As a kid, Danielle Brown absolutely loved sport. “And I was absolutely rubbish at it,” she tells Kathryn Ryan.
“I loved sport, I loved trying sport, but I was never very good at getting good results... it was just about having a bit of fun.”
Now, she’s a double Paralympic gold-medalist and five-time world champion in archery.
She was also the first disabled athlete to represent England in an able-bodied category at the Commonwealth Games in 2020 - where she also won gold.
Photo: Instagram / @daniellebrownmbe
Listen to the full interview
“I didn’t grow up with a disability, and at the age of eleven, my feet started to hurt after I’d been running. It was a bit of a minor inconvenience to start with but got worse and worse and I didn’t get a diagnosis until I was 16...I’ve got something called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome," Brown says.
The neurological condition causes constant pain in her feet, she says.
“A lot of people with this condition will have fallen or injured themselves in some way and as a result, the pain that they get is far greater than what should have been caused by the injury.
“The only problem was, I was a mad little kid and loved doing things and being really active and I was always bumping and banging myself, so we can’t actually identify what triggered mine.”
Finding it difficult to be inactive, Brown looked for a sport she could get stuck into.
“I figured it was down to archery or swimming - and playing with arrows seemed a little bit more exciting than bobbing up and down in a pool.”
Archery is split into bow disciplines - the recurve bow, which is a modern version of a traditional long bow, and a compound bow, “which I'd say looks cool”.
“It’s got three strings, it looks pretty awesome and shiny, and the arrows are super quick, they travel the length of a football pitch in 1 second flat. But with that comes slightly more accuracy and then it becomes who drops it out of the middle first.
“And that’s what I really liked about it, it was about who could keep their nerve together when you’re under that pressure, when you’re in that competition.”
Archery is a precision sport, and your mental game is “so, so important”, Brown says.
“When I was competing at the Paralympics, our targets were 70 meters away so one tiny little error at our end had huge, huge impact when it went down to the target.”
Some competitions began at 8am, and the archers would still be on the range at 6pm, she says.
“So, while you’re not necessarily pushing your body in the way that other sports do, from that endurance point of view, it’s really important that you’re able to keep the energy levels up all the way through and not have big dips and spikes.”
It was only three years after taking up the sport that Brown was on the international circuit as world number one.
“I loved winning, I loved being under pressure, I loved it. Just getting that adrenaline rush and having to cope with that when you’re trying to aim and keep yourself dead still, it was a real challenge, but a fun one,” she says.
“For me, archery has really helped me in terms of my self-confidence, my self-esteem. Becoming disabled, I spent a lot of time in my teenage years worrying whether people would actually be able to see past my crutches, past my wheelchair and actually see me as a person and the value I had to offer.
“Getting involved in archery, particularly that able-bodied side, was all about ability, it was all about what I could do rather than what I couldn’t.
“Out there it was just about that performance and being able to be recognised on that level, with our able-bodied athletes was just incredible.”
'I went through a complete identity crisis'
Brown's career was cut short while she was training for the Rio Olympics in 2016, when the World Archery Federation said it would no longer recognise her disability.
It was devastating, she says.
“Being an elite athlete isn’t something you pick and choose at, it’s not like a job where you turn up in the morning and go home in the evening, every decision from what you eat to when you go to bed all revolves around that performance.
“Being told that I wasn’t disabled enough to compete anymore, that my condition’s was no longer included was just so hard that I went through a complete identity crisis. One minute I’m an elite athlete then all of a sudden, I'm not.
“I’m also a disabled person who isn’t disabled enough. It was really confusing and devastating.”
Brown would like to see changes made to the classification.
“Whilst I’m out of it now, I see young people not able to access the same opportunities as me.”
She’s now pivoted to writing books, and penned One Hundred Reasons to Hope - inspired by Captain Sir Tom Moore and his 100 laps of his garden raising money for the NHS.
Her new book is Run Like a Girl, which won the Sunday Times Children's Book of the Year 2022, features 50 female athletes breaking barriers and achieving great things - including New Zealand's own Dame Valerie Adams.
Photo: Supplied
“I think we’re all taught this when we’re young, ‘Do sports, it’s good for you’ and I don’t think that’s a good enough way of showcasing sport.
“There are so many ways you can engage with it, from volunteering to coaching, to adventure sports, competitive Olympic and Paralympic sports through to people now using sport to change the planet,” Brown says.
“A lot of the books that I do are non-fiction, so it’s about finding really interesting stories, human stories that inspire and engage young people.
“A lot of people talking about losing themselves in books...but I think you can find yourself.”