Universities Week

Born with spina bifida, Tanni Grey-Thompson is a wheelchair user, one of the UK’s most successful disabled athletes and three times BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year. In 2004 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University. Here she talks to Platform’s Robyn Slingsby about London 2012, the challenges of being a mother, discrimination, her heroes and skiing.

She’s just turned 40 and although she no longer trains to compete at world-class level, Paralympian Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson certainly has her hands full. While she admits that not having to watch her weight anymore is a huge relief, she’s a huge advocate of the fact that exercise fuels the brain. She still does a lot for sport since retiring in 2008 – with 16 Paralympic medals to her name - but confesses that her biggest challenge yet is being a mum.

“Winning the 100 metres in Athens for me, as an athlete, was the best thing I did. It was probably the closest thing to perfection in terms of any race I did, technically and in terms of my preparation. The trouble with me is I’m never ever  happy with what I’ve done, I’m really self critical so for most of my athletics career I didn’t think I’d done enough, and then at the point I didn’t think I could do any more, I retired.

“But, to be honest, having Carys, my daughter, has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Being a mother is way harder than any of the work stuff I do because it changes every day. One day she eats peas, the next day she refuses to eat peas and she’ll sit there and say she’s never eaten peas in her life. We’ll be in a shop and I’ll buy her an outfit she says she likes and then you get home and she won’t wear it. It changes every day.

“I was in Beijing for two months last year and before we went, Carys went into school and told the teacher that I was making her going to the Olympics . We had tickets to the opening ceremony and she asked if there would be fireworks, that’s all she was interested in. But once she was there she loved it.”

Permanent state of chaos

Tanni juggles a lot of commitments and has to manage her diary carefully so she spends enough quality time with her husband Dr Ian Thompson and daughter Carys, seven, at their home in Eaglescliffe. How does she do it?

“We live in permanent state of chaos, and that’s fine. There’s a lot of guilt put onto mothers that you have to be perfect mother who cooks, cleans, washes and can hold down a job. I just think that’s nonsense, it’s about not beating yourself up over things and I don’t feel guilty if I give my daughter cheese on toast for tea, even though my own mother would have thought it was dreadful. It’s about not feeling guilty about the stuff you can’t change.

“I really enjoy my work and do lots of different things and I love it, and that has consequences on my husband and daughter but you try and balance it the best you can.

“When I was little my mum stopped working when my sister was born – she’s two years older than me – and went back to work when I was 19, and the world’s not like that anymore. Very occasionally Carys will ask me why I’m away – usually because she wants something out of me. I’ve learned from right back when she was really little that children are amazing at making you feel guilty.

As well as her charity work, Dame Tanni has been involved in the bidding for and planning of the Olympics in London in 2012 – and she’s very excited about it.

Tall poppy syndrome

“London will do an amazing job, when you look at the bid process the team were really professional and did their homework. There’s a bit of a tall poppy syndrome within UK culture, we do sometimes see the negative. This is the best opportunity in sport to showcase what we do and show the world what we’re good at.”

What about disabled access?

“I joined the board at Transport For London (TFL) last year, and going into it my view was why can’t we make all underground stations accessible? But then you look at putting a lift into a tube station and find out you don’t get much change out of £150 million. A lot of work has gone into making the newer stations accessible, but there are issues about air conditioning on the tubes, line upgrades, platform rebuilds, health and safety, and access is one part of it so it all has to go in the melting pot that is the TFL budget and it’s a hard balancing act.

“Every single London bus is wheelchair accessible, every taxi is, so we’re starting off at a much stronger point than any other Olympic or Paralympic city has for quite a while and, for me, the key is educating people. Not a lot of people will know this but there’s a really cool underground map which shows the accessible stations, so the ones I can’t use are in pale grey so they don’t cloud my view of where I can travel. So for me the key is education and we’ll have amazingly well trained volunteers at Games times to help people get to where they want to go. Education is key.

“2012 can be a platform to try and make London more accessible in a wider sense to everyone - mums with prams, wheelchairs, blind people.”

Discrimination

Dame Tanni has no problem getting around but says disabled people do suffer discrimination and things like access to higher education are more challenging.

“The reality for disabled people is that education is harder. So whether they miss school time because of illness or they’re in hospital of if they’ve missed things because of their impairment, I sometimes think that higher education isn’t seen as an option.

“When I was in school I’d just sat my O Levels and the careers teacher told me he could get me a nice job answering phones. I said I wanted to go to uni and he basically said ‘Don’t be so silly, what do you want a degree for, it’ll be difficult and won’t help you because you’ll probably end up answering phones anyway.’”

As it turned out my first job was working for British Athletics and part of my job was in fact answering phones, and I really enjoyed it. But lots of people look at impairment and it starts off as inherently negative and if someone tells you that you can’t do something then it’s very easy to believe that. The beauty of the OU is that people come back when they feel they’re ready to but they also have the flexibility, which makes a real difference.”

So, if Dame Tanni could study an OU course, what would it be?

“Law, I always wanted to do law. I went to Loughborough University, which didn’t offer law so I did politics. It was something I was interested in and actually it’s been incredibly useful. I always thought there wasn’t politics in sport and then you get involved and realise there’s loads.”

Self belief

And what about trying a new sport, what she go for?

“Skiing, but I hate the cold and the wet and being out and going downhill doesn’t appeal to me. I like the concept of skiing and saying that I will ski one day, but I don’t think Ill ever actually go skiing.”

Dame Tanni is an inspiration in her own right, but who does she admire?

“I was at the Young Sport conference, to look at what you can do beyond sport to help people, and Desmond Tutu was there and he was just so cool. His charisma and his personality and the way he talked about Africa was just incredible, so I’m a huge fan of his.

“My mum, who has passed away now, was stroppy and stubborn but just an amazingly strong person to have around, she was really cool. We used to argue a lot but she brought me up to have a lot of self belief.

“And Gareth Edwards. I was brought up by mother to believe that he is the closest thing to perfection that will ever walk this earth and it was the way he played, he knew he was good but he wasn’t arrogant and you listen to some of his stories and he was a really cool bloke. I still get awe struck when ever I meet him.”