Proud athletes 'ready' to represent Paralympics GB

Several athletes who train in South Yorkshire have spoken of their excitement to represent Great Britain at the Paralympics in Paris.

Table tennis players Will Bayley and Fliss Pickard and badminton player Jack Shephard all currently train at the English Institute of Sport (EIS) in Sheffield.

The trio are among 215 athletes who will represent ParalympicsGB in the French capital over the next 11 days.

Ahead of the opening ceremony they said they were "ready" to "bring home some medals".

Speaking to BBC Radio Sheffield, Bayley, from Kent, said: "I'm excited, I just can't wait to get out there.

"I've trained hard, I feel good, I feel as fit as I've ever felt and ready to rock and roll."

Bayley, who was born with arthrogryposis which affects the movement of all four limbs, is a veteran of the Paralympics and will look to add to his medal haul from previous years.

"I've been lucky, I've been to five games now," he said.

"It's amazing, some of the team weren't even born when I played my first game."

He won gold at the 2016 Summer Paralympics Games in Rio de Janeiro and claimed individual and team silver at the rearranged Tokyo Games in 2021.

The 36-year-old began playing table tennis aged seven and though the years have come and gone his love for the sport remained.

"Anything you do, you've got to give it passion and love, you got to give it your all," he said.

"That's all I do for table tennis. I put my heart out there on the table and yes, it does take it out of you, but I love it."

Similarly, Jack Shephard, who lives in Dronfield, discovered his passion for badminton as a child.

The 27-year-old now competes in the SS6 category for short stature athletes and won back-to-back World Championship Singles titles in 2017 and 2019.

He also competed at the Paralympics in Tokyo, but did not make it beyond the group stage, something he described as a career setback.

"If I look back at the journey going into Tokyo as one of the favourites to win it and then not getting the result I wanted was quite a low time for me," he said.

"To be able to bounce back over the last couple of years, I think it put a statement back out to the rest of the world to say the game hasn't crushed me and I'm still here."

He added: "Hopefully I can take my experiences and put that into the games - let's go and win two gold medals."

Meanwhile, this year's Paralympics are a first for table tennis player Fliss Pickard.

The 30-year-old, who has cerebral palsy, said she was "unbelievably excited" to be heading to Paris.

Pickard, from Burnley, started playing table tennis at the age of 14 while volunteering at Hyndburn table tennis club.

"I had really given up finding a sport for myself," she said.

"[At Hyndburn] someone said 'can you play table tennis?' and I said 'absolutely not, I've got no hand-eye coordination but will give it a go'."

Pickard made her international debut at the Czech Open in 2011 and was selected for the GB Para Table Tennis Team Performance Squad in April 2014.

At the World Championships in 2018, she won bronze in the women’s class 6 singles and represented Team England in the Commonwealth Games.

Asked how she would celebrate any Paralympics success, she said: "Me? I don't like a big fuss.

"So I'll probably take a week off but before you know it, I'll be competing again at the end of October."

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