Chris Holmes Paralympic three years to go transcript

Hi! I’m Chris Holmes, just been appointed Director of Paralympic Integration. Started just over a week ago so just getting stuck in, meeting all the people around the place and starting to put plans together for the Paralympic Integration piece.

This is the first time an Organising Committee’s taken a totally integrated approach to the planning and delivery of the Olympics and the Paralympics. What that means is, that in every stage of the process, whatever area it’s in - be it sport, the venues, overlay whatever - the Paralympics and Olympics have equal status at every stage of the process and that’s guaranteed through the functional directorate structure.

My role is to sort of bring all that together really and ensure that it is happening. It’s not to get involved in the granular delivery or planning of any particular aspect to do with the Paralympics but it’s to ensure that everything Paralympic is integrated within those functional areas.

I was incredibly lucky, I started swimming for a local swimming club, got taken down there by my parents, enjoyed it, swam for the county, that kind of thing. I then got invited to a junior development weekend with the disabled swimming team at that point and it just developed from there really.

I went to my first Paralympic Games when I was 16, which was in Seoul in 1988. Had a really fantastic experience, was lucky enough to win two silver medals.

Came back from Seoul though and thought ‘How far can I take this? How far do I want to take it? What do I really want from this sport?’ And I wanted a bit more than that, I wanted to see just how far I could push it.

So I went and trained with the Olympic swimmers at City of Birmingham, got involved with doing sort of seventy, eighty thousand metres a week in the water. So that’s sort of three thousand two hundred lengths of a standard pool, so it wrecks your hair and it wrecks your skin but it was well worth it ‘cause four years later I went to Barcelona and it was even better than Seoul to be honest. Everything went right for me, just had a fantastic games experience.

It was the last time the Olympics and Paralympics had been in an outdoor swimming pool. Barcelona sunshine through the sessions, just awesome. We got to the end of the week and through all the work I’d done with getting the right training with my coach luckily came out of the Games with six gold medals, which had never been done before by a British Paralympian and never been done since. So just incredibly fortunate to have had that experience.

Went on went to Atlanta and Sydney after that, so had seventeen years on the Great Britain Paralympic swimming team. Phenomenally lucky just to have had that experience, it was awesome in every sense. Not just for the sport but for the friendships and just the sense of what it gave me inside, just what it is possible to achieve if you set a goal and go for it.

And that’s why it’s so exciting to have been given this role at LOCOG because it’s having been able to go and compete at four Games to now be a central player in planning the London Paralympic Games. You know, a fantastic opportunity.

I think we can do something very special in London. The Games, the Paralympic Games began in Britain, it was a British creation. We exported it successfully all around the world and it’s now coming home for 2012. And what we’re looking at is to use the power of the games to inspire change.

Now what that can mean in the Paralympic context is quite a lot of things really. Not least the sense of enabling every disabled child in the country to have the opportunity to get involved in sport, the opportunity to participate and the opportunity to access sporting opportunities. That’s a fantastic task but that is the power that the Games has.

Where, at the moment, maybe for a whole series of reasons, disabled children may not feel that it’s possible for them to get involved in sporting situations, they may not have the opportunity to get involved in sport at school for a whole series of reasons and I think we can be...we can’t as LOCOG go about it and solve all these problems but what we can do is be a catalyst for change. Bringing people together, being a focal point, using other Paralympic heroes to act as role models for young disabled people to think ‘Actually I wouldn’t mind doing that. I wouldn’t mind having a go at that.’

Maybe it seems a dream, ‘I’d love to compete in the Paralympics in 2020’. Maybe through what we do in 2012, eight years later that becomes a reality for them.

It’s three years to go ‘til the torch is lit in London for the Paralympic Games. That time is going to go so quickly. When I was competing, the time between Seoul and Barcelona, Barcelona and Atlanta just went so quickly. Three years is not long and we have got so much to pack into that time.

To pick one specific example, what I really want at 2012 is to have knowledgeable, educated spectators watching, experiencing and enjoying Paralympic sport.

We know there’s a great interest and a sense of looking in at the Paralympics at the moment and disabled sport. You The British public do have an interest in it, but to get the maximum amount of what the games experience can be and the potential benefits for change following 2012 it has to come from that sense of an educated viewership. Not just in the stadium around the Paralympic Games but at home watching on television, to have that sense of understanding sometimes quite complicated sports, particularly the two sports designed specifically for disabled peopled of Boccia and Goalball.

Now, it’s understandable why people don’t necessarily have a high level of understanding or even knowledge of these two sports. It’s our job to ensure that when people switch on the TV or walk into the stadium in 2012 they know what they’re watching, they understand the rules, understand the complexities, and can from that gain so much more enjoyable an experience from the Games.

How we going to do that? Massive education piece and a massive role for the media to help us in that journey. I think we can do it. It’s certainly what I’m going to be putting a lot of my time into ensuring that we do everything we can to try and make that happen. In no doubt it’s a big mountain to climb but it’s well worth taking those steps.

Training alongside the Olympic swimmers? Just awesome to be in the pool with them. Because essentially there wasn’t a diving line when it came to training Paralympic or Olympic, it was are you doing the work or aren’t you doing the work. You did the work and you got the same respect from your teammates and from the coach and from the other parents as anybody else.

If you were a slacker, doesn’t matter if you were a Paralympic or Olympic slacker, if you’re a slacker you’re a slacker and people saw you in that respect. If you put the work in, did the goods and when it came to the test set if people could see you were giving it everything you had then sport just respects sport.

And I think almost by us being an integrated Organising Committee, that sends out such a positive message across any area of society that integration is the way to go.

