Athletics: The winner who has made wheelchair athletics a prime-time attraction

The IoS interview: Tanni Grey-Thompson

On Thursday night, at the world's second largest sporting gathering, the athletes of every country but one entered behind their flag as it was walked down the arena. The exception was Wales. They followed no marcher, but a wheelchair propelled by one of the most decorated athletes of all time.

As symbolic moments go, it could hardly have been bettered; for these Commonwealth Games are the first in sports history where disabled athletes are not some sideshow, but part of the main event. They are full members of their teams, integrated in the athletes' village, and their medals will count in the official table. And there is no more appropriate standard-bearer for this new access than Tanni Grey-Thompson OBE, holder of nine Paralympic golds, winner of six London Marathons, setter of no fewer than 15 world records as a wheelchair racer, and the object of a certain amount of prejudiced hogwash in the past.

"I came pretty close to crying as I carried the flag," she admitted the following day as she sat in the athletes' village sipping a cup of tea. "The bit that got me was when I got to the bend, looked back and saw the whole Welsh team behind me." Lest any passer-by be unaware of Grey-Thompson's allegiance, she wears a large red dragon on her shirt. It is her 33rd birthday, an event that she will celebrate by doing some "short, sharp training".

Grey-Thompson's historic lap of the new Manchester stadium is a far cry from the Games just 12 years ago. Then there was no contact with non-disabled athletes and Welsh officials thought so little of her and a male competitor that they provided one vest for the pair of them. And Thursday was a huge leap from the ignorance of just a few years ago. "Even after I won four golds at Barcelona I was asked if I ever did any training, and people have wondered why we have time off to train when it's the person pushing the wheelchair who does all the work!"

No one who sees the hands hardened by a decade and a half of spinning a wheelchair at top level could make that mistake. These she has acquired; what she was born with was spina bifida and a spiky temperament. Always determined, she had, by the age of four, gained the ability to embarrass anyone in earshot with a stream of "bloody buggers" when thwarted. At that age she couldrun, but movement gradually became more difficult. Before she was 10, she was lying on a piece of brown paper in Cardiff hospital being measured for callipers. It was an unlikely beginning for a woman who would hold the British record at every distance from 100m to the half-marathon.

"From a young age I always wanted to be an athlete," she says. And she was blessed with parents who combined feistiness (fighting to get her into a mainstream secondary school), with an insistence she was independent. "My parents were not over-protective at all, and that can't have been easy for them sometimes." Crucial, too, was her childhood friend Sue Roberts. "I learnt more from Sue than anyone else. If she did something, I wanted to do it too, whether it was shinning up trees or using a climbing frame." (They lost touch, but met up again a year ago via the website Friends Reunited.) The final great influence was her first coach, Roy Anthony, who, when the track was too wet in winter, would take her to train in a multi-storey car park.

She maintains she has had to overcome no more obstacles than any other athlete, which is true only if you don't count the three major operations, and six months in a plaster cast which went from her hips to her neck. And the likes of Denise Lewis do not have to put up with experiences like Grey-Thompson's in a Birmingham chain store. Going to the counter she was ignored by two assistants. Minutes passed then a third assistant came along. "She said, 'Are you waiting to be served?' I said I was. One of the girls piped up: "I was waiting for your carer to come back."

Encounters with the insensitive (or, just as bad, the over-sentimentalising) are less frequent these days. "People say to me: 'Don't you wish you could walk?' I say there's not much point, is there? I can't do anything about that. And I'd still be me – just three feet taller, that's all." This is not the voice of a would-be campaigner, and Grey-Thompson has no intention of becoming one when she retires. She sits on the Sports Council, does motivational conferences, writes a column, and presents a radio programme on BBC Wales. She also, with husband Ian, has a six-month old daughter, Carys.

She also has a race. If all goes well in the heats, she will, come Thursday, be a contender for a gold medal. We will be treated to a wheelchair event held in a packed stadium, before a worldwide television audience. The distance is 800 metres, but, for disabled athletes, it represents a journey far greater than that.

Biography

1969: Born in Cardiff

1991: Graduates from Loughborough University with degree in politics

1992: Wins four gold medals at Paralympics in Barcelona

1999: Marries Dr Ian Thompson

2000: Wins third place in BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards

2002: Gives birth to Carys and, nine weeks later, wins sixth London Marathon