Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit. Boris Starling

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СКАЧАТЬ worst was yet to come. In 2004, while serving in Northern Ireland, she noticed problems with her balance and co-ordination – ‘I kept falling over my left foot and I had blurred vision. At first they thought I had cancer, or a brain tumour.’

      She was sent for tests.

      The results came back: Mary didn’t have cancer, and she didn’t have a brain tumour.

      Mary had multiple sclerosis.

      COMPETITOR PROFILE:

      CHRISTINE GAUTHIER, CANADA

      Christine Gauthier signs all her e-mails ‘Christine and Batak’. Who’s Batak? An alter ego? Partner? No, Batak’s more than that. Batak is her Labernese service dog (a mix of Labrador and Bernese Mountain Dog), and he’s beside Christine in everything she does.

      When she slides under the bench press bar, he’s there with her.

      When she gets in her specially adapted canoe, he’s there with her.

      He pulls her wheelchair, helps her keep her balance when transferring in and out of it, picks coins off the floor, nuzzles her when she’s having a bad day, and a hundred other things besides.

      ‘Without Batak, I wouldn’t be here,’ she states simply. ‘He really, really saved my life.’

      Christine’s father was a cop, and to start with she wanted to follow in his footsteps: she went to police school in Montreal and became an officer in Quebec. But the lure of the Army proved stronger. She served with the Artillery for a decade, including two peacekeeping tours with the UN in Cyprus and on the Golan Heights in Syria.

      Then, during a training exercise which involved jumping into a six-foot hole, she landed badly and damaged her knees, hips and back. Repeated surgery – she underwent eight operations in all – failed to repair the damage.

      Christine found herself confined to a wheelchair.

      She lost her job in the Army; she lost pretty much everything else too. Before the accident she’d been endlessly, relentlessly active: cross-country skiing, cycling, weightlifting, volleyball … You name it, she did it. Now she couldn’t do any of that. She lost her spark, her joie de vivre. She’d still go and see the doctors three or four times a week, but the prevailing opinion on rehabilitation at the time was to do as little as possible in order to keep your condition from deteriorating still further. There seemed nothing they could do to get her better, and therefore nothing they could do to halt or reverse her long slide into total apathy.

      ‘I was 10 years inactive in my house. Completely depressed and totally out of shape and left completely isolated.’

      In 2010, the Winter Paralympics came to Vancouver. As Christine watched the coverage, it was like a light had come on in her head. These people were doing amazing things. These people had the same kind of disabilities she had: some of them, in fact, had it far worse. If they could do it, so could she.

      She began to participate in adaptive sports. On the sledges in sledge hockey or out on the water in her paracanoe, she felt her strength coming back in great waves: not just her physical strength but her mental strength too, her will to overcome, her will to live.

      Christine found a charity, the MIRA Foundation, whose mission statement said that they aimed ‘to bring greater autonomy to handicapped people and to facilitate their social integration by providing them with dogs that have been fully trained to accommodate each individual’s needs of adaptation and rehabilitation’. That described her and her needs in a nutshell, she reckoned. The Foundation agreed and they paired her up with Batak.

      It was love at first sight.

      She also received assistance from Soldier On, a programme run by the Canadian Armed Forces to help ill or injured personnel get back to as much normality as possible. And it was Soldier On who in 2014 asked whether she wanted to be part of the Canadian team which was going to the first Invictus Games in London.

      The Canadian team was small, so they all got to know each other pretty fast. Just as importantly for Christine, the military shorthand they shared meant they could bypass the usual awkward questions they’d get from civilians. ‘It’s a certain type of people who join the Army,’ Christine says. ‘Sometimes those people don’t fit in with the civilian world. But you see each other in the street and you just connect. I’m a reserved and shy person normally, not the kind to jump in a conversation, but when I’m in a military group that falls away.’

      None of the team had any real idea of what they were going to. Unknown territory, it might be brilliant, or it might be garbage. Ah well … At least it gave her a chance to put on a Canadian uniform again, and at least they’d get a trip to London.

      But it wasn’t garbage, of course: it was brilliant. Only two Canadian competitors won two medals, neither of them Christine, but the experience made her hungry to do it again, to do it bigger and better. Like everyone else there, she was struck by Prince Harry’s energy and enthusiasm. ‘I’m not impressed with his title,’ she says. ‘But I am impressed with what he does with it. I’m admiring of the man he is.’

      She threw herself into training for the 2016 Invictus Games in Orlando, which for her would be both a stepping stone and a time-out from her other main goal of that year: the Rio Paralympics. By now Christine was a multiple world champion in paracanoe, and had once qualified for a world championship final while paddling with a fractured elbow – ‘When I go race, I know my mission, I know what I want to do. I just block everything out and do the best I can do. I have no boundaries, I just go for it.’

      Paracanoeing is not offered at the Invictus Games. No matter, there were plenty of other things she could do there. The first day of finals, Monday 9 May, became Christine’s own personal Medal Monday. Gold in the heavyweight powerlifting, gold in the four-minute indoor rowing and gold in the one-minute indoor rowing. A couple of days later, she added a silver and a bronze in swimming.

      But Christine downplayed the personal merit of the hardware – ‘It’s not the gold medal around my neck that’s important to me, it’s Canada placing first. For me, the greatest moment is when my national anthem is being played.’

      Besides, she knows that the officials got it wrong, at least in one small way. When those five medals say GAUTHIER Christine (CAN), there should be another name there too.

      Not that the owner of that name cares too much. Not unless the medal comes with a dog biscuit, that is.

      2

       THIS PLACE OF WRATH AND TEARS

      That single step Josh Boggi had taken meant that he was now standing on an IED.

      The IED was a simple pressure-plate device built around two strips of metal held slightly apart. Each strip was linked by electric wires to a battery pack and a detonator set in the main explosive charge. The charge itself was made with farming fertiliser and housed in a cooking-oil canister. There was pretty much nothing in there which you couldn’t build yourself from ordinary household items, which was why IEDs were so common in Afghanistan.

      Josh’s weight pressed the metal strips together, making a circuit which in turn activated the detonator СКАЧАТЬ