Jane Phare previews Grit and Glory, a documentary which follows the compelling story of how six Kiwi athletes trained, competed and finally qualified for the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games.
There are moments in Grit and Glory, a Netflix-style documentary following Kiwi paralympians in their lead up to this month’s Paralympic Games in Paris, that viewers will be forgiven for feeling sorry for cyclist Devon Briggs.
Born with profound club feet, he endured painful surgery as a 9-year-old, his legs pinned with metal rods that were slowly turned, excruciatingly, every day to gradually force his feet to straighten. He describes his childhood as “horrific”, always an outcast, picked last, no one wanted to be his friend.
But by the end of the documentary, those moments have vanished, eaten up by the grit-and-glory images of how Briggs broke three world records at the para-cycling championships last year, earning himself a place in the Paris Paralympic Games.
“If I win a gold medal it’s definitely going to be for me,” he says, ”and for my mum and dad, Throughout this whole thing they’ve believed in me 110%.”
Briggs’ story, of heartache and triumph, is one of six told in a 90-minute documentary, Grit and Glory, made by Attitude Pictures, which will screen on TVNZ1 on Saturday at 8.05pm.
Attitude’s founder, veteran journalist, executive producer and director Robyn Scott-Vincent, and two camera operators spent seven gruelling weeks on the road last year following the athletes, capturing the exhaustion, the emotion, the disappointment and sheer delight at training camps and championships in Europe and the UK. Director Dan Salmon took over in 2024 following the athletes’ progress, taking the project into edit with Peter Brook Bell as producer.
At a training camp in Mallorca, Spain, the para-swimmers pushed themselves to the limits in 44C heat, practising in an outdoor pool. Next we see them at the championships in Manchester. The track athletes trained in Montpellier, France, before the world championships in Paris. And the cyclists trained in Grenchen, Switzerland, before competing in Glasgow and again in Rio de Janeiro earlier this year.
Scott-Vincent was at the Paris world championships last year watching long jumper and sprinter Anna Grimaldi coming down the straight in a 100m sprint. She captured the moment Grimaldi realises she’s in for a medal, the delight evident on her face.
“I’ve never seen an athlete just suddenly start to beam in the middle of a race.” Realising she was in with a chance, Grimaldi told herself to just keep running, winning a bronze and delighting her teammates who hauled her off her feet into the stands for a hug. Grimaldi, who was born with part of her arm missing, will compete in the long jump, and the 100m and 200m sprints in Paris.
Cyclist Nicole Murray lost the lower part of her arm in a motor mower accident when she was 5. That imbalance meant she struggled to get out of the gate fast at the start of a race. When she started cycling competitively, she says she never realised the velodrome tracks were so steep, that she would get up to such startling speeds and that her bike would have no brakes. In Rio de Janeiro she won five medals, including gold.
At one point in Grit and Glory, Murray is filmed hanging exhausted over a railing after dismounting her bike, and being helped off the track after a race at the para-cycling championships in Rio de Janeiro earlier this year. She, like other paralympians, pushes her body to such extremes that she tastes blood in her mouth, and sees black spots in her vision due to lack of oxygen.
Track athlete and blade runner Mitch Joynt was 18 when, working as an arborist, he slipped after kicking a piece of wood into a wood chipper. The chipper caught this foot and started pulling him in. Joynt says if it wasn’t for the quick actions of a fellow worker who ran to turn off the machine, he would have been eaten alive.
Five months after he had his lower leg amputated, he was back working as an arborist and fell out of a tree, badly breaking his ankle. It’s pinned together but now gives him more trouble than his amputation. Still, that hasn’t slowed him down.
Scott-Vincent says when Attitude starting filming Joynt he was driving trucks at night to fund his sport, and training hard during the day. Funding kicked in after he won bronze at the world championships in Paris 2023, an exhilarating moment he talks about in the documentary. Ecstatic at his win, Joynt finds Kiwi spectators and his supporters in the crowd, runs across for hugs, then back on the track to kiss his lane in appreciation and savour the moment. In the end track officials have to gently usher him off to make way for the next race.
“I felt like the main event,” he says.
In the Netflix-style documentary - it has plenty of teary, revealing moments - swimmer Cameron Leslie demonstrates the everyday challenges para-athletes face. Leslie was born without lower legs, malformed hands and with just one finger. In the small hotel room he shares with a fellow athlete, he takes off his prosthetic legs to go to the bathroom where he struggles to reach the liquid soap dispenser high on the wall.
In the pool, Leslie has taught himself not to breathe even when he’s desperate for air, an intake of oxygen that would cost him precious time. We see him powering through the water, winning the men’s 50m freestyle in 38.14 seconds without taking a breath. Paris will be his fourth Paralympics.
In a sport like swimming, Leslie says, he can’t hide his body. The clothes and the prosthetic legs are gone, his body revealed for all to see.
The hidden struggles for some of these athletes is evident in Tupou Neiufi’s story, a young swimmer battling with the ongoing damage from a hit-and-run accident when she was two-and-a-half. The impact resulted in paralysis to the left side of her body and a traumatic brain injury that causes exhaustion, not ideal for an elite athlete. She struggles to focus and questions whether she even wants to compete in the Paralympics after failing to qualify at the nationals in New Zealand or the championships in Glasgow.
Neiufi knows she’s not in good shape when she starts training in Mallorca, determinedly losing 15kg in just over two weeks while watching her teammates disappear to get ice cream in the 44C heat.
Footage shows Neiufi collapsing, exhausted, as she leaves the pool in Manchester and needing help to walk to the dressing room. She was finally selected for the Paris Paralympics just last month.
It is that behind-the-scenes struggle, that grit and resilience that Scott-Vincent wanted to capture.
“When you watch the games you don’t understand a lot about the back story. You should by the end of this [the documentary] really champion these athletes and know what it’s really been like for them to get there.”
She wanted Grit and Glory to demonstrate that para-Kiwis are elite athletes pursuing sport at an elite level.
“They absolutely meet their challenges every day head on and they’re not asking for sympathy.”
* Grit and Glory screens on TVNZ1 on Saturday August 24 at 8.05pm, and on TVNZ+. Attitude Pictures has made an additional eight episodes called The Champion Within following other Kiwi athletes, many of whom also qualified for the Paris Paralympic Games, which will screen on TVNZ1 and TVNZ+ between August 29 and September 8.
The Paris 2024 Paralympics run from August 28 to September 8.
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
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