Transcriber: Ian Brown Reviewer: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka
Hello, and thank you for that lovely introduction.
I was utterly flattered.
So I’m Will Perry, I’m a Paralympic swimmer.
I represented Great Britain
in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games last year.
I competed in four events:
100m breaststroke, 100m freestyle,
the 50m freestyle 4x50 relay, and the 200m medley.
I made one final and top-20 finishes elsewhere.
So, the Paralympic Games.
What’s it all about?
For me and every other Paralympic athlete,
it’s about a celebration of difference,
a celebration of difficulty and achievement.
But I want to share a quick story on how I got there.
So, this is me, on the blocks,
just before my very first race doing breaststroke.
So I’m going to take you a month or two before then.
I’d just competed in my very first European championship,
making my debut for Great Britain.
I’m sitting at home, and my phone rings.
I can see it’s a British swimming coach.
I thought, “I’m in trouble here, what’s going on?”
And it was the most simple call in my life,
but also the most life-changing.
“Hi, Will.
Tokyo?”
I said, “Yeah?”
“You’re going.”
And to be honest, I nearly started crying.
You’re not allowed to tell other people
when you’re selected.
I had to keep it quiet for a month and a half.
I phoned my mom immediately.
And I have to say -
I have to say she started crying as well.
I left a bit of a weight on her shoulders
because she had to go and see some family,
I think five minutes after that and had to clear herself up.
But yes, so Tokyo, the experience.
What an experience!
So many people ask me,
“What was it like?
How can you put it into words?”
I never can.
So the best way I always describe it,
the thing I always say is that -
I remember watching the London 2012 Paralympic Games,
actually here on the Isle of Wight, when we were on holiday.
I remember watching this girl called Ellie Simmonds.
I’d heard of her before.
And my mom came up to me and said,
“This girl, she’s got your condition, and look how amazing she is.
Look, she’s winning, she’s won gold.”
I have to admit, at that time, I wasn’t particularly captivated,
but I was really pleased to see someone else with my condition
doing some good in the world.
At this point, I wasn’t a swimmer, I hadn’t even started.
It was two years off for me, even starting swimming.
Nine years later, I’m having breakfast with her before our very first race,
just her and me in the Paralympic Village.
We’re about to go off on the bus together to compete for Great Britain in Tokyo,
and it’s a real pinch-me moment,
and it’s fantastic.
We’re heralded as heroes,
when you look at the way we’re depicted in the media,
alongside the Great Britain team.
It says, “Look at these fantastic people!
Look what they can do in the pool, look what they can do on a bike!
Look what they can do on skis!”
But that doesn’t last very long.
Remember, the Paralympics only comes around every four years.
The Winter Paralympics, the same.
So when we come back, we have this massive homecoming event.
You know, we’ve got music, we’ve got artists,
celebrating what we’ve achieved in Tokyo.
And you know, I’m outside, I’m acting like a celebrity,
I’m signing autographs, taking pictures.
People think I’m this big deal.
I genuinely don’t, I think they’re lying.
But, you know, we’re treated like stars, and we feel like stars.
But, when the party ends, it all changes.
This is me and my family minus one.
This is in Paris.
But what if I were to tell you, behind this smile,
I’m nervous,
I’m scared.
Coming back from the Paralympics, you’re celebrated as a hero,
and often when you come back from the Olympics or Paralympics,
you go through this process called the Olympic blues.
It’s where you miss the buzz, the adrenaline, and everything like that.
And it’s an awful time,
but it’s made worse when you’re abused in public.
So if I were to tell you that we were having a nice family photo taken,
but I’m constantly looking around.
I'm looking at people.
I’ll give you some examples.
I’m laughed at,
I’m photographed,
I’m filmed.
I’ve been touched, laughed at,
mocked by all sorts of people in public
from the country I’ve just represented
a few months ago.
I recall, even, leaving the homecoming event,
going back on the train,
literally leaving the event, and there are kids laughing at me.
I’d just been celebrated as a hero 30 minutes before.
Why?
Why must this be?
Even now, I struggle to put it into words, I struggle to explain it, but -
What can we do?
And I felt, as a Paralympian,
I have a platform of some description.
I’m not like Peter Dinklage, I’m not a movie star.
But I believe other people with dwarfism,
they don’t really have -
and I was one of these people before -
the courage to speak up,
to say, “This is happening to us.”
Nearly all people with dwarfism can report that they’ve had some sort of abuse.
I’ve heard stories of people having rocks thrown at them,
being held against the wall, having money demanded from them,
even being jumped over.
