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HOW ONE PARALYMPIAN IS MAKING SUPERHEROES OF US ALL Meet Sophia Warner, Paralympic athlete, passionate disability sports advocate, and creator of The Marvel Superhero Series… Hi Sophia, you are a mother, marketing specialist, tv presenter, and Paralympian what an amazing life you lead! Can you tell us more about who Sophia is and what values drive this energy you have? My big driver for me has always been my love of sport, my love of running, everything else is just life really. Everything I have done in television, everything I have done has been because of running. My marketing career was a part of the path I took at university, which has now led me to sports marketing. So all of this together has been like a perfect storm leading to the Superhero Series.
As a Para athlete you had great success on the international stage, but it wasn’t until London 2012 that you made the Paralympic team. Can you tell us about your Para athlete career? What was it that you loved about your sport? What I loved about my sport was definitely my love of running. That’s it! People think with Paralympians that it’s more complicated than that, and maybe for some people it is, they have something prove, etc. For me though, I literally just love running. My journey to the Paralympics was complicated, due to classification issues. My classification, which is a T35, wasn’t
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represented at the Paralympic Games until London 2012. And so whilst I was World Champion and completely top of my sport from 1996, the 2012 games were the first opportunity I had for the Paralympics.
You retired from elite sport in 2013; what sporting challenges do you take on these days? What does sport and keeping active bring into your life? I have taken a real interest in long distance running again. Long distance running is where my heritage is really; I am not a sprinter, I am a much more laidback runner. I currently have an injury though, so instead of running I am aiming to walk 10 kilometres every day. You don’t realise how much you don’t walk until you put on a pedometer. So I am really making that effort to move more, that is part of my fitness challenge at the moment.
In 2013 you set up your own sports marketing agency to maximise opportunities for disabled sport, how do you believe sport can be a positive benefit to disabled people? I think that sport is positive for everybody, but there is a huge gap between elite and grassroots sport. There are something like 850,000 mass participation sport events for nondisabled people, and whilst these events aim to be inclusive, inclusion can be really tricky because it’s different for everyone. It’s got to
come down to grassroots sport; where do disabled people go to do Tough Mudder, for example.
You have also founded the charity “Superhero Sport Foundation,” and as part of this you run the Superhero Series, the UK’s only disability sports series. With Marvel as your headline sponsor, and now entering its fourth year, can you tell us more about the series and why you started it? It is just about getting disabled people doing sport for fun. Whereas other single sporting events I have turned up to seem to have a sympathetic vibe to them, they are not gutsy, punchy, or cool. With Marvel as the Superhero Series headline sponsor, we want to make disability sport cool and aspirational. The Superhero Series is really just about everyone finding their own way to do stuff and to prove that anything is possible.
Want to take part in a Superhero Series event? Check out the website superheroseries.co.uk for more information. Tw i t te r:: @ S u p e r h e r oTr i I n s ta g ra m:: s u p e r h e r o_ s e r i es Fa ce b oo k:: @ s u p e r h e r ot r i
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