“Aim high, even if you hit a cabbage,” Tanni Grey-Thompson’s grandfather used to tell her, and when others told her she’d “never get an education or have children”, her parents “ignored it for whatever reason”, said Dame Grey-Thompson during her keynote at the EMCC conference.

Paralysed by the age of seven, she said: “The perception for others was that the wheelchair was the worst thing; for me it was the freedom to do stuff.”