1000th Lottery Funded Medal for Team GB

Tokyo Paralympic Games delivers Team GB's 1000th medal under National Lottery funding.?

It has delivered medals and so much much more!

The Tokyo Paralympic Games has served up some magnificent moments and we are only just over half way.?

One, above all though, the 1000 medal delivered by a Great British athlete since National Lottery funding began.

?You can’t buy sporting success. Decent funding is, however, helpful.?

I remember, in 1994, being at the launch of “Raising the Game” which set this sporting success on its way.?

John Major, without question the father of the National Lottery, saw the need, and the potential of what this resource could do for sport and indeed for wider society.

It was a sunny day in the Downing St garden and everyone present felt the possibilities, the opportunities.?

Two years later, so well documented, our Olympic team came back from Atlanta with but one gold medal in their bags, finishing 36th?on the medal table.

It was this and more which focussed us, not least when I was fortunate enough to be on the board at UK Sport to set out a new mission for British sport .?And it is exactly this which morphed into Mission 2012, then, the Road to Rio and now, right now, Tokyo 2020.

It was dual-sport star George Peasgood, securing a second medal of the Games with bronze in the Men’s C4 Time Trial to go alongside his Triathlon silver who hit the 1000 medal mark for Great Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes.

Perhaps fitting that such a medal came from our cyclists out in Tokyo as every single one of the team of twenty of have medalled at the Games: that is a true team performance.

Just a couple of days ago, another tremendous triumph for Great Britain, winning our first?ever wheelchair rugby gold.

Jim Roberts provided the firepower as Paralympics GB claimed their first-ever wheelchair rugby medal - and it was a stunning gold too. Roberts top scored with 24 tries while Stuart Robinson weighed in with another 14.

The rules are straightforward - carry the ball over the try line by any means possible - and wheelchair rugby does always capture the public's imagination - at every Games. And this time was no different. Paralympics GB held their nerve for a stunning 54-49 victory over the USA to claim the top prize.

On the same day the hurricane that is Hannah Cockroft chewed up the track with another glittering golden performance. She smashed her own world record to win a sixth Paralympic gold medal and lead a British one-two with Kare Adenegan taking silver in the women’s 100m T34. It was the eighth time Cockroft has broken a world record this year and another golden chapter for the wheelchair racing great.

In the pool Maisie Summers Newton has to be the highlight.?Not just because she has bagged multiple gold medals at her first ever Paralympic Games. More, because her story in so many ways is the Paralympic story.?Inspired through watching Ellie Simmonds win at London 2012 she got on the team, to Tokyo 2020, raced and won gold against the self same Simmonds! A great performance, an inspirational London legacy.?And Simmonds should feel pride also, she may not have won the gold this time but she has inspired a generation: tremendous.

There have been marvellous medals a plenty across so many sports.?Lee Pearson dominated at the dressage and as one Paralympic Games inevitably leads to the next we all very much look forward to his horsemanship at Paris 2024 at the stunning setting of Versailles.

So many gold, silver and bronze medals, world, European and British records broken, so many personal bests laid down.

For me though, still, the performance of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, so far, Jaco Van Gass at the track cycling.?A great gold but what a story of our times, for our times.?Van Gass, a member of the Parachute regiment, on tour in Afghanistan in 2009, receiving life changing injuries, now, Paralympic champion at Tokyo 2020.

The Paralympic Games, world class sport, elite performances from the globe’s greatest.?More though, in essence, The Paralympic Games: the Games of the possible.

?