Unsung

This is Unsung. Introducing the sports stars you don’t know, telling the stories you can’t miss. 

There are hundreds of visually impaired athletes around the world who aren’t able to see the finish line yet can complete a race quicker than most of us can tie our shoelaces. 

Some run far, rather than fast. Some even try swimming or cycling. That they’re able to do so is thanks to a largely undocumented partnership that deserves a bit more love and attention.

And so, in this new episode of Unsung, we’re delving into the hidden world of para sport guides.

We speak to visually impaired Welsh sprinter James Ledger, along with his Scottish guide Greg Kelly, to discover the nuances and challenges involved in building a strong relationship both on and off the track. 

We also speak to American triathlete and Ironman legend Ben Hoffman, as he embarks on a new career as a guide for Owen Cravens, one of the USA’s brightest talents in the paratriathlon. 

Many thanks to all the athletes who spoke to us between their training and events, and best of luck to them in their future events.

Head to the links below to find out more about becoming a para guide.

Quotes:

James

“For me growing up it was very much around fitting in and not standing out for having a disability.”

“I went down to my local Swansea Harriers track and from that moment on, I became obsessed with trying to be as fast as I could be.”

“It’s never nice hearing your sight is getting worse, but thankfully, in the amazing world we live in para sport, I'm still able to do the sport I love.”

“One of the biggest challenges to T11 running is finding a guide. It’s tough to find somebody who's fast enough because I need a guide runner who can pretty much run a second faster than me, so that they can run within themselves, control me to run straight, and also communicating as much as possible throughout the race.”

“I’m really grateful for Greg joining me on my journey. Because he definitely came at my hour of need.”

"The amount of trust I have to put into Greg to allow me to run as fast as I can in a straight line in the dark. Having that relationship is vital.”

“I'll always aim to promote guide runners because I think they're incredible people, you know, they allow people like me to follow their dreams. I think they should be really championed as very much the unsung heroes of my sports”

Greg

“It’s almost like riding a bike, the faster you're going, the more stable it feels. Sometimes with jogging and drills, that's actually the hardest in terms of timing. When we're running fast, it's more normal to keep the arms pumping and legs coming up.”

“The trajectory was just going up and up, with some of our best races being in Switzerland and Paris big. It was great to be given that opportunity and in Switzerland, where we got a PB for James, a British record.”

“James said that he doesn't want me to stop competing and striving for my individual aspirations, but it's something that can develop both of us. So hopefully that’s something that breaks the stereotype that if you're a guide runner, you're only a guide runner.”

Ben

“It's rewarding. It feels good to contribute to somebody else's dreams and goals. Because I can remember what it was like to be that age and it's a special time to be setting out on that mission, on that career that's in front of you.” 

“The first race we did in Tasmania I made a mistake, and I actually did an extra lap on the bike of the 20k course, and so we went from leading the race quite comfortably to falling all the way down to seventh place”

“You're not just guiding them for the 55 minutes to an hour that you're doing the course. It's everything leading up to that. You're spending time with them, going to the meetings, you're in the hotel room with them. It's a lot more than just the race day.”

“The level of responsibility that you feel when you get on a tandem bike and you're going 30 miles an hour around a course, with barriers all around you and two people's lives are on the line, is certainly something that I had never experienced before.”

“My big takeaway from being around all these Paralympic athletes, I'm just inspired. These are amazing people, independent of whatever disability that they're operating with. Just to see them show up and do the work and, and be at the level they are, it just gets me fired up and it makes me get the most out of myself.”

Explore more 

British Blind Sport/Run Together - Find a guide runner

This is Unsung. Introducing the sports stars you don’t know, telling the stories you can’t miss. In this opening episode of a new series of Unsung, we’re telling the story of the IOC’s Olympic Refugee Team.

This year, the Olympics will feature 36 athletes from 11 different countries of origin, competing in 12 different sports. At the Paralympics, eight athletes and one guide runner will make up the refugee team

This will be the team’s third appearance at the Games, after making its debut in Rio in 2016. Back then, there were close to 60 million displaced people globally. On the eve of Paris 2024, that number has now soared to well over 100 million and is still rising – that’s around 1 in 70 people living on our planet. Putting them all in one place would create the 14th most populous country in the world – and that population is increasing all the time.