My story, which happened on the 3rd of January, was:
I went shopping, I had a bad day, and I just went shopping.
Everyone’s done that here.
You know, you go shopping, you need washing-up tablets,
you need deodorant.
I thought, yeah,
that’s a relatively normal thing to do.
So I went shopping to my local supermarket,
and as I was walking up to the door,
there were three young girls,
about 16, 15,
all chatting away, having a laugh as you do,
until one of them noticed me.
And I’ve noticed this my entire life.
I'd like to say sometimes I'm wrong.
I’m never always right, but I do get it right most of the time.
I’ve experienced this for 21 years.
They looked up, saw me, did the normal thing everyone else does:
their heads bow, you can see the whites in the bottom of their eyes,
and they’re looking at me.
One girl said something to the other two,
and they start giggling
quietly, discreetly.
And I’m eyeballing them,
just to make sure that they know I’m looking.
I go in, past the door,
and I hear them burst out laughing, absolutely shrieking with laughter.
So it bothered me.
I continued, I did my shop, got everything I needed,
went out and went around to confront them.
I know they were looking for me,
because one of them was looking behind the door.
As soon as I walked out, they quickly darted back.
I went to confront them,
and they told me I was overreacting, that I’d had a bad day.
It turns out, I had had a bad day,
but I do confront people sometimes just to try and make a difference.
And as I walked away, they were like,
“He was overreacting a bit, wasn’t he?”
And I thought, “What can I do?”
So I went home,
and I thought, “You know what? I’m going to rant.
I’m going to go on social media.”
I posted this.
Luckily the bad language has been cropped out;
otherwise I probably would have been censored.
[I started a movement!]
But I explained my story of what happened.
And actually, it’s not that much of an extreme event
that occurred,
but the reaction I got was phenomenal.
What surprised me was how few people knew about what goes on.
No one knew.
They said, “Wow, I never, never knew.
I never thought about it, I never considered it.”
And I had people, firstly with dwarfism,
messaged me saying,
“Oh, my goodness, me too.
I’ve had this.”
They’ve given me tons of examples.
There’s one really sad example someone gave me
of a former classmate about 20 or 30 years ago -
someone with dwarfism actually -
she took her own life
because she felt the abuse was too much.
But I’m so thrilled to say
that the response was so overwhelmingly positive.
I had all sorts of media, reporters,
radio,
wanting me to share my story,
and make a difference.
And it’s amazing.
Even when I’ve been on national TV explaining what’s going on,
there are still people who feel like they need
to be the joker, be funny.
I had people comment on my Instagram using the word “midget.”
Now, “midget” is incredibly offensive.
It comes back from the time of being a sand fly,
and it originates from the freak show.
And they’re doing that to deliberately get under my skin.
It just shows there are people out there who are being deliberately obtuse,
even when I’m trying to make a difference.
And what I’m here to say
is that we do normal jobs, we are normal people.
We have to pay bills, we have to go shopping,
we have to fill up our car with petrol.
So why should we, when we’re doing that, why are we viewed as comical characters?
Why should me getting out of a car be such a funny concept to some people?
But -
again, it’s been fantastic.
I’ve been to see multiple politicians.
I’ve met many other people with dwarfism who are also fighting this issue.
You might have heard that Midget Gems has recently been removed
from certain supermarket stores.
Fantastic movement, but we’re still not doing enough.
This is a quote from a good friend of mine.
Her name is Maisie Summers-Newton.
She is - no other words for it - a double Paralympic champion,
a world champion, a European record holder,
an MBE,
a world record holder, too many titles to even mention.
And she said this to me when we got in the car
back from a para-swimming competition,
“You know, Will,
I don’t think we’ll ever be fully accepted into society.”
Now what’s really sad about this,
for those of you who don’t know who Maisie is,
she's probably one of the most positive people I know in my life.
She finds a positive in every negative.
She’s training to be a teacher
to try and educate the young generation on dwarfism,
to show that it’s a normal fact of life.
And when she said that to me, it broke my heart,
because she’s so positive, she’s so outgoing,
and for someone like her to say something like that
is just heart-wrenching.
So I felt I had to share it with you.
But if we’re not going to be accepted in society,
when are we going to be?
So it’s time for a change.
It’s time for us to be no longer viewed as comical characters.
I stand here, not as a Paralympian.
I stand here as someone with dwarfism.
I should be treated as someone normal
just because of who I am and what I’ve achieved.
Everyone deserves to be treated equally.
We’ve come so far with it,
we just seem to have missed a train.
So if we’re not going to change now, when are we going to change?
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)