TRURO’s Fran Brown’s Paralympic journey began when she fell off a ladder as a lighting engineer in the West End, writes Tom Harle.
While working in theatreland in 2006, she fell 16 feet and dislocated three vertebrae in her neck, becoming an incomplete tetraplegic. “Don’t go up ladders by yourself,” Brown volunteers. “It’s not advisable.”
Three sports and 18 years later, Brown hopes to win a medal at Paris 2024 as a cyclist. Born with Dartmoor on her doorstep to an outdoorsy dad and musical mum, Brown was propelled by a fierce rivalry with twin Helen, who was a hockey goalkeeper at national level.
She reels off a rich palate of hobbies: netball, clarinet, sailing, ballet, saxophone, and mountain biking to name but a few. But the play was the thing and after training as a lighting technician, Brown worked at some of the biggest theatres in the country.
Brown lists being involved in a special project for the 10th birthday of the Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre as a career highlight: “I love it, it’s my favourite, but I’ve seen that show too many times.”
Brown sees plenty of parallels between show business and her current life as a full-time, high-performance athlete. “The lighting desk is an incredibly highly pressured environment,” she said, who 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.
She continues: “You have 1,000 cues and you need to execute them all. You need to troubleshoot, curveballs happen, things go wrong and 2,000 people are watching what you are doing every night. They may not register what you’re doing until it goes wrong and then they bloody well know! It’s all about performing when it matters.”
After her accident, Brown revisited a childhood love of climbing and went on to become Britain’s first-ever para climbing world champion. Her prowess in that area saw her recruited as an aerialist for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Paralympics, performing mid-air acrobatics at the London Stadium. It was quite a way to start a love affair with the Games.
“We were part of the ceremonies, but we also got to go to quite a few events,” said Brown. “Seeing the pinnacle of sport across the world, it meant so much to the athletes to be there - regardless of how well they did. It made me want to be part of it, to be proud of representing my country at the top of para sport.”
Climbing is not part of the Paralympic programme and Brown rekindled another passion to pursue a place at the event. She became a paratriathlete, winning world and European gold in 2019. A bad flare-up of Crohn’s disease impacted her build-up to the postponed Games in Tokyo, where she finished fourth.
Ongoing complications of Crohn’s effectively forced her to switch to being a full-blown cyclist, with running proving too much of a struggle. Brown won four golds and a silver at last year’s World Cycling Championships in Glasgow to cement another successful sporting switch and the latest chapter in a remarkable life story so far.
“My take on it is that things get thrown at you that are maybe not what you wanted or planned,” she says. “You don’t have a lot of control about things that are going to happen to you - you can control how you react to them.
“If I want to do something and something happens and it’s changed what I can do, I just find a way to get on with it. I hate procrastinating, sitting around feeling sorry for yourself.
“That’s not me. I want to enjoy every day, so I find a way to do the things I want to do. It might be that sometimes you can’t, but then you find a different path and something else that inspires you. Normally, there’s a way of adapting and finding it. Sometimes that will be ignoring the people that say you can’t.”