A feature about Jordanne Joyce Whiley

1. Jordanne Joyce Whiley
Does this name sound familiar to you?
By Georgi Dianov Georgiev
Someone once said that a bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the
branch breaking - his trust is not on the branch but on his own wings to
fly. Perhaps this might be the perfect quote to describe the eager and
professional life of Jordanne Whiley, Britain´s best female wheelchair
tennis player.
Born in Birmingham in 1992 with “osteogenesis imperfecta” or brittle-
bone disease (a tissue deformity in which the tissue fails to grow
properly making the bones weaker and more prone to breaking), Whiley
has used a wheelchair since the age of two. She grew up in Halesowen,
West Midlands.
For the first dozen years of her life she has broken her bones more times
than she can remember and her parents lost count after number 26.
Thankfully, she has not broken a bone since she was 12. She was
constantly in and out of hospital. Her legs carry the scars today and as a
result of so many operations, school was hell. She had to navigate her
first day at her secondary school with both legs in plaster. According to
her, that was the main reason why she was always finding it hard making
friends in the same way as never been invited to birthday parties.
“Whilst I was in high school the kids would take my bag and they would
empty it and put my books up on the projector out of my reach because
I was only two foot tall,” said 4ft 10ins now Jordanne. “Growing up with
brittle bones and the bullying at school was quite hard because I knew
why I was being bullied and I completely understood it. It was abysmal.
It was the worst time of my life and I was always sad.”
Thanks to tennis she could go and play it out of school and all was fine,
but then she would go back to class and all was dreadful again. Now, she
looks back and feels happy to know they did not shape her life. Tennis
was a welcome reprieve from the bullying and she recalls attending her
first tennis camp for wheelchair-users aged 12. She remembered being
happy because of seeing other people in wheelchairs that would not
make fun of her.

2. Neither her teenage years were that bright. “It was not easy when you
are a teenager and all your friends are going out clubbing and they have
got great legs,” she said. “I would say to myself ‘but I want perfect legs
and I want to be tall’. I just felt you should be the person you were born
to be and live on.”
Whiley inherited the condition from her father, Keith, who had been
born with the same disease, characterized by having a 50 per cent
chance of being passed on genetically. Keith, who took up wheelchair
tennis after retirement (he was a 100 metres bronze medallist at the
1984 Paralympics), was the main influence in getting her daughter
involved in the sport.
The first time she picked up a tennis racket was in Tel Aviv at the age of
three. Her father was training for a wheelchair tournament and he had
taken Whiley and her mother, Julie, with him. When little Whiley picked
up a racket and started ‘mimicking’ his moves, she attracted admiration
to such an extent that the next day the local press and news channel
were filming her. “They were filming me hitting balls with my dad and
interviewing him about my new found talent,” she said. “I was all over
the news and local papers for being the youngest person in a wheelchair
to play tennis.” From then on she has worked hard on her game climbing
up the rankings throughout the years.
Despite being told by doctors she would never play sport and she would
never walk unaided, last year the 23-year-old earned her place in history
after winning all four grand slams in doubles with Kui Kamiji from Japan.

3. They achieved a calendar Grand Slam by winning the wheelchair doubles
at the Australian Open (beating the Dutch pair Marjolein Buis and Jiske
Griffioen), The French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open (overcoming
Griffioen and Aniek van Koot in all three finals).
At the age of 14, she became Britain´s youngest ever wheelchair tennis
singles champion and on her 16th birthday in 2008, she was the junior
world number one qualifying for the Paralympics in Beijing. Four years
ago, she won bronze at London Olympics 2012 and now, her sights are
set on the Rio Open 2016.
Jordanne is currently ranked number five in the world in singles and
number two in doubles. But she considers herself “lucky” after 2005
intense operation to straighten her legs where she learnt how to walk
without a wheelchair. She has not experienced a fracture since doctors
inserted nuts and bolts to hold her bones together. She said: “After that
I could walk unaided but I could not run or jump and my balance is very
poor.”
Trying to find out how hard is to playing tennis from a seated position,
Jordanne said: “If you take my favourite tennis player, Novak Djokovic, in
a chair and put him to play against me on the court, I will probably win,”

4. “It is extremely difficult to get the chair moving and because I have been
doing it all my life, it has become second nature or ‘an extension of
me’.”
What is ambiguous is that as the most successful British tennis player,
hardly anybody knows her name. Whiley’s achievements have gone
relatively unnoticed on the grand slam circuit compared to other famous
faces. “If, for instance, Andy Murray wins Wimbledon, he will earn
£1million whereas I will receive between six and seven thousand
pounds,” she said. “And we play the same number of tournaments
training just as hard as they do.”
She is keen to emphasise that she is mostly concerned with helping
promote her sport. “British tennis has Murray and Spanish tennis has
Nadal,” she said. “If I can be a face and people can exclaim, ‘Look!
Jordanne Whiley, lets go and watch wheelchair tennis!’ then it will be a
lot easier for the public to relate to it.”
However, she said she is not in the sport for the money but to inspire
others with the slogan ‘women should have role models who are not
perfect’. “A lot of young people want to be skinny and look good like
Paris Hilton or Beyoncé but there are all sorts of prototypes you can look
up to in life,” she said. “Someone who is not that perfect, in a wheelchair
but playing sports, and is healthy without looking like a stick. I would
hope society to find that inspiring.”
After a recent medical breakthrough, doctors have discovered how to
remove the gene that causes brittle bone disease through in vitro
fertilisation (IVF), which Jordanne describes as 'the most amazing news'.
She said: “It means that if one day I decide to have a child it will not have
to go through what I did and that is an incredible relief.”