Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
STRICTLY WILL
Most viewers watching Will Bayley foxtrot with professional partner Janette Manrara tonight will have no idea of just what the Paralympic gold medallist has endured to make it on to Strictly.
Born with the genetic condition arthrogryposis, causing curvatures in both hands and feet, he had countless painful, bone-breaking surgeries throughout his childhood to try to help him to walk.
But all that stopped abruptly at the age of seven, when Will was diagnosed with an unrelated blood cancer.
“I had non-hodgkin lymphoma,” he says matter-of-factly. “It was really bad at the time, I was in hospital for about a year-and-a-half.
“We stopped the operations on my legs because we decided to just focus on the cancer. I didn’t have any more after that, which is probably why my feet aren’t as good as they could be.”
To combat the disease, the young schoolboy from Tunbridge Wells, Kent, was given a trial drug at London’s Great Ormond Street hospital.
During his lengthy stays there, Paralympian table tennis player Will, now 31, remembers deciding at one stage that he’d simply had enough.
“It was a tough one. I knew I was really ill but I remember saying to my mum that I didn’t want any more treatment. I refused to go.
“But I said to her, ‘If I don’t go back, will I die?’ and my mum said, ‘yeah’. So I was like, ‘OK, I’ll go back’. I think those sorts of times make you a lot stronger.”
Thankfully, the drugs halted the potentially fatal disease. “It managed to get me through it, I’m so lucky that it worked,” he says now with a laugh. “To be alive is amazing, really.”
The cheerful athlete says credit for helping him survive the crisis must go to his “amazing” mum Chrissie. “My mum was so brave, she was a massive support,” he says. “I only saw her cry once during the whole time I was ill. And that was by mistake!”
He knows that his illness also affected his brother Tom, now 34, and stepdad Gary.
“It was tough for them too because they were basically home alone for such a long time. I took all the attention from my mum.”
It was a gift from his grandma that was to change his life for ever – a mini-table tennis table so he could play on the ward. “That’s when I first started,” he explains. “Then when I left Great Ormond Street I just wanted to carry on, so we got a table tennis table in the garage and then I started playing for a club.”
The sport became his passion but it didn’t stop him getting unwanted attention at secondary school.
“I used to struggle with confidence a lot,” Will confesses. “Obviously when you’ve got a disability, you worry about how you look.
“It didn’t break me down but kids can be quite cruel. They’d say ‘why have you got weird hands?’ or ‘why can’t you walk properly?’ When you’re getting changed for PE you don’t want to show that you’ve got feet like mine.”
Will took to poking fun at himself