She is a wheelchair user since she was nine and, in truth, is lucky to be alive after surviving a horrendous car crash in June 2009. Her mum Bridgette was driving and Britney was in her seat-belt in the back-seat. They were headed to the beach when hit by a car that was on the wrong side of the road. Britney was cut from the wreckage and on life support for several weeks. Bridgette, a vibrant fit woman who is never far from her side, also still bears the scars of broken ribs, wrist and collarbone.

The crash must have been particularly devasting given that the family had only moved to Ireland from South Africa four years earlier after her dad Denver found work here.

“That whole year is a blur to me now,” Britney recalls of spending the next 12 months in hospital, six months in Temple Street and the same in the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) in Dun Laoghaire.

“I still struggle but it doesn’t frustrate me as much as it did in the first three years. I was just going into my teenage years. I still somehow lived a life but I have very different friends now. I lost most of my previous friends because they couldn’t see me as the same person and some of them turned their backs on me because I was just too much of a burden. They looked at me differently so I made different friends and better friends now.”

All of this is told with a mega-watt smile. This is not a woman who wallows in self-pity or the past. As a Christian she finds a way to count her blessings. But on the cusp of her Paralympic debut she has a platform now to underline the daily accessibility issues with which all wheelchair users have to contend.

“It’s the everyday things that challenge you — reaching for cupboards, getting over kerbs, doing your driving test. Even sitting on a public bench you can get sore and injured.”

Training for her sport is sometimes easy by comparison. She was playing in a basketball blitz in Cork when someone suggested she’d be suited to power lifting and she took to it immediately. Para-power lifting is a straight bench press competition and, in only her second year competing, she set a new world junior record in the 73kg class by lifting 89 kilos at the Asia and Oceania Championships. A year later she set another with a press of 100kg at the Hungarian World Cup and, in 67kg competition, she has a personal best of 103kg.

Lockdown was tough, shutting off access to gyms and making it difficult to meet up with her coach Roy Guerin, a three-time Paralympian based in Tralee. But they managed through Zoom. She set up a gym in the family’s spare room and persevered, a word she could trademark.

She found the Paralympic’s one-year postponement “an absolute killer”. She adds: “It was a big thing for me to get used to the spotlight and I’d got myself psyched up and was looking forward to it, and then was so nervous about whether it would go ahead or not.”

What she likes most about her sport is “that I can put my frustration into the bar and the control it gives me over my mind. There was one time when I lost my concentration. My coach said in my ear ‘snap back, snap back, focus on you, on your body and the bar’ and I just got in the zone again.”

Only the top eight in their weight class qualify for the Paralympics but she’s up against much older, experienced and heavier lifters in Tokyo where her biggest challenge will be not to get overawed by the enormity of the occasion.

“My ambition is to get good experience at this Paralympics, to wave the flag for Ireland and power-lifting, and to at least get a good lift, maybe a PB. That would be fantastic.”

FIVE MORE TO FOLLOW IN TOKYO

In Jason Smyth (T13 100m), Michael McKillop (T37 1500m), Niamh McCarthy (F40 discus), Ellen Keane (SB8 100m breaststroke) and tandem cyclists
Katie-George Dunlevy and Eve McCrystal, Team Ireland has defending champions and Rio medallists back in Tokyo. But the Irish team also has other medal contenders and new faces looking to make their mark.

Greta Streimikyte (T13 1500m)
Greta, who is vision-impaired, was fourth in Rio but has since won two European titles. A switch of coach in 2020 and doubling her mileage has seen her knock nine seconds off her personal best this year alone and her 2021 PB of 4:29.33 makes her a serious medal contender.
 

Pat O’Leary (VL3 canoeing)
A chemistry lecturer in NUIG who has a prosthetic leg, Pat made the final of the KL3 200m sprint in Rio. Since then para-canoeing has introduced a new boat called the Va’a, with an outrigger and a single paddle, also raced over 200m. Pat won the European title in Va’a in his VLG3 category this summer and also races in the KL3.
 

Nicole Turner (S6 swimming)
Turner (19), from Portarlington in Laois was only 14 when she made five finals in Rio. Since then she’s won eight European medals (four this year) and bronze in the 50m butterfly at the 2019 World Championships. She’s swimming in three events but the 50m ‘fly and 100m breaststroke are her best.

Ronan Grimes (C4 Cycling)
From Athenry, Ronan was born with a club foot and only discovered para-cycling in 2016. He has won a World Championship medal in road or track in each of the last three years and is targeting the individual pursuit (track) and the time trial on the road. He works for the Irish medicines regulatory board (HPRA).

Tamsin Addison (Grade V dressage)
British-born and based but lived in Ireland for many years as she went to Queens University in Belfast and is married to Dundalk man Micheál O’Donoghue. When she was 21 Tamsin became the first person in the world, through specialist treatment, to regrow a bone in her upper arm after cancer. She’ll be hoping her horse Fahrenheit can withstand Tokyo’s heat.