BBS Sports Blog Week 4: Rower Naomi Riches On Her Exciting Paralympic Experience

We’ve started the Blue Badge Style Sports Blog to help advise less able people on how to get into sports. Each week we feature a different Paralympic athlete writing about their own sport.

This week, London 2012 Gold Medalist, Naomi Riches has written a brilliant post for us about her Paralympic experience and her experiences of growing up visually impaired:

My parents could never have imagined that their baby girl, who was diagnosed as registered blind at just eight weeks old, would be, twenty- nine years later, a Paralympic Champion in her home country.

It’s been an eventful twenty-nine years!

When my parents learnt that I was Registered Blind they knew, from that moment, that things were not going to be easy by any stretch of the imagination.  Growing up with a disability comes with many challenges but, with my parents help, I met these challenges head on. Whilst, mostly, that head on attitude was my downfall in the early years; it occasionally was my savour.   The further through life I got the more this attitude seemed to get me places.

My school years were not brilliant – the integration of disabled pupils into mainstream school was not working anywhere near as smoothly as it seems to today.  I didn’t help matters though as my best subjects were art and graphics. Most of the staff and my fellow pupils in school could not understand and didn’t want to even try and understand how a girl who had no colour vision, poor depth perception and who was extremely light sensitive could be good at drawing, painting, photography and sculpture.  With art I had just learnt to play to my strengths: why use colour when black, white and grey work by themselves?  If you are going to use colour just label your pens and pencils – simple!

When I went to a boarding college for blind and visually impaired students for my A-levels, I started to learn that my sight was only an issue if others made it so.  Home in on what you can do, not what you can’t, and adapt what you struggle with so that it becomes easier.

It was in April 2004 that Great Britain’s Adaptive Rowing Team coach rang me, saying he had heard from a friend of mine that I liked rowing, was tall and was Visually Impaired. He said that if indeed I was all three of these, would I like to try out for the team?

I had tried rowing briefly at college and had, without fail, always watched the rowing during Olympics.  Something about how powerful and skilful you needed to be and how you could either row/scull in a single, in a crew of 2, 4 or 8 really appealed.

I started rowing nearly nine years ago now and for almost six of those I’ve been thinking of the London 2012 Paralympic Games.  After 5 World Championship gold medals and a Bronze in the 2008 Beijing Games, getting to London, knowing I had been selected as part of the Mixed Coxed Four was both exciting and terrifying beyond words.

In the Mixed Coxed Four category there are four rowers and a Cox.  All the rowers must be either visual impaired/blind or have a physical disability that still allows them to use their legs, their trunk and their arms in a standard, sliding seat rowing boat.  You are only allowed a maximum of two visually impaired/blind rowers in the four. All visually impaired/blind rowers must also wear blacked out goggles so that we are all equal. So far we have come across a variety of disabilities: fused ankles, arthritis – which limits certain joint movements, below the knee amputees, missing fingers or hands and nerve damage – causing movement limitations in various limbs.  All these can be worked around by adapting certain pieces of equipment.

Eyes closed rowing is an exercise that many rowing coaches use in able-bodied rowing clubs, so some people would say that my visual impairment is not really a valid disability for this event.  However – although I might be going backwards with someone else steering and my hearing might be very good – my proprioception, balance & spatial awareness are all quite poor and these are key elements in rowing, especially when four of you are moving as one at 45 strokes per minute!

Once our crew had been selected, time seemed to fly. Before any of us knew it we were moving into the Paralympic Village and were only a few days away from racing in the heats.

Were we in a position to sit on that start line knowing we had done all we could to prepare us for this? I think we were.  I was nervous, of course, but oddly calm for our heat.  We had done 1000m pieces in training, the only difference was that this time there were thousands of people cheering and five other crews trying to get there first.  I told myself: “Just do what you know!”

We won our heat knowing that we then had a day of rest before the final.  The Germans also won their heat setting a new World Best Time.  We had our suspicions that they would be quick and now we knew that they were one of the crews to keep an eye on.

Finals day was quite a blur I must say. We stuck to our routines of per-paddle, stretch, eat, sit about for a bit, stretch a bit more and so on. Then, before I knew it, it was time for the race.

ATTENTION . . . BEEP . . . We were off, our Paralympic final.

The start we knew, the rhythm we wanted, our timing together, 250m gone.

As one, our race, do what we know. 500m gone and the Germans were in the lead.

Stay calm, do what we know, keep our rhythm . . .

At 300m to go I could no longer hear Lily, our Cox, because the ‘Dorney Roar’, as it was named, was mind blowing!  With my goggles on I had no clue what was happening in terms of us and the Germans. I could just stay in time, feel the boat underneath me and dig deeper with every stroke.

Then Dave, who was sat in front of me, stopped rowing and collapsed backwards onto my feet.  We had finished but I had not heard the finish line beep.

“Did we win? Pam, did we win?” I asked.

Then the words I had dreamt of hearing from Pam in the bow seat behind me:

“WE WON!!!”

Relief, pride, relief, joy & relief!

What an incredible Games it was!  Thank you to anyone who was at Eton Dorney and part of that ‘roar’ that carried us over the line.

Thank you to anyone who was at any venue, watching the TV, watching online or listening to the radio.  London wouldn’t have been so good without you!

Thanks Naomi for a truly riveting, interesting and informative article. Next week we’re featuring a post by, Great Britain Boccia star, David Smith.