Record-chasing Storey sets the bar ever higher both for herself and the Games
It has been a sobering few weeks for the Paralympic movement building up to the start of this year’s Games on Wednesday. Concerns over Rio 2016’s finances and infrastructure, its capacity to host an event capable of building on the legacy left by London 2012, have shone an uncomfortable light on disabled sport, forcing a reappraisal of just how far the Paralympic movement has come and how serious we are about it.
The Games have had to be scaled back by the organisers, who owned up to funding shortfalls after overspending on the Olympics. Ticket sales have been lukewarm. Hannah Cockroft, the two-time Paralympic champion, admitted this week on arriving in Brazil that it felt like she was at “any old competition, not a Paralympic Games”, noting a distinct lack of “buzz” about the place.
Cockroft added that competing in empty stadiums would be “devastating” for athletes who felt there had been a step change in how disabled sport was perceived in London four years ago.
Dame Sarah Storey was never convinced that the euphoria generated by 2012 was proof that the Paralympics had ‘arrived’ in the first place.
While everyone was busy, in her words, “slapping themselves on the back” after London 2012, and rejoicing in the huge mainstream publicity it generated, Storey – who stands equal with Baroness Grey-Thompson and Dave Roberts as the most successful British Paralympian of all time with 11 gold medals, and who is likely to be out on her own by the end of this month with four more opportunities coming up – wanted more. She wanted to see that interest consolidated.
“We say this every four years but we haven’t just been sat around since the last Games,” says Storey, for whom this will be a seventh Paralympics. “We are out there delivering performances every year; UK Sport funds us to compete full time. We now need to crack on in the four years in between.
“Sure, we get column inches now the Paralympics are upon us; we get newspapers and radio. Now we need TV to actually turn up to our world championships, and have an archive of me winning gold medals at worlds, or [fellow track cyclist] Jody Cundy winning gold medals. I think we all thought that [progress] might happen when everyone slapped themselves on the back so hard after London.”
Storey is not trying to do down the work of the likes of broadcaster Channel 4, whose “Meet the Superhumans” campaign in 2012 did so much to alter public perceptions. She admits there have been huge strides made in the 24 years since she made her Paralympic debut in Barcelona, when, as a 14-year-old swimmer she took two golds, four silvers and one bronze medal.
“It’s become less about volunteers and therapy and more about elite sport,” she says. “People have stopped talking about coaching disabled athletes. Now they just coach athletes. There is depth across the board. Medical science has moved on, too. Our understanding of certain impairments. The way disabled athletes train. But now the Paralympic movement is calling on itself to be bigger again. We have the capacity to be so much bigger.”
Storey’s exacting standards are no surprise. The 38-year-old from Eccles did not become an 11-time Paralympic champion and 27-time world champion – not to mention the holder of 72 world records along the way – by setting the bar low.
Born without a functioning left hand after her arm became entangled in the umbilical cord in the womb, Storey’s achievements in both disabled and able-bodied sport are dizzying.
She competed as a swimmer in her first four Paralympic Games, switching to cycling in 2005 after persistent ear infections forced her to try something different. She found that she was even better at that sport, to the extent that she was competitive with able-bodied athletes who had been riding their entire lives.
At the 2008 Paralympic Games, Storey won the individual pursuit in a time that would have been in the top eight at the Olympic final. In 2012, she very nearly took one of the three places in the GB squad for the women’s team pursuit. Even this year, at the age of 38 and having given birth to her daughter Louisa in 2013, she finished third in the country at the national time trial championships, beating Emma Pooley, Team GB’s pick for the Olympic time trial, by 21 seconds.
If she can claim one more gold in Rio – and who would bet against her? – Storey will be out on her own as the most successful Paralympic athlete GB has ever produced.
She is rightly proud of her longevity, particularly as a new mother, paying glowing tribute to her husband Barney, the tandem pilot and coach she married in 2007 and with whom she runs her Podium Ambition UCI women’s road cycling team.
“Louisa is the priority now but I have only missed one session in three years because of needing to be mum,” she says. “And that was when she had tonsillitis at the worlds in Montichiari [earlier this year]. It’s testament to my family and how we cope with the situation, and the number of events I do, because it would have been easy to say, ‘I won’t do four or five events. I’m just going to forget about the track’.
“I feel quite proud that we’ve managed to keep all those balls in the air.” Could she go on to Tokyo in 2020? “I don’t have any plans to retire,” she says. “I need to see how I go. Have I improved? Haven’t I improved? I’ll still only be the same age as Kristin [Armstrong, the American who won the Rio Olympic time trial at 42] is now.” One thing is certain, there will be no resting on any laurels.