12 minute read
Lily Rice
Flipping the narrative
Since the age of 10, LILY RICE has used a wheelchair – to win world championships, become the first UK woman to pull off a backflip, shatter prejudices and inspire others. For Rice, her chair represents freedom
Riding high: at just 17, Rice has become a figurehead for WCMX in the UK and is active in promoting the sport worldwide
L
ily Rice recalls positioning herself at the edge of the 4m vertical skate ramp – about the height of a garage roof. She was 15 at the time, her then-cropped pink hair hidden by a full-face helmet, and her neon-green manual wheelchair built to be light and shockproof.
Any skateboarder or BMXer will tell you that dropping into a vert ramp is one of the most terrifying things you can do at a skatepark. There’s a moment of sheer freefall before your wheels start riding out the curved transition and the momentum carries you back up the slope on the other side. When you’re poised on the deck, looking down, all you can see is the metal coping lining the top of the ramp, and then the flat ground metres below. Riding vert in a wheelchair takes a whole extra level of guts.
Rice had already conquered that fear several times when on this occasion she met a film crew at a skatepark in Cornwall to document her skills. She has hereditary spastic paraplegia, which makes the muscles of her legs tight and weak, but her upper body is strong. With effort she can climb the stairs to the ramp’s upper deck while her dad carries her wheelchair. Hands gripping the rims that turn her chair’s back wheels, it takes one final push to roll over into empty space.
But that day Rice’s weight was a little too far forward, and she could do nothing to correct it. The crash was caught on film: she lands face-first on the bottom of the ramp with her chair on top of her. The sounds she makes are almost inhuman; she doesn’t move. Her best friend, skateboarder Daisy da Gama Howells, comes running over, convinced Rice is paralysed or worse. “I never want to hear that noise again,” Da Gama Howells says. “There was blood everywhere.”
When Rice and Da Gama Howells tell this story a couple of years later, they laugh uncontrollably throughout, which gives some indication of their dark sense of humour. “It’s our coping mechanism,” Rice says. As Da Gama Howells recalls, Lily was drifting in and out of consciousness, and as she waited for an ambulance – her teeth smashed, neck injured, damaged nerves in her face making it impossible to swallow – she mumbled surreally about mundane concerns, like whether her mum would tell her off for not wearing elbow pads, whether the fall was caught on film, and if the blood pouring from her face would stain the wooden ramp.
Rice recalls being in the ambulance: “I was… going. There was a light coming for me. I remember it so well. Daisy’s dad was there, trying to take a picture of me, and I was just trying to keep my eyes open so I wouldn’t die.” For two weeks, she could only eat chicken soup syringed into the back of her throat. Da Gama Howells slept next to her to check she made it through the night. But as soon as Rice could eat properly, she returned to school, and within a month she was back at the skatepark.
Traumatised by the experience, Rice’s body would freeze up if she tried to roll down even a low bank, but she was undeterred. Slowly, she rebuilt her confidence, practising flat-ground tricks like grinding ledges and bumping down stair sets. ‘Skating’ in her wheelchair had already transformed her life and dominated her plans for the future. It didn’t cross her mind to quit.
Ramping it up: Rice is working with USA Skateboarding to get WCMX included in the Paralympic Games
Wheels of steel: Rice and her best friend, Daisy da Gama Howells, photographed at Haverfordwest Skatepark in southwest Wales
As a little kid, Rice had always been the outdoorsy type, getting around with the help of leg braces and crutches. Encouraged by her dad Mark, who’s a paramedic and surfer, she climbed trees, rode bikes and hung out on the beach near her hometown of Tenby on the southwest coast of Wales. The condition that affects her lower body worsens over time, and by the age of 10 she was using a wheelchair to make it easier to get around, but she hated the way it made her feel and struggled on without it. She’d hide it in a corner of her room, unable to reconcile the thought of being a full-time wheelchair user with her own sense of self. Then, at 13, she saw some video clips of Aaron ‘Wheelz’ Fotheringham, and everything changed.
Las Vegas native Fotheringham, now 29, was born with spina bifida, a condition of the spine that can cause paralysis in the legs. At the age of eight, encouraged by a BMX-riding older brother, he decided to try riding ramps in his wheelchair, and began entering BMX competitions, adapting the other riders’ jumps, spins and balance tricks. Sometimes this involves an assist from someone running behind the chair to add acceleration, but, like Rice, Fotheringham has a powerful upper body and can propel himself into, around and out of skate bowls and ramps with style and speed. Soon he was winning competitions and gaining worldwide attention for stunts so unbelievable that just watching them online provokes a vicarious rush of adrenalin and euphoria. In 2006, he was the first person to land a wheelchair backflip, building enough speed to soar high above a ramp and land his wheels on the deck. Two years later, he joined the Nitro Circus actionsports team, which has a touring show of daredevil stunts, and in 2012, on a Californian ‘mega ramp’, he dropped into an 8m vert and jumped a 21m gap.
It was Fotheringham who coined the term ‘wheelchair motocross’ or WCMX – a mashup of ‘wheelchair’ and ‘BMX’ –to describe what he was doing; the sport is also sometimes referred to as ‘freestyle wheelchair’. In 2015, the Alliance Skatepark in Grand Prairie, Texas, hosted the first-ever WCMX World Championships, which also included adaptive skateboarding and BMX by athletes with limb differences, visual impairments and other disabilities. Fotheringham won gold in men’s WCMX that inaugural year, and at every World Championships since.
Rice says she was “stoked” when she saw these videos, which rewrote the script in her head about what being a wheelchair user meant. Her dad was stoked about the idea, too; he knew one of his friends’ kids, Daisy da Gama Howells, had just started skateboarding, so he put the two girls in touch. Another of his friends was Craig Brown, a postman, surfer and skater who played a key role in getting Pembrokeshire’s biggest skatepark built in Haverfordwest.
