GB’s Pearson wins gold at sixth try

London: At long last, Josie Pearson has her gold medal. Pearson won it in the F51/52/53 discus, the sixth event she has competed at in her career, and the first in which she has been so successful.

In her time Pearson, 26, has been a showjumper, dressage rider, a wheelchair rugby player, a wheelchair racer, and a club thrower. “I think,” she said with a touch of relief, “I have found my niche.”

Pearson broke the world record in the F51 class with each of her first three throws, of 6.38m, 6.54m and, finally, 6.58m. That was good enough to win her the gold by the huge margin of 242 points, ahead of Ireland’s Catherine O’Neill. “This,” Pearson said, “has been the most amazing experience of my life.”

Only nine years ago, Pearson broke her back in a car crash when she was driving back home to Hay-on-Wye after a bank holiday spent tenpin bowling in Newport. Her boyfriend, Daniel Evans, died in the accident. After the collision, Pearson was able to move only her arms. Paralympic stories come in all forms. Pearson’s is a testament to the role sport can play in rehabilitation. She resolved to finish her A-levels, and carry on with her life. “You are either someone who copes or doesn’t,” she has said. “And we all did.”

Pearson had been an excellent horse rider as a teenager, and for a time she tried to carry on with it. She competed in a dressage event but she just did not have the mobility she needed to be as good as she had been. The contrast between the before and after was simply too stark.

Not long after, she met Alan Ash, a fellow patient at the Oswestry Spinal Unit. Ash was a wheelchair rugby player and he persuaded her to have a go. Soon she was playing for the South Wales Pirates. It is a mixed sport but she was the only woman on the pitch. She would have to get used to it. In November 2006, she attended national trials and was selected, along with Ash, for the Great Britain squad. She was the only woman on the team at the Beijing Games too, the first, in fact, to compete for the country. The Great Britain team finished fourth in those Games, so Pearson decided to turn to athletics. She says it took her a year to pluck up the courage to switch — but when she did, she was a natural. She was selected in four events for the world championships in New Zealand and said that she expected to win medals in all of them.

In the end she was disqualified in the 200m and 400m, and finished fifth in the 100m and 800m. Worse still, it turned out that the heavy training regime was doing serious damage to her neck. She had to quit, not least because the new injuries meant she was reclassified from T54 to the more severe T51, and the Paralympics do not include any races for that group. This time last year, she was saying that she wanted to win four golds on the track. All of a sudden she wouldn’t even be able to compete.

“I have always been very determined,” Pearson said. “I know what I want in life and I have always wanted to be the best in my sport.” So, at last, she came to throwing events. In the club throw, she could finish only sixth. “I used to get such an adrenaline rush from riding that I thought it would be impossible to find that in another sport,” Pearson has said.

Safe to say she found something a lot better at the Olympic Stadium, with 80,000 fans roaring her on. “I can’t emphasise enough how beneficial sport has been. It has given me back my independence, which you think you’re never going to get when you’re lying in hospital.”