Kare Adenegan: Warwick's Paralympian

At 20, most of us students have, to be completely honest, done little exceptional in our lives. We may have got through our GCSEs and A-levels, but then so have millions of other people across the country. 

Very few - in fact, none at all - have won five Paralympic medals, barring Warwick’s own Kare Adenegan, who’s just back from picking up two silvers at the Tokyo 2020 Games. Adenegan, already a veteran of the sport of wheelchair racing, has competed at international level since the age of 13.

It was only a year prior to that, at the 2012 London Games, that Adenegan even heard about Paralympic sport at all, making her sharp acceleration to the present day all the more incredible. 

To get a sense of just how Adenegan became what is effectively a sporting phenomenon, before talking of her experience in Tokyo, I wanted to take her back to the beginning, to discover the roots behind her remarkable story.

“London 2012 was the first time I’d ever seen Paralympic sport, and I was inspired by what I saw. At school it was difficult to be included in sport, and watching the Paralympics gave me the realisation that disabled people can do elite sport.”

Dealing with this exclusion due to her disability - Adenegan has cerebral palsy - appears to have built-up useful pent-up energy and focus. When she started to compete, she was soon among the best in the world. By the age of 14, she was taking on, and beating, Hannah Cockroft, the gold medal holder in the T34 100m, becoming the only person ever to have triumphed over her. 

Despite this, initially, Adenegan describes how she hardly took to the sport like a duck to water: in the first year, she came “last more than anywhere else”. She makes the comparison to cycling, as wheelchair racing is “very technical … and it was a lot to get my head around to start off with”. I suspect that Adenegan was being modest, however, as even the best cyclists take more than a couple of years to become one of the best in the world. 

This modesty, however, is seemingly a large part of the reason behind Adenegan’s ascent, as she has always worked really hard to make it to the top. She says that it was only at the World Senior Championships in 2015, “alongside the best women in the world”, that she felt she truly belonged. This was despite already being ranked number six in the world and having picked up medals at the World Junior Championships the year before. She was quite considerably younger than the people she was competing with, but “never let my age be an excuse”.

Having started only three years previously, she was suddenly at her first Olympics in Rio, an event where she was starstruck to be alongside “a load of athletes I’d seen on TV”. She was generally really just “excited to be there” in what was an “amazing experience”. 

She came away with a silver and two bronzes, and having “not really expected to get a medal, to get three was huge for me”. Her performance at the event firmly put her name on the map, if it wasn’t there already, as one of the top up-and-coming athletes in the world. At 15, this was literally only the beginning. 

In 2018, she broke the world record in the 100m, despite having to deal with the run-up to A-levels at the same time. However, as with many top athletes, a distraction or hobby is often needed to take the mind away from the pressures of elite sport, and for Adenegan it was school and study that provided that. 

While school work became tiresome at times, it was also “a nice thing to have and allowed me to relax and not just focus on training: something to turn attention away from the pressures of day-to-day sport”. These are pressures that the likes of Simone Biles have made us more aware of in recent times.  

It was Warwick that then took over the role of ‘useful distraction’ once school was finished. The sports track at Westwood, and the proximity to local club Coventry Godiva Harriers, represented some of the motivating factors behind Adenegan’s decision to choose the university. Her attraction to Warwick was such that “deep down, I knew that Warwick was the only place for me”.

It was after only a year at university, however, where Adenegan was thankful for the low contact hours in the history department, that Covid-19 hit, and the attraction of the track and the presence of her teammates was ripped away.

She describes Covid overall as “quite tough”, forcing her to convert her downstairs room into a gym. Everything was now about “adapting, and trying to make the most of what I had”. 

Another set-back was the announcement of the postponement of the Games, something that was “difficult”, as all the hard work and preparation was all of a sudden thrown down the drain, at least for a year. As ever with Adenegan, however, this disappointment didn’t faze her. She instead fashioned a positive out of it. Rather than this being a one-year set-back, it was instead “one extra year” that could be used for improvement in that race for more medals.

Competitions began again in September 2020,and, in February 2021, Adenegan was back on the track full-time. She describes it as “difficult” to get back to full speed, especially as university exams took precedence, but as the Paralympics came around, she was “hitting peak levels of performance at the perfect time”.

And, finally, after five years of waiting, she was at the Paralympics, something that sounds like more of a relief than anything: “I was glad to just be there, after all those months of waiting during Covid.” Finally, after a year of frustration, Adenegan was in position to face the task ahead.

And that task was to beat the great Cockroft, who is as yet unbeaten in a Paralympic event. Naturally, Adenegan says she”‘admires Hannah greatly”, and “always knows we’re going to have a great race”. But when she’s on the start line, any thought of her rival disappears. She’s “always just focusing on my own race”, as Cockroft becomes “just another competitor”. All that was left was “pure excitement”, and a desire to “put it all out there”. 

That excitement translated into Adenegan’s unbelievable start, where she “surprised herself” asserting her dominance at the top of the field. Cockroft did eventually manage to reel her in, but set a world record in the process, underlining the incredible nature of Adenegan’s silver. The smile on her face was there for all to see, and Adenegan was understandably “really pleased for myself”.

She also got a silver in the 800m, a fantastic return that she was “really pleased with” in only her second Games, something she says was the “best I could have aimed for”.

Adenegan gave herself only a week of relief, but already “got so bored” that she was soon back on the field, looking forward to the local Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in 2022. She underlines how “I know the things I need to work on” and, with everything starting to open up, the horizon could well be turning gold sooner rather than later. 

Looking into the future, Adenegan sees teaching as an option but, once university is over, she will first focus firmly on sport, continually working towards two goals. 

Naturally, winning a gold is one but, when she won the BBC Young Sports Personality of the year award, she underlined how, after her experience of feeling excluded, she wanted to help young people get into Paralympic sport. This aim is something she highlights once again: “There are a lot of people with disabilities who don’t realise sport is for them, and they can earn money. Beyond Paralympics there are loads of benefits physically and mentally that sport can give.” It’s a message that is incredibly important for us all.

Adenegan finishes off the interview by saying that she wants to leave a “legacy”. If the Paralympics were anything to go by, she is a long way towards doing that.