2012 London Paralympics

Five-Time Paralympian Claire Cashmore: A Superhuman Origin Story

Paralympian Claire Cashmore and her book “Splash” released this year. Photo courtesy of Claire Cashmore.

Up on the podium Claire grins from ear to ear. She throws her arms in the air and waves her stump with pride. With a gold medal around her neck, her dreams are bigger than ever. Because whatever she can’t do today…she knows she will conquer tomorrow. – from the book, Splash.

Emerging

The little girl at the end of this children’s book is the alter ego of Claire Cashmore, the 5-time Paralympian. In real life, it took many more years for Cashmore to build a conqueror’s mindset. The native of Redditch, who has won  9 medals for Great Britain in swimming and paratriathlon, was born without a left forearm. This difference resulted in a childhood of self consciousness and self pity.

Like any kid, Cashmore wanted to fit in. But she felt her arm that ended in a stump set her apart. So she actively hid it.

“In the summer, when it was boiling hot outside, I’d always wear a jumper,” Cashmore told me. “Or I’d put a blazer over my arm. Or I’d position my bag on that side. I hid it well.”

The only place she felt comfortable in public was in the pool. “I loved the water. It felt like freedom, that feeling of being encapsulated by water, a blanket around your skin. I’d play for ages in the pool.” And as she built competence in a local swimming club, she began to win competitions.

Not just another kid in the pool. Claire is far left. Photo courtesy of Claire Cashmore.

In 2004, she made her Paralympics debut in Athens, where she had a mindset shift that changed her life. She found herself in the presence of people who were not stopping themselves.

“Athens was a real turning point,” she said. “Until then, I had no role models. I was 16 and so self conscious about how I was different. But in Athens, I was surrounded by so many people who were achieving so much despite their limitations, not feeling sorry for themselves. I made a decision then. I was not going to hide my arm.”

Cashmore won two bronze medals swimming in Athens, and medaled at subsequent Paralympics and would go on to become one of ParalympicsGB’s most recognized Paralympians. In the run up to the 2012 Paralympics, she was featured in Channel 4’s celebrated campaign marketing the London Paralympics, famously called “Meet the Superhumans.”  This campaign and the success of the London Games marked a shift in public perception towards persons with disabilities.

“Meet the Superhumans” Campaign. Claire Cashmore far left.

“When I first started work on the campaign, I didn’t realize how major it was,” she told me. “At that time, nothing was major with the Paralympics. I walked to the pool and saw the cameras, the trucks…and then when the campaign started, the billboards. It was awesome! That campaign really opened eyes up. Finally we were seen as elite athletes as opposed to people with disabilities. We were seen as role models.”

COVID Strikes

Like many of her peers, Cashmore was hard at work in 2019 preparing for Tokyo2020. She was making the transition from swimming to the paratriathlon, and was doing so well, she was seen as a favorite for gold in Tokyo.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic cast a murky cloud on all life’s activities around the world. Athletes were unsure about the future. They had little or no opportunity to train. Like everyone else, they had a lot of time on their hands. Time to think.

It was 2020, and Cashmore was having a conversation with her sister. London was in lockdown, and the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining global traction. Cashmore felt the Black Lives Matter movement was about representation, or the lack of it for certain members of society. She told her sister that she could relate, that people with disabilities were also lacking representation in all aspects of life.

That’s when her sister, a teacher, said, “stop moaning about it and do something about it.” And over the course of this sibling dialogue emerged the idea for a children’s book, an opportunity to change perceptions of impressionable kids towards persons with disabilities. As Cashmore writes in the foreward of her 2021 book, “my intention in Splash is not to draw attention to my limb difference, but instead to normalise it.”

How many people do you know who trained for Tokyo2020 AND wrote a book during a pandemic lockdown? I know one.

Tokyo2020

Finally, Cashmore and her teammates got their wish – the Tokyo2020 Olympics and Paralympics were given the green light. She is grateful to the host town of Miyazaki in Western Japan, where she and her teammates were able to swim, run and cycle with relative ease for two weeks, allowing them to acclimate to Japan before heading to Tokyo for the Paralympics.

Her paratriathlon team did not stay at the Athletes Village, residing instead at a hotel  near the paratriathlon course, and were grateful to the hotel and their employees who met all of their needs. “They really bent over backwards to make sure our stay was perfect,” she said.

And she was grateful for the Japanese people.

Claire Cashmore with her Tokyo2020 bronze medal in the Para Triathlon. Photo curtesy of Claire Cashmore.

“I was expecting nobody to be around because spectators weren’t allowed,” she said. “But there were so many people cheering for us, no matter what country we were from. They really backed us. When you think about what was happening in the world, the fact that there was a bit of a crowd watching us was really special.”

