How adversity drove Britain to Paralympic rugby glory and why they are out to inspire as well as repeat in Paris
Stuart Robinson and Aaron Phipps are striving for Paralympic rugby glory.
One was blown up in Afghanistan, the other mugged by killer blood-poisoning bacteria in Hampshire on his first day back at school after Christmas.
Two wildly different environments, the same near catastrophic outcome.
Stuart Robinson and Aaron Phipps would each lose their legs and stare death square in the eye – yet find the strength to not only survive but inspire a generation.
Robinson, thrown 30 feet in the air when his RAF vehicle hit an Improvised Explosive Device on a routine patrol near Camp Bastion, was left so badly injured he was put in an induced coma for six weeks.
Rushed to hospital
Phipps, rushed to hospital by ambulance in a 90mph mercy dash, spent 32 days in ICU fighting meningitis and septicaemia during which family and friends were urged to come and say their goodbyes.
Today both are in Paris, gold medal-winning Paralympians ready to launch Great Britain’s wheelchair rugby title defence.
“Our stories are probably good examples of how things can go wrong very quickly,” says Phipps. “You just don’t know what’s around the corner.”
If you’re wondering how Paralympics GB, a team which had not won a medal of any colour in ‘Murderball’ before Tokyo, managed to rule the world despite losing its funding, the clue is in the charioteers.
Eight years before emerging as Britain’s 14-goal hero in that 2021 final defeat of USA, Robinson suffered 36 separate injuries in a Taliban explosion – in addition to loss of legs, 18 fractures of the spine, shoulders, arms, jaw, sternum and pelvis.
His response? “Life begins now and there is no point allowing it to define me.”
Phipps, who went into Southampton Children’s Hospital in 1999 as a 15-year old and emerged almost 12 months later having missed a birthday, was no less stoical.
“It was the worst and best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “Worst for obvious reasons, best because it gave me a different outlook on life, a completely different drive.
“It made me very aware of my mortality, which then made me take opportunities. It made me try things I wouldn’t have done otherwise.”
The way Phipps puts it, “I had to lose 30 per cent of my body before I started to use 100 per cent of my potential”.
Just last week Ed Jackson, whose own story of scaling Himalayan peaks after being left paralysed from the shoulders down by a near fatal spinal cord injury is now a major film, paid tribute to him.
Jackson told Planet Rugby that during his own darkest hour he took inspiration from the epic tale of Phipps training for three years to climb Kilimanjaro only to find his wheelchair could not cope.
Instead of quitting, the now 41-year old duck-taped pads to his knees and crawled for four days to reach the summit.
“Seeing what Ed said in that article blew me away a bit to be honest,” Phipps admits. “I was quite humbled by that. It was very cool.
“To think now if there’s another 15-year old going through what I went through and they have us to look at, that’s massive. I didn’t have that. It was scary.”
This is why Robinson and Phipps are recounting their worst of times. Not for any form of self-aggrandisement, rather to try and give hope to others.
“You never think you’re going to get injured or that bad things are going to happen to you,” says Robinson, or @LeglessRobbo as he appears on X.
Great things can happen
“But when the worst does happen hopefully people can see from our journeys great things can still happen. That you can still continue with life no matter what.
“From a purely military perspective I have a lot of friends, and connections on social media, who are ex-military and are injured and going through their rehab.
“It’s giving them some kind of perspective and direction that you can take your life forward after such a devastating life-changing injury.”
For Robinson, having first the Invictus Games, then the Paralympics, to focus on was a godsend.
“I’m not going to pretend I awoke from the coma and my first thought was ‘I have to take part in the Paralympics’,” he says.
“But before I deployed to Afghanistan I had watched a little bit of the London 2012 Paralympics and seen the massive impact the Games, the sport, the movement was having around the world.
“So maybe it did resonate a little bit when I woke. To have that thought process in the back of my mind. It gave me a distraction point from being injured and coming to terms with what had happened.”
On Thursday in the French capital ParalympicsGB’s gold medal defence starts with a match against Australia at the temporary Champ de Mars Arena.
From there they face Denmark before a top-of-the-bill Saturday night clash with hosts and European champions France. Waiting in the other half of the draw are the revenge-thirsty US, the most successful nation in the history of the sport.
“Tokyo was incredibly special,” says Phipps of a competition which, despite empty arenas due to Covid, drew a 1.1 million terrestrial TV audience for the final, the second-most watched moment of the entire Games.
“Fifth in the world to gold medal, we did it in fairytale style.
“We are under no illusion that we can’t stand still. The performance we put out in Japan isn’t going to win us another gold medal. But that’s fine. Our focus is on being better.”