So be it in education if kids go to mainstream schools, the local comprehensive or whatever, then that is such a positive thing because if you look at some of the major barriers which disabled people face...just take an obvious example of an inaccessible building. Now would an inaccessible building be built and be designed by an architect if that architect had gone to school with someone who was a wheelchair user?

So they wouldn’t be seeing disabled people as this great 'other', somewhere away from them, somewhere where they’d have no direct experience of or contact with a disabled person. They would in their design process they would just have that naturally hard-wired into their brain because they wouldn’t possibly design a building which their friend, their school friend who they’d grown up with, wouldn’t be able to use.

So integration absolutely the key, it’s a really positive message from us as an Organising Committee, I think it’s a message which we can ripple out across the whole country. Because there’s a huge gulf to be breached still if you think that almost half the disabled people of working age don’t work, you know 66 percent of visually impaired people of working age don’t work. Now, a country can’t afford to waste that talent year on year and I think it’s not our role to take on all of these tasks, but I think we can be a focal point, a catalyst, to drive change.

If I was to set out three goals it would be to have an educated, knowledgeable and geed up audience coming into every Paralympic sport at 2012. Knowing what they’re coming to see and being key and excited by that prospect. And when they leave the stadium having had an experience which they wouldn’t have otherwise had had they not had that education in the build up to 2012. And that starts today, that’s not about giving people education on a sport a quick guide when they walk into the venue at 2012. That piece of work starts right now.

Secondly, absolutely critical to ensure that disabled children across the whole nation get a fair go. Can’t be put any more simpler than that. Just given a fair go. Particularly in the sporting environment. Obviously again that work starts right now and is a huge challenge for us.

And thirdly, which builds on that, if kids do get into sport and that’s their thing, ensuring that the coaches in the community, ensuring that the clubs are welcoming and confident to have disabled children, disabled youngsters in their programmes. Not just to have it as a want or as a desire but to actually have an incredible welcome and be open to that possibility, and that really comes down to confidence and the sort of work that we do - again using Paralympic role models, essentially demonstrating to people in whatever environment that they’re in that this is possible.

I think the Paralympics is special, there’s a definite spirit of the Paralympics and I guess it’s down to a number of factors, not least that it’s a lot younger organisation and movement than the Olympics.

So what you get I think with Paralympics is you feel closer to the sport, you feel more drawn in and engaged with the sport, there’s a much more family feel to it. Potentially it’s incredibly enjoyable, it’s an incredibly unique experience for not just spectators but for everybody who is fortunate enough to be involved with the Paralympics at any level at any stage.

So there is that, it’s almost intangible but that Paralympic spirit is special and everybody who has an involvement can describe it but maybe can’t entirely say exactly what it is but know they’ve been touched by it.

I remember the Moscow Olympics, Duncan Goodhew winning the gold medal in the hundred breaststroke and I just thought that looked such a cool thing to be part of. And I sort of remember the other guys from 1980 aswell, Seb Coe, Daley Thompson. And just really getting that sense of what it was to be involved in sport, what it was to compete and just if you could get it right, what it was to win a gold medal. I thought that looks pretty cool, I wouldn’t mind.

It seems such a long way away, I was a young boy just training a twenty five yard pool in Kidderminster. Yeah, in many ways it couldn’t be further away but I just thought that looks pretty cool maybe, maybe, maybe if I just hold that dream maybe I could get close to making it possible.

When Moscow happened in 1980 I was, yeah, I could see pretty much fully. I went to the local school, yeah could see enough to get around, a tiny bit short-sighted maybe but could see. For all intents and purposes I was sighted.

Then when I was 14, went to bed one night, woke up the next day and I’d lost the majority of my sight over night. Just over night. Had a tiny, tiny bit left but maybe just sort of an inch in front of me, no more than that.

And I faced a choice really, even in that, in those darkest moments there was a choice of 'what do I want to achieve?. Before it happened, I had three real goals at that stage, I wanted to do A levels, wanted to try and get a place at Cambridge and wanted to try and swim for my country.

Now, even in that darkest moment when I lost my sight I thought well have those goals changed, and they hadn’t. They way I was going to have to go about trying to achieve them may have changed but that’s simply practical steps to put in place. The actual goals themselves still burned just as strongly inside me.

So it was that choice. Do I allow this to change my life, to affect where I was wanting to go? Or do I think okay it’s happened, how can I go about still trying to achieve those goals.

And incredibly lucky to have had the team of people around me at every stage, who have an equal part in the gold medals I won, have an equal part in my degree, have an equal part in everything I’ve achieved. Nothing is really of any value, is ultimately achievable individually; it all comes from a team. Whether that’s your friends, family, coaches, whoever it is. Any true success is a team success.

I think sport is a tremendous enabler because it does open up a world of possibility for you. I certainly remember when I was studying for my finals at university and thinking ‘God this is pretty tough’ and I was doing sort of thirteen hours studying a day. But while I was doing that I thought but this is really important. Surely I can do this if I was prepared to do five hours a day in the pool and an hour in the gym.

And sport, as I say, it opens up a door into a whole world of possibilities and the discipline and the lifestyle that sport gives you is equally applicable to any sense of any other world and anything that you’re trying to achieve.

It almost doesn’t matter at what level of sport you’re involved in. I was fantastically lucky to take it all the way to the medal rostrum at the Paralympics, but what sport gives you at every level from the first moment that you participate in sport is a sense of self-confidence, a sense of self belief, a sense of achievement, a sense of camaraderie, a sense of team. All those things come from the first moment that you get involved in sport and those things are worth more than any gold medal.