But especially in a year typified by highly emotive elections all over the world, there is a tendency to distil the topic of refugees and immigration to faceless numbers and dispassionate data. But each statistic has a human story behind it. You’ll hear a couple of those in this episode.

Matin Balsini and Dorsa Yavarivafa were both born in Iran, the country where almost half of this year’s Refugee Team comes from Iran, giving some indication as to just how bad the situation is for Iranian athletes. 

The Iranian government exerts significant control over sports and often uses athletes for political propaganda, enforcing strict compliance with its ideological mandates. Those who dissent or fail to conform face dire consequences. 

It’s a repressive environment that stifles freedom of expression and forces many talented athletes to defect in search of safety and the liberty to compete without political interference. Athletes like Matin and Dorsa, who share their painful experiences and emotional journeys in finding a new home in the UK, and the stories of their successful route to the Olympics in Paris.

Many thanks to Matin and Dorsa for speaking to us just weeks before their appearance in Paris, and to the IOC for facilitating the interviews. 

Quotes:

Matin

"The one thing I really love about swimming is when you are in the water you cannot hear anything, you basically cannot see anything. And you can scream and no one can hear you."

"At 17, I decided to coach myself. And the hardest thing was, after one year when I improved a lot, the coaches were jealous. They didn't want me to improve because they thought that it made them look small."

"During the session I'd be swimming alone in the pool, and they would just turn the lights off.I had to swim in the darkness."

“I'm so happy that I am going to the Olympic Games and I'm super excited as well. But it's a bit sad for me because I can’t represent my nation anymore.”

Dorsa

“All I had with me for a whole year was my racket. It was just me, my racket, and my mom."

"I was about 14 when we left. It was really hard because I had to leave my family and my friends. I was quiet, depressed, and sad at first, because I was really shocked. But I had to do it, it just wasn't safe for my mom and me to stay in Iran."

"We tried to go, and they pointed a gun at us. They thought we were armed. And then they put us in jail. They separated me from my mom, which was really difficult. I remember how scared I was then. Imagine a 15-year-old girl being away from her mom in a jail. It was the worst nightmare of my life."

"Imagine representing your own country, there is such a power in that. But I'm not able to do that. So that is very sad, but I had to do it."

Explore more

Refugee athlete Eyeru Gebru speaks to Eurosport

Hello and Happy New Year! It’s Alexis here from Unsung with our first ever public service announcement.

At the end of our last episode in December, I mentioned that you’d next hear from us in the Spring. But while we continue to work on series 2, forgive me for jumping on the feed a little earlier than planned.

Because, like a school kid eager to show their parents their “cleaned my plate” lunch sticker, I wanted to share the news that Unsung has been shortlisted as a finalist in the 2024 Sports Podcast Awards.

After our rookie season, we’ve been nominated in the Sports Talk Podcast category, pitted against the likes of football legend Ian Wright, top broadcasters Kate Abdo and Simon Jordan, snooker player Shaun Murphy, and three sporting titans from across the Atlantic who’ve nearly 5m followers between them.

And then there's little ol' Unsung. Think David and Goliath, except we’re not David; we’re David’s annoying little dog, yelping for scraps and attention when he goes off to chin the big guys.

Although it’s fair to say we’ve had a little more attention since our nomination.

A new listener recently tweeted us to say our last episode was like, “if you purchased Roy Chubby Brown off of Wish, you would get this guy”. But hey, that counts as a download. 

With 2023 coming to a close, there’s something a little different for you in this rather frenetic episode of the Unsung podcast.

In just 40 minutes, we rattle through the sporting year via the perspective of its unsung heroes, beginning way back in January at a boisterous and disbelieving darts crowd in Ally Pally, before ending with a tenuous reference to the late Mystic Meg to review a sporting event that is yet to occur.

You’ll also discover the Augusta National golf legend you're unlikely to have heard of, find out why Phil Foden can’t stop eating salmon and soy, and discover a good reason to raid the drinks globe for the winter's first drop of snow. 

