Meet the women making Paralympic history

In 1960, when Margaret Maughan won a gold medal for swimming 50 metres in the Stoke Mandeville International Games (that’s the Paralympics to you and me), she didn’t have to beat anyone. There was nobody else entered in the race. She swam it for team points.

“I daren’t even tell you how long it took me,” she said. “I’d never swum 50 metres before. It’s not the medal I’m proud of.”

The gold medal that does mean something to the octogenarian is the one she won in those Rome games that same year for archery. It made her the first Briton ever to win a Paralympic gold, and assured her place in history. And Margaret Maughan was very good at archery.

The Paralympic sporting world back then was a very different place. No sports funding – Margaret Maughan was a schoolteacher. Forget endless training; she practiced once a week at an archery club in Preston. And – shockingly – forget the idea of accessibility. When the 70-strong British team arrived at the Olympic Village in Rome for those games back in 1960, they were horrified to see all the accommodation was on stilts, two flights of stairs the only access.

The disabled athletes training for 2012 are focussed on their sports in a way Margaret Maughan and her fellow competitors could only dream of.

“We were horrified,” she told Channel 4 News. The Italian army stationed people at the bottom to carry athletes and their wheelchairs up and down.

It’s a far cry from today, with the London 2012 Paralympics being billed as the most accessible ever. The disabled athletes training for 2012 are focussed on their sports in a way Margaret Maughan and her fellow competitors could only dream of.

Making history

We met one of them, Danielle Brown, another woman who made history. This Paralympic gold-medal winning archer was the first disabled athlete ever to represent England in an able-bodied event at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010. She won gold.

She trains five, even six days a week, in a cold archery hangar in Shropshire, shooting arrows across 70 metres and rarely missing the centre of the target. Danielle Brown is a rarity, a disabled athlete who often beats the best able-bodied sportswomen.

So what could the pair learn from each other? We filmed their first ever encounter in a restaurant over-looking the Olympic stadium.

They talked of everything from how much the bows have changed (“so glamorous” was the older woman’s verdict on Danielle’s) to how much the Paralympics have changed, to what they attach to their quivers for luck (Margaret’s is a beautiful silver arrow given to her before her first big tournament, Danielle laughingly said hers was a rubber egg given to her by her sister, though after seeing the silver arrow she was feeling slightly short-changed).

There’s more than 60 years between them but they share a real love of their sport.

And Margaret Maughan’s advice to Danielle Brown? “Practise hard, but if you stop enjoying it, give up. You’ve got to enjoy it.”