra in the Eighties. “In wheelchair racing, the chairs don’t have much wriggle room so you have to minimise the material, because of how you sit, having a lot of material around your hips could wrinkle [or] dig in. I was quite lucky because my kit sponsor had access to the best materials.”
“You want to be confident on the starting line. There’s no time to be worrying about whether you will expose a nipple or not during the race, it’s distracting. So I preferred to wear something with sleeves and one-piece suits cyclists wore as I didn’t need anything incredibly different. The stuff I had modified was because of my height and my body shape, not my impairment.”
Swimmer turned sprint kayaker Charlotte Henshaw says the issue is disability specific, rather than gender specific, “which makes it difficult to say whether access to kit has progressed or not in comparison to ablebodied women”. Like Grey-thompson, Henshaw says she does not need her kit heavily altered, either. “It’s really important and powerful for disabled people to see themselves in the broad spectrum of sports. If more people are willing to work with us, and ask the right questions, we will flourish,” she adds.
Access to kit for parasport athletes is a very individual requirement. It is impossible to provide an off-the-shelf solution that comes with additional costs and less availability, according to Paralympic road and track racing cyclist Sarah Storey, who also competes against non-disabled athletes.
“From my experience, the solution has been to look at some cost-effective DIY solutions where possible, before taking a more sophisticated and costly approach. A database of places that can help to adapt or create bespoke options might be a start.”
Alex Mitchell, founder of Kit Us Out, a charity that supports parasport athletes from developing countries by buying key items of competition-level equipment, says wearing the wrong kit does not only affect body confidence, it can have repercussions around injury and performance. “There is a massive gap between athletes that are on high-growth programmes and athletes who are not. Although the UK is one of the leaders in the world in relation to parasports, it has limited funding and tends to put money towards where they feel the best impact could be, and that’s sadly the nature of the beast.”
Yet for others, “inclusion is not making separate clothes for separate groups [of people].” Dutch sprint runner Marlou van Rhijn, who was born without lower legs, says: “I’ve always worn normal sports clothes and had a pretty regular kit. I wear shorter tights when running on blades so that I can roll them up easily and change.”
British alpine skier Menna Fitzpatrick who, together with her guide Jennifer Kehoe make up Britain’s most successful winter Paralympics duo, believes “sports kits for parasport athletes should be as close to an able-bodied kit but with the adaptation that people might need”.