“Georgina? Hello? Georgina?” Georgie Brayshaw is parked on a roadside somewhere in Switzerland, in Berne, she thinks, and pressed into the back window trying to get better reception. “How’s Switzer …” The line drops. “… id you say? You cut …” And drops again. “How’s Switz …” A lorry passes. “… raining a lot.” Brayshaw, 30, is on her way back from the World Rowing Cup II in Lucerne with the rest of the GB women’s quadruple sculls team. They won gold, again, just as they did at the world championships in Belgrade last year, and the Europeans in Szeged earlier this one.
At the time of this interview, she has 60 days to get ready for the Olympics, when, although she would never say it, the team will be favourites to win gold again. But Brayshaw takes life one thing at a time, and before all that, she has a long drive to finish, a ferry to catch and, right now, a story to tell. As soon as she starts in on it, the distractions – the static, the traffic, the background chat of the other passengers in the car – fade away. Because it is a hell of a tale.
Brayshaw never wanted to be a rower. When she was little, horse riding was her thing. Her family weren’t especially well-to-do, and Leeds-born Brayshaw describes herself as “a state school girl from the north”. But her parents bought her four riding lessons for her seventh birthday. Soon enough she was taking them once a week, then twice, then volunteering at the local yard at weekends too. They ended up buying a stake in a horse on part-loan. “And it just built up and up and up until by the time I was 15 I had him full time.” His name was Harry, and she adored him.
Then the accident happened. She doesn’t remember anything before, during or after it. “The last thing I can recall is probably about an hour before,” she says. “I remember getting to the place and meeting up with all my friends, and I kind of remember setting off on the ride like through the field, the start of it, but I don’t remember anything else.” The next two or three weeks are all missing. “I just don’t know.” She has pieced it all together from the recollections of the people who were there with her.
They were in a group, galloping through a field, when they came to a tarmac track. “And of course when you come to a road you have to slow down. But Harry was feeling a bit bold, I don’t remember any of this, this is just what I’ve been told, I was trying to stop him, to like bring him down to trot or walk over the road. And he was just being an idiot. And he spun as he hit the road and he slid over.” And then everything went black. Brayshaw was taken to hospital by air ambulance. She spent the next nine days in a coma.
Her parents, three brothers and friends had no idea if she would come around, or what condition she would be in if she did. When Brayshaw did emerge from it the left side of her body was entirely paralysed.
“I could only use my right arm and only smile with half my face.” It took months of treatment to learn to walk again and an entire year before she felt at all normal. “Even then, I’d get in the car, and I’d would be reaching over to shut it with my right hand, or I’d be walking around school and my left hand up on my shoulder, and my teacher would ask me: ‘Have you hurt your arm?’ And I’d be like: ‘Oh no, sorry, I don’t use it.’” She was a member of the cross-country team but found, all of a sudden, that she could not remember how to run. “It was such a weird feeling. I remember my PE teacher just telling me: ‘Yeah, you do.’ And eventually I just had to, you know?”
They asked Brayshaw if she wanted to retake the year before her GCSEs but she was adamant that she didn’t want to be held back. She has a twin brother and hated the idea that he might leave her behind. She’s old enough to admit, in hindsight, that it might have been the wrong decision. “But for me, at the time, I just didn’t want to be different to anyone else. It was bad enough that my friends used to say they felt like I wasn’t the same Georgie after the accident, you know? I just wanted to fit in with everyone, to be the same. So I didn’t drop down years or anything like that. I decided to just power on through it all.”
Which is how she has taken life ever since. Soon enough, she was back riding again, although the doctors warned her not to. “I started going back to the yard straight out of hospital, just helping to muck out and things like that,” she says. “My friend used to ride Harry and then I’d get on him when he was all sweaty and tired, just to walk him around.” Then she got back to galloping. She didn’t blame him. Or anyone. “It wasn’t his fault. It was just one of those things. What happened to me wasn’t good, and it wasn’t bad, it was just life. And I’ve always been taught that you just have to get back on and try again. Also I just love proving people wrong. It’s been similar with rowing.”
Brayshaw only took up the sport at university. She was throwing herself into everything, because she wanted to make the most of it. Rowing stuck, partly because people told her she wouldn’t be able to do it. Having been rejected from the national programme the first time she tried to qualify, “I just thought: ‘I’m going to get back and try again’”. When she was finally accepted, she had to weather four years without funding and endure the disappointment of being left out of the team for the Tokyo Olympics. But after everything Brayshaw had been through, it didn’t seem so difficult. Her mother was recovering from a stroke, “and when things like that happen, you do think to yourself: ‘You know what? Just go for it’”.
The damage is still with her. “You could see some differences between me and other rowers,” she says. “I was quite weak on my left, or I just didn’t quite have control of my left-hand side. It’s taken quite a lot of extra training to get those neurons firing properly but even now I notice the differences. But I just kind of accept myself as I am what I am. I would never blame my accident. It’s actually what gave me the courage and determination to try to do this.”
In the moments Brayshaw allows herself to think beyond this summer, her thoughts turn to what she might do with her story. “I hope that I can, people with brain injuries, you know, show them that it does get better,” she says. “I’ve already tried going into schools to talk to kids. Because if you have a dream, it doesn’t matter what your grades are at school, it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, so long as you work hard for it. It really doesn’t take anyone extraordinary to do this. I know, because I’m an ordinary girl. And yeah, I have my differences. We all do. But you just have to get on with it.”
