Rower quits Tokyo dream

REBECCA CHIN, one of Wales’ leading international rowers, has had to abandon her Tokyo Olympic dreams due to injury.

The 26-year-old North Walian had hoped to complete the remarkable journey from teenager Para-athlete at the Beijing Paralympics in 2008 to fully fledged Olympian in 2020, but has been forced to quit due to ongoing back problems.

Her decision brings to a close a decade of remarkable sporting achievement by the Deganwy athlete, who first hit the headlines as a 16-year-old in Beijing in 2008 when she competed for Team GB at the Paralympics in shot putt and discus.

She went from sitting a GCSE exam that summer to being told she had qualified to throw F44 discus for Britain at that autumn’s Paralympics. When she arrived in China, the standard check shifted her to the F38 category, deemed more appropriate to her unusual type of leg function that give her balance and standing difficulties.

She was also entered into the shot putt, in which she finished 10th, and simply took everything in her stride.

Twenty minutes after finishing second in the discus, and moments after being interviewed by BBC commentator Steve Cram, the teenage Chin was told that she had been stripped of her medal due to an on-the-spot reclassification of her disability. In effect the judges deemed that her impairment, consisting of hyperlax ligaments in both feet, didn’t make her “disabled enough”.

“When they called me into a small room after the event I just thought I was being drugtested. But it was the classifiers, and they told me I’d been declassified there and then. “

Then a chance meeting with multi-medallist Kath Grainger in the victory parade post Beijing opened her eyes to rowing.

The Deganwy athlete went on to represent GB at two World Rowing U23 Championships before winning silver at her first senior World Championships in 2015. More success followed, although she missed out on the Rio Olympics through injury.

“Rowing has given me so much since I took it up in 2008, from lifelong friends and memories to the chance to travel the world. But it’s also taken its toll.

“I’ve been dealing with more back injuries this last year which has meant I’m not able to enjoy the sport as much.”