Jordanne Joyce Whiley Does This Name Sound Familiar to You?
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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. 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. 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,” “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.” .