The swimmer with no arms.

During my time as a coach I’ve been very fortunate enough to work with some great international disabled athletes, both swimmers and triathletes. I’ve loved working with them and have always come away from the experience having learnt something about life and about myself.

I suppose it’s having to accept and deal with their disability which makes them so strong but they often seem to have a greater capacity to deal with adversity than able-bodied athletes. If our goggles break on the starting blocks then many of us are likely to go to pieces and swim badly but I’ve noticed many of the disabled athletes just seem to accept any problem which comes their way and get on with it.

As an Inspirational Speaker my job is to inspire the audience to greater levels of achievement and many of the other speakers I compete against have a disability. Some of you will have seen Tony Christiansen or Mark Inglis speak and know that they do a great job. In fact Mark and I once joked about how in our profession he had the advantage over me because he’d had his legs amputated! To make up for my disability (of not having a disability) I often show my audiences a video taken at the Sydney Paralympics in 2000 of a Chinese swimmer with no arms called Baoren Gong. I find that after I show the video people in the audience don’t tend to tell me that their life is too tough or give me an excuse as to why they can’t do something.

Take a look at the video below - I’m sure you’ll be in awe of what Gong does and I just pray that he never decides to become an inspirational speaker.