Some athletes genuinely are astonishing – Jo Butterfield is one of them. When the Paralympics GB mixed curling team takes to the ice in Cortina, she will be attempting to become the first British athlete to win a gold medal at both the Paralympics and the Winter Paralympics.
Butterfield, who is tetraplegic and uses a wheelchair, won gold in the F51 club throw (the equivalent of the hammer throw for athletes whose legs, trunk and hands are affected) at the Rio Paralympics in 2016. Even if she doesn’t win again in Italy, her life can rightly be regarded a triumph – especially if one considers the physical limitations she works with.
The 46-year-old lives in Scotland with her wife Rhiannon but was born in Doncaster. Her mother was a secretary and her father a systems analyst. Brought up with two older brothers, she was “a bit of a tomboy” but not a sports obsessive.
“I managed soldiers’ careers, posting people on tours,” she says. “You never did it lightly, you were sending people to risky jobs. Unfortunately, some didn’t come home and some came home seriously injured.”
“I remember waking up paralysed from the operation on 28 January 2011,” she says. “There was a 0.01 per cent chance that could happen; it was so insignificant, but it happened. Things looked very scary, I was told that I’d need carers. It didn’t look like it was going to be that much fun.”
Within four years she was winning gold at Rio. But she didn’t do it the easy way, tearing a cartilage in her shoulder beforehand. “I came into the holding camp not knowing if I was going to be able to throw.” Her second throw in the final was a new world record.
She took silver in the 2019 World Championships but Covid interfered with her preparations for the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, which were postponed until 2021. Butterfield just missed out on bronze when she came fourth. “My attitude was, ‘OK, we’ve got through this. Let’s build now for Paris.’”
But only weeks later, Butterfield discovered that there would be no women’s F51 club throw event at the Paris Paralympics. “I found out on Twitter and I was heartbroken. This isn’t a recreational thing for me, it’s my job. It’s what gives me purpose and suddenly it was taken away.”
Paralympian curling differs from standard curling. The aim is still to deliver stones to the centre of the target but there’s no brushing and the stone is delivered from a wheelchair with a cue-like stick.
As ever, Butterfield had to adapt. “Because I don’t have much grip we had to tie a cue to my hand with a bit of TheraBand”, she says. “Within six months, I was at my first world championships, and I got my first medal.”
“I was pretty much out for the whole season, but I still trained every week and that got me through. Being with the team was the only time when I didn’t think about what was happening: ‘Where could this go to? How bad could it be?’ I was just thinking about curling, being part of the team and doing my job.”
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“I annoy myself at times. I always see the world through rose-tinted glasses. But that’s not because I’m naive – I’ve been through some hard things. it’s because that’s what I choose to do.
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