“My team have joked a few times that my waters could just break on the podium,” says archer Jodie Grinham, who will compete for Britain at this month’s Paralympic Games. “That would be quite something.” Grinham, speaking to The Athletic via video call from her training camp in St-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, will be seven months pregnant when she fires her first arrow in the compound archery competition at Les Invalides on Thursday.
She believes she will be the first Paralympian to compete at such a late stage of pregnancy. Advertisement “I will have achieved something that no one else can say they’ve done,” says Grinham. “I (will have) been to a Paralympics at seven months pregnant and got to compete.
“(But) I’m not doing any of it for a statement, I’m doing it for me. If that is enough for people to say, ‘Why can’t we?’, then fantastic.” Already a mum to Christian, born in October 2022, Grinham has juggled looking after her toddler and training at home, as well as managing the side effects of pregnancy.
The 31-year-old has adapted her training and technique in a bid to return to the podium having won a silver medal alongside John Stubbs at the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the mixed team compound, a category for athletes with “lower levels of impairment in the upper or lower limbs”, according to the British Paralympic Association. Grinham has “no fingers and half a thumb” and explains “my arms are different lengt.