Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an athlete. She broke a British record for the 100

meters at the age of 16. She won a bronze medal in the Soul Games in 1988 and

she went on to win four gold medals in Barcelona four years later and gold and three

silvers in Atlanta after that. In Sydney last year once again she won four gold

medals. All her victories have been won in a wheelchair because she was born with

Spina Bifida and hasn't walked since she was seven years old. Just because my legs don't work,

she says, doesn't mean I don't want to win. She's the most successful track

competitor in the history of the Paralympics, Tanny Gray Thompson. Tanny I

think the sight of you crossing the finishing line when you were getting that fourth

gold in Sydney and your kind of hands

raised in victory was an enduring image of the Sydney Games.

Was it the most exciting moment in your life?

One of them anyway. It was, I think there were so many mixed feelings with Sydney.

So much of it was actually relief more than anything else because going into the games there'd been

quite a lot of pressure on me to do well.

And as the games went on, the first medal was easy,

the second one wasn't too bad. By the time I got to the third, everyone was saying, well, you're just going to

win four, aren't you? And you just don't know. So it was a whole mixture of things and it was great because my

sister and her husband were out there which was really nice to have family around the

rest of my family stayed at home so it's... Your mother can't be able to watch

...