This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
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.
“Nobody’s ever done it and I’d love it to be me,” says Butterfield, talking at the National Curling Academy in Stirling. “It’s a huge opportunity.”
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.
“I can use my arms, but I have very little grip in my hands,” she explains. “My thumbs move but that’s about it. I’ve got very little wrist function. If I put my hand above my head, it falls back down.” Then, as she tends to do, Butterfield adds a positive. “But I’ve got good biceps.”
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.
After completing a psychology degree at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, she worked at the Ministry of Defence for the next 10 years.
“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.”
In an irony that doesn’t escape her, Butterfield herself joined the ranks of the seriously injured following an operation to remove a tumour from her spine when she was 31.
“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.”
But she did find something that was fun: after rehabilitation Butterfield discovered wheelchair rugby and then club throw. “I had no idea what the future held,” she says. “But something in me said, ‘OK, this is the new me – what can I make of it?’”
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.
The victory reset her life, gave it new possibilities. “My body isn’t perfect, my body isn’t elite. It’s a very broken body, paralysed, but sport has given me an avenue to be successful.”
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.”
Butterfield then remembered conversations she’d had with Nigel Holl, who was then performance director of British Curling. “He always said to me, ‘Come and try curling’, so I picked up the phone.”
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.
“You have to be pinpoint accurate when you release the stone,” says Butterfield. “We don’t have that ability to affect the stone afterwards, so we like to think that we’re slightly more accurate than the Olympic curlers.”
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.”
Through sheer force of will she had, once more, made a positive from a negative. Then in 2023, another setback – Butterfield was diagnosed with breast cancer. She went through radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery and still, today, has immunotherapy injections.
“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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And now this remarkable woman is heading to her first Paralympic Winter Games, with her curling partner Jason Kean, already imagining how she will perform. “I’ve visualised the whole process so far. I visualise getting out of bed, being on the bus to the arena, and going onto that ice for the first time.” And winning gold? “Well, I am annoyingly positive,” she says.
“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.
“Am I grateful that I’m in a wheelchair? No, it sucks 99 per cent of the time. As I fall out of bed, trying to get dressed and get washed, it’s hard. But the opportunities that I’ve had because of it have surpassed anything I could have dreamed of. So yes, I am grateful. And, yes, I am joyful.”
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