Cashmore won the bronze medal in her Paratriathlon competition, which she said was bittersweet because she hoped to do better. She was frustrated by incurring a penalty during the cycling phase of the race, which meant her chance of catching the leaders was essentially impossible.

But Cashmore is a veteran who has grown, progressing from a self-conscious teenager to a world-class athlete who has encountered countless high-profile challenges and taken them on with determination and professionalism.

“I was really proud that I managed to keep my cool, keep my head in the moment of craziness and hold on for that bronze medal,” said Cashmore, who has re-set her sites on Paris.

And as her alter-ego Claire said at the end of Splash, “whatever she can’t do today, she knows she will conquer tomorrow.”

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Classification for Para-Athletes: Is it Cheating or is it Fifty Shades of Grey

Bethany Woodward

Bethany Woodward is a silver medalist in the 200 Meters (T37) sprint at the 2012 London Paralympics. She continued her career as a para-athlete, but has become disillusioned about the state of para-athletic competition. The Ringwood, England native made news recently for returning a silver medal won in a competition several years ago, not because she cheated, but because a person on her relay team was not disabled enough.

In this fascinating audio report from the BBC, entitled Paralympic Sport – Fair Play?, Woodward was interviewed regarding the growing issue of “classification cheating.”

The reporter explained that Woodward is classified as a T-37 sprinter. “T” stands for “track,” while 37 is a degree of disability. The lower the number, the greater the impairment. The purpose of the classification system is to create an equal playing field for the competitors. But either because of the challenge of classifying disabilities or purposely interpreting the criteria for a certain classification broadly, athletes can see inequities.

Reporter: Volunteers classify athletes based on how their disability impacts their performance, not on the disability itself. They look at the medical paperwork and the doctor or the physiotherapist does tests. Then a technical classifier, a sports scientist or a coach, for example, will assess the athlete. They’re also watched in competition before their classification is confirmed. Bethany Woodward said after the 2012 Paralympics, the make-up of her class seemed to change.

Woodward: In London there was no one in my classification I thought shouldn’t be there. But then suddenly classes were seemed to be opening up. I have hardly any dorsiflexion in it, or none. And within the criteria for cerebral palsy it said that you shouldn’t have any dorsiflexion . And then there was people coming who had dorsiflexion and I could see that when they were warming up.

Reporter: In other words, they could bend their foot.

Woodward: Yeah, they could bend their foot. So there were physical elements you could see that they were definitely a lot stronger in different areas than you. My cerebral palsy isn’t something that will fluctuate at all. And then you have people coming in who have a medical condition that really fluctuates. One day they could be absolutely fine and one day they are not OK. And we can’t ask for medical evidence because that is something deemed confidential.

When asked why she returned her medal, Woodward explained that nothing has changed since she first raised the issues. “Nothing has changed in a year. There was nothing I could do to fix it, but I can make I can step away with a clear conscience, a voice. In handing that medal back really closes the book for me – I did everything I could for this sport.”

Olivia Breen
Olivia Breen

Olivia Breen is a long jumping champion who has cerebral palsy and learning difficulties, and who went to Rio and made it to the finals of the T-38 100-meter finals. According to her father, Michael Breen, one of Olivia’s competitors had relapsing MS, which he felt was unfair when compared to athletes with cerebral palsy like his daughter, because their condition could be in remission at the time of the race, or controlled by drugs. He also claimed that another finalist objected to being classified at all.

What followed in the report was an insightful exchange that speak to the challenges of differentiating subtle differences in conditions.

Reporter: I’ve read interviews with athletes whose impairments have been questioned before an d they say, frankly it’s insulting for people to say that about me. They don’t know my medical history so you don’t know for sure what is or isn’t affection that particular athlete’s performance.

Michael Breen: That’s a really good point. I’m not going to try to justify every person who’s queried someone’s disability because it’s not possible. What I’m saying is, there is something fundamentally wrong with classification. It’s not fit for purpose and it’s broken.

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Para-Athlete PowerLifter Eri Yamamoto-MacDonald and the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games

Eri Yamamoto and Yamawaki

Eri Yamamoto-MacDonald navigates the world in a wheelchair. No matter how fast this para-athlete swims, or how many goals she scores as an ice sledge hockey competitor, or how many kilograms she pushes into the air as a competitive powerlifter, when people see her, they see someone who needs help.

At an American Chamber of Commerce Japan event on June 2, 2017, Yamamoto-MacDonald of The Nippon Foundation told a fairly typical story, for her, of going to a store to buy rice. When she got to the cashier to pay for a 5kg bag of rice, the person working there took notice of her wheelchair and asked her, “are you able to carry that bag of rice?” She understood the person was not acting mean, but she was frustrated that as a power weightlifter, who lifts 50 kilograms in competition, is seen as so helpless that she can’t lift 5. “They are not seeing me as an athlete. They are seeing me as a disabled person.”