Rice and Da Gama Howells began meeting up at Haverfordwest Skatepark in the early morning to get to grips with the basics of rolling off banks and carving lines around bowls – concrete constructions meant to mimic the empty swimming pools that skateboarders repurposed in the 1970s. At first, people were surprised to see a wheelchair at the skatepark, and Rice says she gets more than her fair share of strangers telling her to be careful, but she soon felt accepted by the community. As they grew in skill and confidence, she and Da Gama Howells started showing up to the Tuesday night sessions where all the locals get together to skate and ride.
It’s on one such evening, in July this year, that Rice and Da Gama Howells are reminiscing as music drifts out of a sticker-covered speaker and into the summer air, mixed with whoops of encouragement, clattering boards, and the sounds of metal trucks grinding against coping. Among dozens of teenagers and adults is Brown, who whips about the bowl on a board, jokes around with kids that he refers to as family, and yells encouragement to Rice as she drops into the bowl and carves steeply around its deep end. When her run is over, Rice’s dad jumps in, runs behind his daughter, and builds up enough speed to push her up and out.
“The inclusivity here is something else,” Brown says later, sitting on his
board, darkness starting to envelop the park. “Skaters are all a bit lost. We’re kindred spirits. Everyone’s got each other’s back. It’s how life should be.”
Rice fell deeply in love with WCMX. The first time she dropped into a tiny mini ramp, she says, “that was it for me”. Fotheringham sent his old, battered WCMX wheelchair to her after she messaged him on Instagram, and she met him in person when Nitro Circus came to the UK. “It was crazy to meet someone you’ve seen so much online,” she says. “Watching him ride is just mind-blowing.” Since then, the two have kept in touch, riding together at US competitions for a few years prepandemic. “It has been unreal to watch her progress – it’s insane how far she’s come,” Fotheringham says of Rice. “She’s definitely been a [leading] light for WCMX. Not just in the UK, but all over.”
With her dad taking her to skateparks, and the support of local skaters such as Brown, Rice’s riding developed fast. Just seven months after she first dropped into a ramp, she became the first girl or woman in Europe to land a wheelchair backflip. It took her six hours of practising flipping into a foam pit, then taking plenty of falls on a soft, bouncy ‘resi’ ramp, but she finally got the rotation right, landing on her wheels and rolling out of it.
The event generated national press, and suddenly Rice was starring in music videos, travelling to her first World Championships, repping brands and winning awards. James McAvoy, the Scottish actor who plays wheelchair user Professor X in the X-Men movies, donated five grand to a fundraiser set up to finance her custom-made WCMX chair. Coincidentally, she then ran into McAvoy at the airport when her family were flying to a competition in California, and he invited them all to the premiere and afterparty for the 2019 X-Men film Dark Phoenix. As Rice recalls, it was bizarre to run into Katy Perry in the toilets, and take pictures with Jennifer Lawrence and Orlando Bloom.
With all this adventure and success in her mid-teens, one could forgive Rice for thinking the world owed her a favour and focusing only on herself. But while rapidly continuing to up her own game – winning gold in the women’s division of the WCMX World Championships in 2019 despite that disastrous fall earlier in the year – she also poured energy back into growing the UK scene and encouraging a new generation of riders.
In March 2019, Rice put on the UK’s first WCMX Jam in Northamptonshire to allow adults and kids to try the sport and ride together. For nine-yearold Imogen Ashwell-Lewis, who uses a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, it was a transformative experience. AshwellLewis participates in several other sports such as horse-riding and tennis, but she likes the way that riding skateparks doesn’t require wheelchair users to be segregated in their own space. It breaks down barriers, and she gets to shatter other people’s preconceptions. When she takes a hard slam and falls out of her chair, she says, “about five people will usually come running over” looking shocked and horrified. “I calmly tell them, ‘Yeah, it’s not that big a deal. Can you help me back into my chair? I want to do it again.’”
Rice knows that she’s in a position to change the lives of kids like AshwellLewis, and she takes this responsibility seriously. To help more people get into WCMX, Rice gives talks in schools, consults with skateparks on accessibility, and works with a wheelchair manufacturer that makes chairs for ramps. She has gone from being the only rider in the UK to creating a scene of around 50 people, all of whom congregated at another Jam she set up in Manchester in August this year.
Rice has also been working with USA Skateboarding to get the sport into the Paralympic Games. Skateboarding and BMX were added to the Olympics for the first time in Tokyo; it makes sense that adaptive versions of these disciplines could work just as well on a global stage. Details such as scoring and qualification criteria would still need to be figured out, but Rice thinks there’s a good likelihood of WCMX being included in the 2028 Games in Los Angeles – the birthplace and spiritual home of skateboarding – with a possible demonstration during the Paris Paralympics in 2024. It might not be long before we see Rice, AshwellLewis and others in their growing community representing their country, with billions watching around the world.
As exciting as all this is, it’s not merely the competitive spirit or a hunger for recognition that drives Rice. There’s a deeper reason she spends hours at her local skatepark, drives to skate spots around the UK with Da Gama Howells every spare weekend, flies out to competitions in the States, and risks injury daily. “I don’t know where I’d be without [WCMX],” Rice says. “Sport in general is so good for your mental and physical health. It has improved mine a lot.”
The morning after the Haverfordwest skate session, Rice spends an hour backflipping into a foam pit for The Red Bulletin, then returns to the topic while unstrapping her knee pads. “It feels like freedom,” she says. “There’s no one telling you what to do in a skatepark. You can express yourself through movement, and everyone motivates you to be the best version of yourself. I have a place there.” Instagram: @lilyrice_wcmx
