Paris Paralympics: ‘I never blamed rugby for my injury’ – ParalympicsGB’s David Ross

“I remember having a conversation with my mum at a point and she said ‘do you think you’re flogging a dead horse here?’ I just said no. I knew I had the chance to do this if I got a clean run at things.”

Having first became involved with Great Britain’s wheelchair rugby squad during their preparations for the Rio Paralympics, David Ross has had to wait two cycles to finally make his bow at the Games but, before tomorrow’s competition beginning in Paris, the 29-year-old never considered drawing a line under his time on the court.

Indeed, even had his international career not ultimately bore fruit, the County Down man knows he would still be involved in some capacity in a sport he says helped him “regain that little bit of normality” after a life-changing injury sustained in a schools rugby game eleven years ago.

Ross was representing Wallace High in February of 2013 when he was trapped underneath a collapsed ruck, the routine incident causing a freak injury that left the then 18-year-old paralysed from the neck down.

He was still coming to terms with the reality that he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair when a chance encounter introduced him to the sport in which he will become a Paralympian.

“I’d have trained pretty hard at school, looked after what I was eating,” he told BBC Sport NI.

“I met a [wheelchair rugby player] Will in rehab one day and he had a KFC with him. He said to me, ‘if my coach knew I was eating this, he’d kill me’ and that line, it was like a lightbulb in my head – ‘that’s what I used, that’s what I need to do, I can still do that.'”