Great Britain wheelchair rugby international Kylie Grimes admits she “never struggled” after suffering her injury in 2006.
Grimes, who was one of only two women in the wheelchair rugby squad at London 2012 and won gold at this year’s Tokyo Games, suffered a spinal injury after a diving accident, and has no feeling in her lower body.
Despite the severity of her accident, Grimes has revealed that she never let it affect her too much, largely in part to the fact she could still play sport.
“I have never struggled… and I don’t really know why. I don’t really know why I never had a really down stage after – a lot of people who go through big accidents do.
“It’s not the journey I wanted, it’s not the life I wanted at the time, but it’s not a bad life, it’s just a different life, and I think I just accepted it very quickly, as long as I could play sport because that’s all I ever really wanted to do with my life. I was told straight away there’s so many disability sports, and you can still do that. So, I just knew that my life wasn’t over it had just gone in a different turn.”
Grimes began wheelchair rugby in 2008, before being invited to Great Britain (GB) trials in 2011. She was successfully picked for the squad, and represented GB as they finished fifth at the London Paralympics in 2012. She was also selected for the 2016 and 2020 Games, and was the only female who won gold this year at the delayed Paralympics.
She went on to say that the support system she had in place during her recovery played a key role in helping her maintain a positive outlook on her new life.
“All I can think of is, I’ve always been a very determined person, and as a kid I was always told, by my mum, by my family that you can’t fail in life… my mum used to say to me ‘you can’t fail if you try your best, you can always go again.’ So, I kind of took my accident a bit like that.
“It wasn’t easy, it was frustrating. I had days where I was like ‘why can’t I do this today, why can’t I do that. My body’s letting me down’, and I’d just tell my mum and she was like ‘tomorrow’s another day, you’ll be good’ and I was. So, I think as long as you’ve got close people near you, who you can talk to, you can get through anything.”
