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 | You and Yours - Transcript ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 |
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| TX: 27.04.04 – PARALYMPICS 2 – Who Are The British Names To Watch Out For? PRESENTER: PETERWHITE |
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| THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE ´óÏó´«Ã½ CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY WHITE Our Paralympic athletes are already in training for the big event in September and all this week I'm reporting on how preparations are going. Britain has a special place in Paralympic history. The idea of the games was developed at Stoke Mandeville Hospital which specialises in the treatment of spinal injuries and the first Paralympics actually took place in Britain in 1948. We've also been consistently more successful in the Paralympics than in the Olympics. So how are we likely to do this time and who are some of the new names to watch out for? Well I've been talking to some of the emerging athletes but first a reminder of a couple of those Sydney success stories. ACTUALITY - SYDNEY GAMES Great Britain are closing Canada down and the celebration's already beginning. Great Britain now in the lead. It's going to be gold for Great Britain and what a remarkable relay, gold for Great Britain, silver for Australia and bronze for Brazil. And Tani Grey is moving away from the rest, this is a brilliant ride by Tani Grey-Thompson and surely gold medal number four is in the bag. WHITE They were heady days back in Sydney 2000 when Great Britain finished second only to the host nation and for the first time the general public began to recognise the names of disabled athletes. Two months later wheelchair racer Tani Grey-Thompson came third in the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s mainstream sports personality of the year poll. Since then she's had a baby daughter but she's back in full training now and again one of our main medal hopes. Once again we have a strong squad of swimmers and there are expectations that our equestrian team, which swept the board in Sydney, can repeat the performance in Athens. But as Great Britain team manager Phil Lane explains good performances produce even higher expectations and pressure. LANE We're certainly striving for a top three finish. We were set a very tough target by UK sport, finishing top of the medal table, I think finishing top of the medal table was a bit of a chancy thing to nail your colours to but we will certainly strive to do that. And we're fairly confident that the athletes we're taking will put a tremendous performance. ACTUALITY - POWERLIFTER WHITE Powerlifter and wheelchair user Emma Brown from Pontypridd, doing 10 repetition lifts of 50 kilos - just to warm up you understand. Emma won gold for the first time at Sydney, aged just 20. But she had an even earlier introduction to the sport. BROWN I thought I'd always been strong because I used to arm wrestle the boys in school and win. And when I was 14 I went to the national games at Stoke Mandeville and I went along to a have-a-go session of powerlifting and I lifted the senior national record on my first attempt - which was 60 kilos at the time. ACTUALITY - GYM Hi how are you? Okay how are you? I'm just going to do some weights now. If I need some help will you come and [indistinct word] me? Yeah no problem. BROWN My discipline's the bench press and basically that means you lie on your back on a bench and you take the weight at arm's length, lower it to your chest, pause on your chest and push it back up. And my world record is 140 kilos, which is 22 stone. ACTUALITY - GYM Take the pressure, keep it going, and one more, okay that'll do. WHITE Last time a powerlifting team of 11 won two golds and a bronze. In Athens with a team less than half that size they're still hoping for two golds and Emma is quite sure it's going to be an even bigger experience. BROWN In Sydney we competed in front of 750 people, there was an awesome atmosphere but that's the biggest amount of people I've ever competed in front of. So I have no idea what five and a half thousand people will be like. Obviously there's a lot of hard training in front of me now in the next 22 weeks. I fully intend to keep my world record and medal status as Paralympic champions. ACTUALITY - WHEELCHAIR RUGBY WHITE One of the newer sports to the Paralympics is wheelchair rugby. Started in Canada and the States in the seventies and known then ominously as "murder ball" because of its rather violent nature, it's evolved from a combination of sports into a game in its own right, as Ross Morrison explains. MORRISON In essence wheelchair rugby bears very little correlation to actual rugby, except in terms of the actual level of violence involved. In that it's played indoors on a basketball court with four players on each team, on court at any one time, with a regular volleyball. The idea being to push through the goal at the other end of the court, carrying the ball. It's full contact, so although there's no actual body contact the chair contact is full on. ACTUALITY - WHEELCHAIR RUGBY WHITE The game was originally designed to give opportunities to players who couldn't play wheelchair basketball, which demands a very high level of upper body strength. As usual with disability sport accommodating a range of disabled people can make tactics complicated. Each degree of disability rates a point score, falling with the level of severity. The four players on the court must never exceed a points value of eight, which makes for some fairly trixy strategies. MORRISON You could have a very dominant player worth three and a half points, they'd be very quick, fast, good passing ability, but then conversely the other three players will only be able to make up four and a half points, so they'd be balanced out but you'd have to place a much weaker style players, what we call low pointers. And so you could play a more balanced line up, a high/low line up - all sorts of things basically depending on who you're playing and what kind of tactics you want to play. ACTUALITY - WHEELCHAIR RUGBY WHITE I was talking there to Ross Morrison and we'll also be following his progress and that of powerlifter Emma Brown as they train throughout the summer, all the way to their big moment in Athens in September. Back to the You and Yours homepage The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is not responsible for external websites |
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