Thanks to canoeing, Jonny Young can walk again.
Sport changes lives and none more so than Young's, who in the decade since a spinal cord injury has gone from being a full-time wheelchair user to ambulant. Now he’s targeting Paris 2024 as the ‘cherry on the top’ of a truly remarkable recovery, propelled by the Paralympic Games.
“Sport has given me a better quality of life than I could have imagined,” said the 38-year-old. “I have a disability for the rest of my life but I can strive to push the boundaries of what is achievable.”
Belfast-born Young always loved the outdoors, sitting in a kayak for the first time aged nine and surfing on the north coast of the island of Ireland. He cycled across the USA with his wife Fiona, spent a year in New Zealand, carved out a career as an outdoor instructor and spent winters skiing in France.
With the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics Games set to inspire people and communities across the country, Young hopes that by sharing his story it will give others motivation to get involved in sport (canoephotography.com/Bence Vekassy(ICF))One fateful day in the French Alps in December 2012, when Fiona snowboarded down the hill to fix her kit, Young decided to go into the ski park.
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“As I approached this jump, I felt like I was going too slowly,” he recalls. "The snow was too slushy and I needed more speed. One voice was saying, ‘you don’t have to do this,’ the other one, ‘don’t wuss out.’ So I listened to the voice I’ve always listened to.
“I was miles up, just really high up in the air, I was ready for falling. I landed on my feet and then just crumpled under the weight of myself. There was no momentum of tumbling - just splat. I just closed my eyes and thought, ‘you’re an idiot.’”
Young had broken his back, suffering a T12 incomplete spinal cord injury. Helicoptered away from the scene, he was immediately operated on and spent six days in intensive care. He spent his first five months in the UK at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where Dr Ludwig Guttman founded the Paralympic Games.
“His whole philosophy was to get people moving again and use sport as a means of preventing death,” said Young. He is one of over 1,000 elite athletes on UK Sport’s National Lottery-funded World Class Programme, allowing them to train full time, have access to the world’s best coaches and benefit from pioneering medical support – vital for the pathway to Paris 2024.
“Sport was a good opportunity to push the realm of what improvement we could see with my injury.”
The day he was discharged from Stoke Mandeville, Young applied for UK Sport’s Road to Rio talent identification programme. A year later he won World Championship silver in the V1 200m in Moscow. The Northern Irishman believed Rio 2016 would complete his redemption arc - in the end, he lost out in the British selection races and went to the Games as part of ParalympicsGB’s ‘Inspiration Programme.’
Young’s range of movement has gradually increased as the years have gone by, a phenomenon he credits to the healing power of exercise and participation in sport.
With the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics Games set to inspire people and communities across the country, Young hopes that by sharing his story it will give others motivation to get involved in sport. Young is taking a third swing at gaining a place on ParalympicsGB having won silver in the KL3 category at this year's Worlds to qualify his nation a place on the start line in Paris.
“If you boil it all down to that initial philosophy of why I got into the sport, it’s because of the Paralympic movement,” he said. “Are the Games themselves that important to me? I don’t know. I’m not a Paralympian but I believe I fully embody what the mission statement of the Games is. No amount of gold medals is ever going to reflect that.”
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