Alex Brooker: How the Paralympics changed me

An emotional new documentary brings home the competition’s huge importance, says The Last Leg star 
Getty Images
Alex Brooker25 August 2020

When I was growing up I regularly visited a centre to get new prosthetic legs.

If anything, I used to look forward to it, because it got me out of school for the morning. But I always felt very self-conscious because the other patients were always a lot older, mainly pensioners. There was nobody there like me, really.

Then I remember being on a visit when I was about 12, and on the noticeboard seeing a poster for an amputee sports association. There were amputees swimming, playing golf and one was running. That was the first time I ever saw a blade prosthetic.

“I’m going to get one” turned very quickly into: “I’m going to be a 400m runner.” I’d never said that before and I’ve never said that since. My leg was not the obstacle in that dream, it was that I spent too much time playing PlayStation and eating sweets. But I came home that day absolutely buzzing. Elated at the fact that someone like me was able to run — and fast. I was reminded of this watching a new documentary about the history of the Paralympics, Rising Phoenix, which will be landing on Netflix on Wednesday.

PA

(PA)

When you’re disabled, the bar is set so low for you. Even if people don’t say it, you can tell by the looks they give you. The assumption is that you can’t do anything for yourself. I’ve always understood it to an extent, but it still hurts. And from that comes a determination to prove people wrong.

It never leaves you, and for me it was there last year when I was struggling to make a relay team to swim the Channel as part of a show called Sink or Swim for Channel 4 and Stand Up To Cancer. I could have quit, but then I would be proving the people right who thought a bloke with little arms and one leg wouldn’t be able to swim.

My relationship with my disability hasn’t always been positive. In 2010, I was selected to be on a talent development squad for rifle shooting, with the aim of competing at the London 2012 Paralympic Games. I lasted only three months of training. Not because it was too difficult, but because I couldn’t handle being around other disabled people. I’d lived all my life like I was able-bodied, then all of a sudden, I was defined by my disability.

I quit and went through a course of therapy. I just didn’t want to be seen as disabled. But all that changed at London 2012. In fact, my life changed in more ways than I ever could’ve imagined.

When I auditioned to be a reporter for Channel 4’s Paralympic coverage I was wary because there weren’t any disabled people on TV, and there never had been really. I grew up thinking maybe the public weren’t ready to accept disabled people on their screens.

London 2012 blew that away. Packed stadiums watched these phenomenal athletes do the things disabled people are told they can’t do. Channel 4 ran an ad campaign after the Olympics saying “thanks for the warm-up” and on the first day of the Paralympic Games I knew why.

Brooker watched Jonnie Peacock win at the Paralympics
Getty Images

I cannot describe the feeling of watching Great Britain’s Jonnie Peacock, a bloke with a leg like me, run 100m in 10.9 seconds with this deafening noise cheering him on. All my life I had shied away from my disability but all of a sudden I embraced it.

Being on The Last Leg, which I co-host, was a huge part of that. I’d never really talked about my leg and hands being different. God, I remember being a teenager at school discos, hiding my hands because I was worried girls wouldn’t like me. Then I find myself on TV laughing and celebrating who I was — riding on the crest of a wave created by these incredible athletes.

Of course what makes the Paralympics unique is the stories of what the athletes have overcome. But what made London 2012 so wonderful was that it made you forget about that and focus on the sport. Jonnie Peacock the amputee became Jonnie Peacock the brilliant sprinter. I came into London 2012 as a journalist who had avoided addressing his disability, and left as a TV presenter who celebrated it.

When Sir Ludwig Guttmann created the Stoke Mandeville Games in 1948 and started the Paralympic movement, he did so with the intention of using the power of sport to give hope to servicemen injured in the Second World War. Rising Phoenix chronicles the story of the Games, told through the voices of Guttmann’s daughter Eva Loeffler, Prince Harry, the Paralympic organisers and several athletes including Peacock.

Their stories spoke to me in so many ways. French amputee long-jumper Jean-Baptiste Alaize, who survived the civil war in Burundi, talks emotionally about the prejudice he overcame to reach the top of his sport.

Australian wheelchair rugby player Ryley Batt talks of overcoming his own self-consciousness as a teenager to embrace his disability, and become the best player in the world. And Bebe Vio, an Italian wheelchair fencer who lost her legs and arms to meningitis when she was 11, tells the story of defying the odds to take gold at Rio 2016. How she rose again — like a phoenix.

I cried several times during the documentary because hearing those athletes talk of their struggles reminded me of my own; of the times I’ve been afraid of being disabled. I had those tears at London 2012 and again in Rio in 2016 when I talked on Last Leg about how the Italian hand-cyclist Alex Zanardi had inspired me with his positive attitude toward his disability.

At the time, my wife was pregnant with our first child and all I could think about was failing as a father because of my disability. How would I hold a child? How could I be the dad I wanted to be with my restrictions? But Zanardi, who lost both his legs in a motor-racing accident and went on to win gold in London and Rio, talked about his life being a never-ending privilege. It reminded me that life should be about what you can do, not what you can’t.

Athlete Bebe Vio in the Netflix documentary
Netflix

I wonder, when Guttmann started the Stoke Mandeville Games, whether he knew what a huge impact his legacy would have — not only on the people competing, but those watching too.

Such was his vision, I expect he did. I left London 2012 with a different view on who I was. I left Rio 2016 with a renewed faith that I could overcome whatever life threw at me. And I got up after watching Rising Phoenix once again feeling proud to be disabled.

For me that is the essence of the Paralympics — being able to achieve the seemingly impossible, defying the odds and more importantly being proud of who you are. That feeling I had when I first saw the photo of the amputee runner when I was 12.

American archer Matt Stutzman, who does not have arms and instead fires the bow using his feet, sums it up best in Rising Phoenix when explaining there was no medical reason for his disability: “This is who I am. Merry Christmas.”

Rising Phoenix is on Netflix from Wednesday