Sport felt out of reach for Laura Turner as a child. The 37-year-old is registered blind and has been severely sight impaired since birth. “I didn’t do PE at all in primary and middle school,” she says. “It was always seen as a health and safety risk. I would just sit to one side in the sports hall.” It wasn’t until she went to a more supportive secondary school that staff encouraged her to get involved. “The teachers said to me: ‘You can do guide running, you can do swimming, you can play goalball, you can do horse riding … basically any sport you can think of.’”
That was all Turner needed to hear. She went on to represent the UK in athletics and goalball – a fast-paced indoor sport where everybody wears blindfolds – and later competed in para dressage with her horse, Chloe. In 2012, she was one of the volunteers to carry the Paralympic torch as it made its way through the UK. “Picking up sport as a youngster meant an awful lot to me,” she adds. “It was the thing I could go to where I didn’t feel like I had a disability.”
