‘I’m just a guy turning up for work’ – the amputee Paralympian racing for gold
Danny Sidbury lost his legs to meningitis when he was two years old. Now the Finchley-born Team GB athlete speaks to Jewish News ahead of his T54 wheelchair racing qualifier
In training for his second Paralympic Games, 30-year old Danny Sidbury reaches up to 23 miles an hour in his racing wheelchair.
He won the silver medal in the men’s 1500 metres T54 event at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. He is also a two-time bronze medalist at the 2023 World Para Athletics Championships held in Paris.
Ahead of his second Paralympics, he’s speaking to Jewish News about his first competition in his race-chair: the upcoming 5k heat qualifier this Friday 30th August in the heart of Paris.
Born in Finchley to a British dad (Phil) and Spanish mother, (Nati) the family including sister Ambar moved to Almeria in Spain when he was 8, six years after he lost both his legs beneath the knee to meningitis. And despite a brief sojourn in London, the Andalusian city has been his home ever since.
Bilingual, Sidbury jokes he’s “still working on his English”.
Sidbury is a bilateral amputee below the knee, due to meningitis at the age of two. “Although,” he adds, “I don’t normally say that. I say a shark attack because that’s much more exciting. Although there aren’t that many shark attacks in Spain and even fewer in the UK.”
Officially, he’s competing in ParaAthletics, which Sidbury describes as “an umbrella term for any form of athletics done by people with a disability.” Within that, he adds, it gets “even more niche, as I do wheelchair racing specifically, and within that, I’m the T54 classification. It gets very confusing, very quickly.”
To the uninitiated, the ‘T’ in T54 stands for track, as opposed to ‘F’ for ‘field’. The classification system is a way to represent your “level of disability or impairment, so that everyone is competing on as level a playing field as you can get.”
Those in the T54 category are “the most able-bodied athletes in wheelchair racing. Our impairment affects us from the waist down.”
Those in T53 Sidbury explains, have “core muscles that are also affected, T52 is quadriplegic (paralysis of all four limbs) and T51 is more severe. The category also includes cerebral palsy qualifications.”
Danny got his first taste of wheelchair racing aged 8, “when my Dad just thought I should do sport, just for exercise and social purposes, like any other kid.”
Surprising himself, he caught the racing bug whilst meeting his future and current coach Christine Parslow, who worked with him as he embarked on his first London Marathon in 2015.
Fast forward to the Tokyo Games where he participated in an extraordinary T54 1,500m final, and together with five other athletes, broke the world record.
Now at the Paris Olympics, he jokes that at least there will be more people in the stands this time, as the Tokyo Summer Paralympics in autumn 2021 were in “the thick” of the Covid pandemic.
Sidbury says his family are arriving in Paris after his qualifying race, admitting he’s “under great pressure to make the final because everyone has bought tickets to it.”
With a determined eye to the future, he says this will likely “be the only Games where my family will be able to come and see me in person because the next ones are in Los Angeles (2028) and then Brisbane (2032), which logistically makes it a lot harder for people to come and watch.”
The racing chairs are “built with the specific purpose of going around a track at speed. They are uncomfortable to sit in, you push them completely differently to a day chair (regular wheelchair) and they only turn left because that’s all you have to do on an athletics track.”
Aside from his twice daily training sessions, six days a week, in terms of mental preparation, Sidbury says it’s all about timing. “The intensity, the pressure, excitement and the butterflies are all good things, but you’ve got to feel them at the right time. I try to stay as relaxed as possible, (playing piano to unwind), enjoy my time as much as possible, keep things ticking over in training and then when it’s time to go all out, allow myself to feel all those things.”
Alongside athletes from across the globe, including China, Thailand, Switzerland, the USA, Canada, Eritrea, Japan and Australia, he’s competing in the 400 metres, 800 metres, 1500 metres and 5k races, the latter of which is twelve and half laps around an athletics track the size of a football pitch.
While he’s looking forward to moving from his hotel to join fellow athletes at Olympic Village, when it comes to the crunch, Sidbury says: “It’s every man for himself.”
He adds: “I don’t see myself as a role model. It’s not my ambition. I’m just a guy turning up for work, and my job is to do laps.” As to his biggest ‘work’ challenge, it’s simple: “Winning gold”.
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