When Kylie Grimes’ surgeon visited her after a gruelling 11-hour operation, he assumed that the then 18-year-old would have a lot of questions. After all, she’d just learnt she was paralysed below the chest and would never walk again. But he didn’t expect her first question to be, “What sport can I play?“
“He told me, ‘No one asks me that,’ and said people normally want all the details of their operation and rehab,” recalls Kylie, now 33, who had broken her neck diving into a swimming pool.
“I replied, ‘Nah, mate, I just want to play sport.’”
Fifteen years on, not only has Kylie found a game she loves in wheelchair rugby, but at this summer’s Paralympic Games in Tokyo she became the first woman to win a gold medal playing the sport. Remarkably, she did so as the sole female member of the ParalympicsGB wheelchair rugby squad. Now Kylie and her teammates have also scooped another honour: National Lottery Paralympians of the Year at the National Lottery Awards 2021.
The National Lottery Awards 2021 honour ordinary people doing extraordinary things with the help of National Lottery funding. Other winners include Olympic boxer Lauren Price; Maxwell Ayamba, from Sheffield, who is dedicated to encouraging minority ethnic and refugee communities to explore the British countryside, and Emily Jenkins, from Nottingham, who founded a therapeutic dance programme for women with cancer.
These projects – and hundreds of thousands more – are made possible by National Lottery players, who raise £30million for good causes like these every week.
“I’ve been saying for years that wheelchair rugby is the most amazing sport that not enough people have watched,” says Kylie. “But during the summer’s Games so many people started to send messages on social media to say they’d seen the semi-final and the final on TV and were willing us all the way, which was brilliant.
“Then, for the public to vote for the team to win this award is a bit mind-blowing. We were up against some really high-profile Paralympians who’ve won loads of medals over the years.”
The road to Tokyo was rough, but the team were determined not to let the pandemic set them back. “It was the hardest Games to prep for,” Kylie says. “When lockdown first happened, we didn’t have sports halls and couldn’t meet, but we knew the only way we’d win gold was to keep training.
“We all spent long, cold months alone, wrapped up in coats and scarves, doing sprint sessions in parks and on tennis courts –anything we could. It was hard but we got on with it because we had to. In a way, having our injuries and disabilities helped – we’re used to having to adapt in life.”
The hard work more than paid off. “Being the first woman to win gold means even more than the medal itself,” says Kylie, from Farnham, Surrey.
“Knowing that youngsters now have a role model and say, ‘I want to be like Kylie one day’ makes me so emotional.”
Kylie and her teammates are already looking to the future. “Wheelchair rugby is now National Lottery funded all the way to the Paris 2024 Olympics,” says Kylie. “It’s going to help the sport grow and it’s going to hopefully keep us on a winning streak so we can bring home more medals. It’s phenomenal!”
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