Just in time for the Paralympics the veteran broadcaster and campaigner for disability rights, Peter White, has launched a special Paralympian series of his No Triumph, No Tragedy programme (Radio 4), the title of which should probably be reversed. On Sunday he talked to Margaret Maughan, the first Briton to win a gold medal at the Paralympics. She broke her back in a road accident in Malawi, where she was teaching, but only a year later she triumphed at Rome in the first international games for the disabled to be held alongside the Olympics. Maughan had discovered that although she had always been hopeless at sport she was rather good at archery. In Rome she hit her target spot-on.
How did you get there? asks White, knowing back then there would have been no ramps, no special provisions for the disabled. Maughan and the other 69 athletes in Team GB were wheelchair-bound and at London Airport they all had to be lifted from the runway up to the plane in the bucket of a forklift truck. It took hours. Once in Rome, they discovered that the athletes’ accommodation in the showcase Olympic Village had been artfully designed on stilts. For the Paralympics all those taking part had to be carried up two flights of stairs just to get to and from the competition venues. The army were drafted in to sort this out. How undignified, White declared, to be carried up and down stairs every day by men in uniform. Maughan, though, was unperturbed. ‘The atmosphere,’ she recalls, ‘was marvellous, meeting people from all over the world.’
Maughan is now 85 and slightly bemused by the attention she’s at last getting as the first great British Paralympian. She was introduced to archery at Stoke Mandeville hospital by the pioneering Dr Ludwig Guttmann.
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