For joint speakers, Yamamoto-MacDonald, as well as Yasushi Yamawaki, also of the Nippon Foundation and president of the Japan Paralympic Committee, it is their mission to change the perceptions of people regarding individuals with impairments. “It’s not about disability, it’s about ability,” said Yamawaki. “We take the word ‘impossible’, and add an apostrophe between the ‘I’ and the ‘m’, because we like to say ‘I’m possible’. To us, nothing is impossible.”

Yamamoto-MacDonald, who has not had the use of her legs since birth, has been working in the Nippon Foundation Paralympic Support Center with a goal of bringing social change to Japan. It’s important to change the tangibles, she said, designing infrastructure and venues to make it easier for people with impairments to navigate and take advantage of their surroundings. But it’s more important to deal with the intangibles. “Changing peoples’ minds is more important. Having them watch high performance para-athletes can change people’s perceptions towards people with disabilities.”

Nippon Foundation produces an Education Toolkit, called “I’m Possible”, which they distribute to schools throughout the country. So far they have handed out 23,000 toolkits nationwide. Nippon Foundation has organized visits by para-athletes to over 100 elementary, junior high and high schools last year. The plan is to visit 250 schools in 2017 and 1,000 by 2020.

The education is important because it is often the social environment that highlights the disability of an individual, as Yamamoto-MacDonald explained. If the work environment of a person with an impairment allows that person to move about and do the things he or she wants or needs to do, the so-called disability can be rendered unnoticeable. But if the physical environment caters to so-called able-bodied people only, and the surrounding individuals consciously or unconsciously behave or speak in a way that ignores or demeans those with impairments, then as Yamamoto-MacDonald observed, the social environment creates the disability.

She explained that at her workplace in the Nippon Foundation, everyone works to chip away at both the tangible and intangible barriers people with impairments face. However, while her workplace allows her to live a relatively normal life, she finds Japanese society less accommodating. “Japanese people are very polite. But in public, they are not. If I’m traveling by train, I need to use the elevators. But people who have the option of stairs and escalators push their way in front of me to get into the elevators.” She said that in contrast, while London still needed to make improvements to infrastructure, they had a better mindset, even back in 2012.

Yamamoto MacDonald and Roy

At the London Paralympics, I worked at the Japan House to build awareness for the Tokyo 2020 bid. To get to the venue I had to take public transpiration. I got off at a station where there were no elevators. The officers told me that I had to get off at the station before this one. But they made sure I got to the venue. The people’s mindset is very important, even without all of the infrastructure. I got to where I needed to go in London. Tokyo doesn’t have that mindset. People need to care a little more. It would be better to have more accessibility, but it is accessibility in the heart that is more important.

Yamamoto-MacDonald talked about how important it is for companies to expose themselves more to people with impairments, and to understand that engaging with a wider variety of people is an opportunity. In fact, she said that CSR, which stands for Corporate Social Responsibility, should really be re-labeled CSO, or Corporate Social Opportunity. It’s an opportunity for corporations and wider society to understand the power of diversity and inclusion. But it is also a way to expand opportunities for people like her. This is key for two reasons: to motivate those with impairments who feel different and isolated, as well as to unlock the potential abilities in the disabled.

I never got asked about my hobbies, or what sports I like. When I was 9, I was so shy. I couldn’t say “thank you”. Why is it only me who has to say “thank you” all the time, I thought. I couldn’t say “thank you” back because I felt I couldn’t help anyone. But when I began swimming, I gained confidence. I swam faster, faster than even able-bodied swimmers. That’s when I started saying “thank you”. As I grew more confident, I began to dream of being a Paralympian, going to the Paralympics. Since I began having that dream, it has become my identity.

An injury at 16 made it difficult for Yamamoto-MacDonald to continue her swimming career. She went to Canada and became proficient at ice sledge hockey, but she also understood this kind of hockey was not yet a Paralympics event. When she returned to Japan, she did not have a specialization that could focus her training for 2020, until she stumbled upon powerlifting.

Last year, the Tokyo Metropolitan government sponsored a special event – a power-lifting exhibition. I saw big guys lifting hundreds of kilograms. My boss told me to give it a try. I grabbed 20kg and it was light! It was fun! I saw other women stop at 20kg but I was able to lift 40 kg. Since then I have been powerlifting.

She explained we rarely see powerlifting on television or live. There are very few events and opportunities, and the opportunities for people with impairments to see para-athletes is very low. “You have to meet the right people for the right chance to come around.” And that is something Yamawaki explained is key to driving societal change – the need to create greater exposure of para-athletes to society to show what is possible.

Yamawaki ended the talk with a video from the International Paralympics Committee. As you can see in the video below, there is a strong push to bring sports opportunities to youth with impairments, that motivating them earlier in their lives will lead them to greater choices and fuller lives.

“It’s not about what people can’t do, it’s what they can do,” he said.

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