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big regrets that I didn’t work harder at school and get a better education.
    Although Bedelsford is now mainly dedicated to disabled children with speech and severe learning difficulties, when I went it was a mix. That meant the school was dealing with a whole range of needs and challenges. A lot of the physically impaired kids were actually very brainy. In that sense it was just like any other school, with some kids brighter than others. I always felt the other children were a bit innocent , though – like they had been wrapped up in cotton wool by their parents. As a dad I now totally understand. But back then I couldn’t get my head around it at all. When I was fourteen or fifteen I started going to raves. When I went in on Monday morning and some of them asked whatI had got up to over the weekend and I told them, a lot of them would look mystified.
    â€˜What’s a rave, Dave?’
    They just didn’t know. They were a bit naive. One kid couldn’t even dress himself. But he was just like me. Why couldn’t he get himself ready in the morning?
    I don’t want to give the impression that my school days were all bad. They weren’t. And without Bedelsford I wouldn’t have got into sport and I wouldn’t have become a wheelchair racer. I might have hated going to school and studying, but I can’t thank them enough for helping put me on the path to a life in sport.
    While the rest of the lessons were a chore, I absolutely lived for PE. I couldn’t wait for Friday afternoons, when the classes were held. My PE teacher, Julie Wrathall, was a very good hockey player and used to encourage me to play as many sports as possible – hockey, rugby, different forms of athletics. I even played tennis against Sir Cliff Richard when he came to visit the school one day (he didn’t play in a wheelchair). Even when the PE lessons weren’t on I was always trying to organise the other kids to play some sport or other in the playground during breaks.
    But by the time I was eight, sport had already become a central part of my life. Even at that stage I was training two or three times a week. It was around that time that the school offered me my first real taste of competition . One of the physios who worked at the school had seen how keen I was on sport and asked me if I wouldlike to do the London Mini-Marathon. They explained it was like the London Marathon but over a much shorter distance. At that time the marathon was one of the only sporting events on TV where you could watch disabled people competing. It was only for a few moments every year but I remember watching it and thinking, ‘I would love to do that.’ Now I was being offered the chance to actually do it – although I had to get through the trials first. So, four months before the race I had to show I was good enough by doing a two-mile race in a crappy little hospital chair. It was a bit of a rough course – it took you along public paths and up and down kerbs. The target was to complete the course in less than thirty minutes. I scraped through. Just.
    At the same time as all this was happening, I was also playing basketball. I was just looking around to see which sport was best for me. Obviously I couldn’t play football or take up boxing so I had to find something that would stimulate me. Basketball was one of the first things I wanted to do. Gordon Perry, the first man to win the wheelchair marathon, was a coach for the under-18s Great Britain basketball team and he was always trying to convert me. I even competed for my country as a junior in a multi-sport event in Australia. Although I was there first and foremost as a wheelchair racer, Gordon asked me to step in for one match to give some of the other players a rest. I loved it and we won comfortably.
    But racing gave me that extra buzz. It might be becauseit’s an individual sport. I used to get frustrated on the basketball court if some