Meet the Paralympian couple tackling LGTBQ rights and mental health issues – The Telegraph

When Jude Hamer slid into Lauren Rowles’s direct messages on Instagram last year during the first lockdown, it was to chat about their shared love of Crossfit training and pet rabbits. What the Paralympians did not know then, was they would find a life partner.

Sitting in the living room in the home they share near Reading, they are reflecting on their experiences at the Rio Games, where Rowles was crowned Paralympic champion in the TA mixed double sculls a year after taking up rowing, and wheelchair basketball player Hamer finished just outside the medals in fourth. However, behind the scenes, they were struggling with mental health issues. A lot has changed since the 2016 Games, largely through finding each other.

Being vocal about their mental health has become their way of challenging the perception that winning medals and making it to major tournaments equates to happiness. From personal experience, they know that is not true.

“Just because something looks great on the outside, that doesn’t mean that you’re having a good time,” Hamer, who won silver at the 2018 World Championships, says. “In Rio, I could have been anywhere else in the world. I absolutely hated every minute of it and I could not wait to get on that plane back. I was in the worst mental place I’d ever been – I was suicidal.”

For Rowles, the low came after Rio. “I won the Paralympic Games and was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, but then completely crumbled and was suffering from depression afterwards,” she says.

The couple now recognise that part of their mental health challenges are rooted in their childhood trauma coping with disability. Hamer endured more than 30 surgeries to try to correct one leg being shorter than the other.

It led to intense bullying at school, and she opted for amputation aged 16.

Rowles, has been a wheelchair user since the age of 13, when she suddenly developed transverse myelitis, losing feeling from her chest down overnight. It was in adulthood, and when facing failure in elite sport – Rowles losing a World Cup race in 2017 and Hamer missing out on the European Championships final in 2015 – that the effect of their early years was triggered.

“I didn’t process the trauma of what happened to me at 13, and in 2017 I fell into a deep depression,” Rowles, 23, says. “I felt this pressure on me, because I won a gold medal in Rio, that I had to be amazing. I ended up dropping out of university because I had severe depression. I couldn’t even leave the house. I had such bad anxiety.”

“I was also in a really dark place,” Hamer adds. “It took me three years to get off antidepressants and to be OK with where I’m at now. I always looked at athletes like it was just sunshine and rainbows all the time. It’s not like that at all.”

Rowles was never keen to share these parts of her life, but connecting with Hamer last year helped change things.

“My story is much more than what I’ve done in basketball,” Hamer, 30, explains. “Winning a medal, that’s my goal in my career, but it’s not everybody’s dream. I want what I’ve learnt about my mental health during my career to resonate with more people than just athletic people.”

It resonated with Rowles. During the monotonous first few months of home workouts in lockdown, they started doing Crossfit together on Zoom but connected on a much deeper level. “Jude would organise a savage workout and I’d do it to impress her,” Rowles says, laughing. “But then we found ourselves speaking on the phone for like two hours after.”

The only uncertainty was that Rowles had yet to come out publicly. “The challenge for me in coming out was I had no gay role models as a kid,” she says. “All I had was what the media showed me, and if you were gay you had a rough time, you’d be a victim of hate and abuse. In a similar way with disability, what I got shown was that if you were disabled you weren’t independent and were bound in this body and this thing that happened to you.

“Now, in the days of social media, you can share that it doesn’t have to be that way – girls who look at my social media can think wow, she’s just like me.”

While Hamer jokes that Rowles’s family and friends have “blamed her” for the more grungy look she’s adopted since they met, in all seriousness Rowles says it was Hamer that showed her it was possible to live a more authentic life. Now Rowles has quickly joined her partner in taking up the mantle as a vocal LGBTQ+ advocate in sport.

“I wasn’t out, I didn’t want to be labelled, but Jude gave me the confidence to do it, in being with her we took that step together,” Rowles says. “I was worried because companies see me as a box-ticking exercise: their eyes light up when you say: ‘I’m gay, disabled and female.’ I am all those things, but I can be more of that from what I say and what I do. It’s going to come from me sharing my experience, being out and visible.”

That visibility will be put further to the test in Tokyo. Japan ranks second-last in gay and transgender rights among the nearly 40 wealthy nations in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and is the only G7 nation not to legalise same-sex unions.

Activists have lobbied for the Tokyo 2020 organisers to push the Japanese government to consider introducing a bill to protect gay and transgender rights ahead of the Games, but have been disappointed.

Rowles and Hamer see the conflict in the host nation not actively supporting gay rights, but believe this could well be a moment where perceptions could be changed.

“The simplest way I can put it is look at what London 2012 did for the UK – it finally started to normalise disability. Could Tokyo have the same effect for LGBTQ people?” Rowles says.

“I’m not saying this is going to be one big Pride event. But could it be that Japan needs this to expose themselves to that? Just being out and being proud and being strong about that?”

“It gives people something to think about,” Hamer says.

Rowles smiles: “It gives me hope.”