If you’ve listened to previous Unsung episodes, you might recognise some of the voices featured here. We’ve got anecdotes and insight for every month of the year, and if you’d like to hear more from anyone involved, be sure to check out episodes 1 to 9 from our archive.

It all makes for a whistlestop tour of 2023, and I think you’ll enjoy it. If you do, please consider leaving a review to help others discover it.

And if you know of someone who’d make a good subject for a future Unsung podcast, get in touch with a recommendation at unsungpodcast.com.

 Quotes:

 “The real skill in my job is you wait until everybody is at the pinnacle of their set position and they have all been absolutely still in that position. And when you're happy that they've all had that opportunity to get into the still position and concentrate, you pull the trigger. It's fair to say probably at a major event between set and pulling the trigger, I'm holding my breath. I'm holding my breath, because I'm praying I don't have to pull the other trigger."

 “Climate change is real. It’s something that’s very heavily linked to snowmaking, which is becoming more popular with resorts just to ensure that they can open for their customers and provide a great experience. Instead of having snow machines that are 100 to 150 metres apart from each other, they’re going to 20 to 50 metres apart. You’re getting snow guns that are closer and closer. That has been a trend that we’ve been seeing in this industry.”

 “Last season, it was absolute chaos because of the World Cup. Quite a lot of people thought, "well, I'll go to the World Cup, I'll come back a mega star and PSG or Real Madrid will be on the phone, and it's the transfer window immediately afterwards." So when people came back from the World Cup, they were like, "oh Real Madrid's not on the phone. I haven't heard from Barca. Uh, I guess I'm staying. Better get a chef then."

 "I built my business, and I wasn't going to let any of these guys [dopers] ruin it for me. So, I found a way of enjoying it, of getting over the shock and any disappointment and just moving on. And cycling's also a sport which is very beautiful. Um, I don't just mean the scenery, I mean the beauty of riding a bicycle is a very beautiful thing."

 “In groundsmanship, everybody knows if you let the underdogs train on the pitch first, they're going to do it over because that's going to give them an advantage, to make the pitch bobbly. So, Portsmouth came and hammered it, then did a penalty shoot-out. Then Petr Cech came on and said, 'why am I playing on a potato field?'."

Charity Partner

Leading social care charity Community Integrated Care delivers 10 million hours of care annually to people with learning disabilities, autism, mental health concerns, dementia, and complex care needs. Their revolutionary ‘Inclusive Volunteering’ model sees it partner with top sporting events to tackle society’s deepest inequalities, enabling thousands with complex barriers to enjoy sport.

Our guest this time around is Phil Neale, who enjoyed a 47-year career in professional sport. Having played 369 games for Lincoln City and 354 first-class matches for Worcestershire; he’s believed to be the last man to play both professional football and professional cricket at the same time.

But it’s his post-playing role that we’re mostly discussing in this episode, first as county-level coach and then with the England A setup, before moving on to become England cricket’s first-ever operations manager. Appointed to help out Duncan Fletcher and captain Nasser Hussain in 1999, it’s a role he stayed in for over 20 years, encompassing 257 Test matches, 422 ODIs and 110 T20Is. He was also there throughout the tenure of six head coaches and 11 Test captains.

During our chat, which took place as the early stages of the 2023 Cricket World Cup unfolded in India, the man who became known to England’s top cricketers as Uncle Phil talked about his versatile yet integral role behind the scenes. He recalls his memorable experiences, including five Ashes series victories, the 2010 T20 World Cup triumph, and, of course, the famous 2019 World Cup win at Lords.

Phil describes being peppered in the nets by Freddie Flintoff, navigating a floundering Michael Vaughan through an Indian airport, and revealing which cricketer’s bag was the only one he lost in over two decades. There are also tales from that infamous Germany boot camp ahead of the 2010 Ashes and the time he tried his best to keep a lid on post-World Cup celebrations in 10 Downing Street.

Many thanks to Phil for taking the time out to speak to me, and also to Luke Thornhill and Donald Nannestad at Lincoln City for putting me in touch with their former player.