Like every athlete the world over, Jordan Lee was forced to be resourceful during Lockdown and the answer to the Killarney high jumper’s quandary was, literally, right outside his back door.

“Squatting and different variations of squats are particularly important in high jump (training) and while I had my own weights at home the one thing I didn’t have access to was a squat rack.”

So he created a makeshift one with two wheelie bins.

He doesn’t mention the complications that having only one forearm creates when you’re pumping heavy iron because Lee brokers no obstacles to his sporting ambition.

Basketball was his first love, despite an inauspicious start.

“For the first couple of years people would rarely pass me the ball simply because I looked different to everyone else. That was something that fuelled me.

“After nine years I became the first one-handed basketball player to represent their country so I suppose people doubting me drives me on still to this day.”

After playing underage for Ireland he met Jason Smyth at a disability conference who persuaded him to try some other sports at a Paralympic Ireland Expo in 2018.

Within two years Lee had won a bronze medal in the T47 high jump at the 2018 European Championships and he’s aiming higher at the same event in Bydgoszcz, Poland next week.

The 20-year-old left no training stone unturned during lockdown, including using the lake at Muckross for daily ice baths. He also provided hard labour to Killarney Valley AC to build their new 200m track, the brainchild of his coach Tomás Griffin.

Yet it is a recent three-week training block in Birmingham with a specialist coach that could prove most fruitful.

Fuzz Caan is a Rada-trained actor who has appeared in everything from Shakespeare to and .

He’s also a former international high jumper, a renowned technical coach and the man who got Robbie Grabarz to knuckle down and win a European title and Olympic bronze medal in 2012.

Lee first met Caan when Athletics Ireland brought him over for coaching workshops and it’s easy to see how his bubbly personality gelled with the charismatic UK coach who has an affinity with the outgoing personality-type common among high jumpers.

“Yeah, Fuzz has a fantastic record, he’s one of the best coaches in the world and coached Germaine Mason (silver in Beijing Olympics) and Robbie Grabarz.

"To be in that environment, training with Olympic and able-bodied athletes was great. I really like being thrown into the deep end.”

Next weekend’s European Championships are the first majors for Ireland’s top track and field para-athletes since the 2019 World Championships in Dubai where he finished sixth.

“I was definitely disappointed,” Lee admits, of picking up bone bruising in his heel a few weeks earlier.

“When you’re jumping off your plant leg you put 11 times the force of your own body weight into the ground. The injury was on the heel of my take-off leg so that didn’t help matters.

“I was quite disappointed but I wasn’t even clearing 1.75m a couple of days beforehand and I managed to clear 1:87m on the day so while I should have done better it was still an achievement to turn that around.”

He has a personal best of 1:95m from the Irish National Championships (able-bodied) in 2019 and the European record in his event is 1:97m so that is among his ambitions.

Asked about the postponement of the 2020 Paralympics and the doubts still surrounding them this summer he says: “There’s nothing I can do to change the situation. We all have to live with it and it’s all about taking things one step at a time.

"The Europeans are all I’m thinking about right now, not the Paralympics.”

Jordan Lee was speaking at the launch of Circle K’s ‘To Team Ireland’ initiative for Tokyo 2021