I'm a Paralympic champion but relentess pursuit of excellence never stops

The life of a top athlete is never simple. You can be seven time European Champion, two time Commonwealth Champion, two time World Champion, and have eight Paralympic medals (one Gold, five Silver, two Bronze). But you always feel like it’s not enough.

Piers Gilliver ended a long wait when he became ParalympicsGB’s first wheelchair fencing gold medallist since 1988 when he won Gold at the Tokyo games in 2021. He had already earned a Silver in Rio, followed that up with a Gold, Silver and Bronze in Japan, before in Paris in the summer, he picked up another three Silver Medals and a Bronze.

The 30-year-old wheelchair fencer, who trains at the University of Bath, is already targeting LA in 2028 to add to his medal haul. He admits that life as an elite athlete is hard but is always striving to that bit extra to be the very best that he can be.

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“One of the problems of elite sport, it is always the next thing,” he told SomersetLive. “It is so hard to stop and appreciate what you have done.

“I won Gold in Tokyo and enjoyed it but it was onto the next thing as I knew I had more in me and then eyes straight on Paris. I won four medals but could have done better so I want to do better in LA.

“It is an essential attribute to believe that you can do these things but it is not a given and you have to look through critical eyes. Elite sport, the hardest thing is that constant pressure.

“You have to believe everything you do is terrible but you do one thing a day to make it better. Asking those questions when I go to the gym, how to make the technique better, and then asking the questions was that session good enough.

“You have to have the mentality of never good enough. As soon as an athlete thinks they are great then they stop improving. It is not just about working hard but years and years of pressure and guilt and stress hanging over you.”

After winning silver in the Category A Epee at Rio 2016, he rallied to the Tokyo final and bested Maxim Shabarov in a thrilling encounter, where he triumphed 15-9 to top the podium. That ended a long wait when he became ParalympicsGB’s first wheelchair fencing gold medallist since 1988.

Gilliver left the French capital with four medals - two silvers in the Men’s Category A Individual Sabre and Épée contests, plus a silver and a bronze in the Team Foil and Épée where he teamed up with Dimitri Coutya and Oliver Lam-Watson.

“I’m pretty gutted,” said Gilliver at the end of the Games. “I hoped to come here and win the gold but it didn’t work out on the day.

“The competition days are always really tough, back-to-back tough competitions and it’s hard to process. Once the Games come to a close, you can really look back and be proud of winning a medal, it’s a big deal.”

Gilliver has come back from the abyss to win a sabre silver having battled vicious symptoms of concussion in the early part of 2023.

“It’s been a really tough cycle,” said Gilliver. “The last couple of years have been some of the hardest points of my life and there are points where I’ve questioned all sorts of things.

“There have been a lot of challenges and it’s been a tough one to get through, so it’s great to be able to even be here competing to be honest.

“I want to go to LA,” he added. “All the Games so far have had a different feel. Paris was in an incredible venue, crowd going crazy, so the environment was different.”

Piers first tried the sport of wheelchair fencing in 2010 at his local fencing club in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire and he joined the British Disabled Fencing Association in 2011. From there, he never looked back.

“When I was a kid I hated sport,” the medallist said. “When I was at school, options were football or rugby, nothing else, so my view of sport is all you hear about and see and because I didn’t enjoy them, I didn’t think there were any other options.

“I hated sport when I was younger – I wasn’t interested, I was terrible at every sport I tried, and I’d be the first to admit that I couldn’t catch. I just didn’t think sport was for me.

“So I’ll forever be thankful that – sat at home one day as a bored teenager – I googled wheelchair fencing. It immediately caught my attention, it was so totally different from the sports I’d grown up with, like rugby and football and once I started to fall in love with it.

“I was always interested in history – I collect military memorabilia and now run a small business selling antiques – and like all kids, I liked swords. Finally, here was a sport that struck a chord.”