Sarah Storey has weighed in on the debate over accessibility in British society, saying: “If you give every disabled person the chance to thrive, they will.”
The most successful athlete in British Paralympic history, Storey extended her success to a ninth Games and an 18th gold medal on Wednesday, after winning the C5 time trial in Paris. But she said she was no stranger to the kind of situation which recently befell another Dame, Tanni Grey-Thompson, who was forced to abandon her wheelchair and crawl off a train due to a lack of assistance at London’s King’s Cross station.
“I said before London 2012 that we were expecting too much of a Paralympics to change society in one fell swoop and we didn’t, Tanni’s situation the other day showed that,” Storey said. “You can see that the legacy of sport is amazing, but the legacy for society is still the thing we have to work on.
“It’s great to see the sporting legacy, with the golds the team has got, including me, and what’s happened in sport can be a metaphor for what could happen in the rest of society. We’ve been given our opportunities to thrive, and we do. If you give every disabled person the opportunity to thrive, they will.”
Storey serves as the active travel commissioner for Greater Manchester and says she constantly encounters the small failings that make great differences to the daily lives of disabled people.
“I have my job in transport, and I’m constantly saying: ‘Have you checked that the signed route is step-free? Will you make sure that the signed route is definitely step-free?’ Because there’s nothing worse than someone rolling up to set steps, and going; ‘Oh, you could have signed it and said it wasn’t step-free, this is the way I need to go.’
“I think with technology, we could have automated systems that would know when a wheelchair user’s on a train,” Storey went on. “The lack of spontaneity for travel for people with disabilities needs to change.”
