Loki is the editor of the Creativity column which appears
every Tuesday in The Independent. He went to interview Bruce
Birchall at his home in London's Notting Hill Gate.
One
of the arguments in favour of mind sports used by Tony Banks in his
remarks in Parliament in the debate on chess gaining status as a
sport, on March 15th, was that disability was no bar to
participation. This has to be seen in the context of the
Government's wish to see Sport for All, in the way the way the DCMS
is run; the extent to which any sport manages to increase access to
it for women, ethnic minorities, the elderly, the unemployed and the
disabled will be important factors in determining the level of grant
that that sport ultimately receives.
It is perhaps
worthy of note - though he argues there ought not to be anything
remarkable about it - that one of the first clutch of MSO
Grandmasters, this year's silver medallist in Creative Thinking,
Bruce Birchall is a disabled person. Diabetic problems with foot
ulcers have seen him hospitalised seven times in the last five years
with six toe amputations a consequence of this, such that he now
gets Disability Living Allowance, Mobility Component, in respect of
his walking difficulties. However, he does not let it get him down
and remains cheerful, and able to rise above his problems
easily.
"I may no longer be fleet of foot," he quips,
"but I remain quick of mind. And getting a gold and two silvers in
Creative Thinking, and a Grandmaster title, as a result, tends to
demonstrate the case that becoming disabled does not mean you
therefore have to become inactive and marginalised. You can still
take part on an equal footing -- even if your feet are no longer of
equal size to those of your opponents. The disability is irrelevant
to the outcome of the contest. It is ability that matters and
decides the winners and the medallists."
"The only time it becomes an issue is
if you have to struggle to get up on a podium or a stage, using
stairs with no handrail, or the venue is split-level, as the Royal
Festival Hall was for the chess events in MSO 1. Which all rather
depends on the disability-awareness of the
organisers."
Bruce hopes that other disabled people
will be encouraged by his success to take part in next year's Mind
Sports Olympiad, and that specific encouragement for them to do so,
is included in the publicity material next year.
"No-one should feel sorry for me," he
argues, "I don't feel sorry for myself. You have to ask: what is a
person? What is essential and what is unimportant? And it is the
personality, the intelligence, the imagination that matters. The
loss of a few toes or a few teeth does not alter any of that. Or to
be more precise: it needn't do. I don't have an impaired or flawed
sense of identity, because I am now an amputee. "
He
looks forward to a time when there will be only one Olympic Games,
with mind and physical sports co-existing side-by-side and there is
felt to be nothing remarkable about that; excellence at a discipline
being all that mattered.
"The phrase 'able-bodied' is in common
usage", he says, "it would be good to see the phrase "able-minded"
given a similar emphasis, to achieve a parity of esteem. You don't
have to have a corpore sano to put it in, a mens sana is perfectly
possible without it. Look no further than at Stephen Hawking. So
what if he cannot run the 100 yards in under 10 seconds? And so what
if the 100 yards gold medallist cannot do theoretical physics?
Elitism of the brain is just as unacceptable as elitism of the
physique."
- Loki
