Archery

Britain’s Paralympic Greats – Margaret Maughan

Labour Party

Margaret Maughan has the impressive distinction of winning Britain’s first Paralympic Gold medal at the inaugural Paralympic Games in Rome 1960 in Archery. She went on to compete in four further Paralympic Games, winning a number of further medals.

It was in Malawi that Margaret first encountered archery, watching ‘an eccentric Englishman’ firing arrows from a bow on a lush, green golf course in 1959.  She had no idea at this point that she would be creating British history doing something very similar 12 months later.

Margaret had been working as a teacher in Nyasaland, now Malawi, the landlocked country in south-east Africa, when she was involved in a very serious car crash.  The Foreign Office transported her back to the UK for further treatment, where she was admitted into the Stoke Mandeville hospital, the spiritual home of the Paralympic movement, specialising in spinal injuries for injured soldiers from the Second World War.

Margaret started archery as part of a gym session with her physiotherapist.  She said that the “treatment was centred around being as active as you could possibly be.”

Speaking to Channel 4 in the build-up to this years Paralympic games in London, she discussed her journey to becoming Britain’s first gold medalists:

“When you first become paralysed you lose your balance, you can’t feel how you are sitting.  The archery was brilliant because it made you sit up straight in your wheelchair, you had to spread your arms out and strengthen your shoulders. I enjoyed it and I was quite good at it.  I started purely for rehabilitation. I was given a bow and arrows when I left hospital and returned to my family in Lancashire. I found an archery club in Preston and they were very kind to me, they never had a member in a wheelchair before. I did it more as a social thing to get to know people.”

“I didn’t realise I was going to Rome, but I got this letter inviting me to compete in archery and swimming, for which I was very bad at. But we had a go at everything in those days.  In the space of 12 months, I was doing archery in the hospital to winning gold in Rome. I didn’t think I had made history, I knew I had won the first British medal for the team. We won 25 golds in total that year with 70 participants.” 

Margaret won a further two Paralympic gold medals, along with two silvers, at the Tel Aviv (68), Heidelberg(72), Toronto (76) and Arnhem (80) Games in dartchery (a combination of darts and archery) as well as lawn bowls.

Margaret will be attending this summer’s games and will be an inspirational figure for all the young athletes competing for Team GB.

Britain’s Paralympic Hopefuls – Jemma Morris

Labour Party

This week’s subject in the series on women Olympians is Jemma Morris.  In 2010, at the age of fifteen, Jemma  became the youngest archer to shoot for the GB Senior Paralympian team.  She goes in to this summer’s games as one ofBritain’s best hopes for a medal, and she’ll barely be seventeen.

When Jemma was quite young she was diagnosed with a disorder leading to muscle wastage and loss of touch sensation.  At the point when her younger brother, Iwan, began to show symptons, her father Damian asked Carmarthenshire council if there were any sporting pursuits the whole family could enjoy together.

The whole family became keen archers, with Jemma making her debut for the Welsh Junior team in the British Junior Indoor Championships in 2010, where she won a silver medal.  A few months after this, Jemma competed in the British Outdoor Championships where once again Jemma won a silver medal while shooting for the Welsh Junior team.

In the same year, Jemma was selected to shoot as part of the Great Britain Paralympian team.  She then went on to take part in the European Disabled Championships in France as part of the Great British team.

In her time, Jemma has set nine Welsh records in was awarded the Des Clarke memorial trophy for being the most promising junior archer in theUK.

Jemma’s success is incredible for someone so young and, whether she medals or not, this summer will be a wonderful expreience and she will no doubt be a regular feature of the British Paralympic team for many years to come.  Having said that, there’s no reason to believe that this young, prodigious talent can’t bring home the gold this summer.