Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit. Boris Starling

with a fractured elbow – ‘When I go race, I know my mission, I know what I want to do. I just block everything out and do the best I can do. I have no boundaries, I just go for it.’

      Paracanoeing is not offered at the Invictus Games. No matter, there were plenty of other things she could do there. The first day of finals, Monday 9 May, became Christine’s own personal Medal Monday. Gold in the heavyweight powerlifting, gold in the four-minute indoor rowing and gold in the one-minute indoor rowing. A couple of days later, she added a silver and a bronze in swimming.

      But Christine downplayed the personal merit of the hardware – ‘It’s not the gold medal around my neck that’s important to me, it’s Canada placing first. For me, the greatest moment is when my national anthem is being played.’

      Besides, she knows that the officials got it wrong, at least in one small way. When those five medals say GAUTHIER Christine (CAN), there should be another name there too.

      Not that the owner of that name cares too much. Not unless the medal comes with a dog biscuit, that is.

      2

       THIS PLACE OF WRATH AND TEARS

      That single step Josh Boggi had taken meant that he was now standing on an IED.

      The IED was a simple pressure-plate device built around two strips of metal held slightly apart. Each strip was linked by electric wires to a battery pack and a detonator set in the main explosive charge. The charge itself was made with farming fertiliser and housed in a cooking-oil canister. There was pretty much nothing in there which you couldn’t build yourself from ordinary household items, which was why IEDs were so common in Afghanistan.

      Josh’s weight pressed the metal strips together, making a circuit which in turn activated the detonator and exploded the primary charge. The suddenly superheated gases expanded rapidly under the pressure – ‘rapidly’ meaning a shock wave travelling around 500 metres per second, blasting the canister and everything else in it (ball bearings, nails, bolts) into hundreds of pieces of deadly-sharp shrapnel. At the same time, the heat from the explosion set off a fireball and the blast wave caused a partial vacuum into which high-pressure air rushed back, pulling more debris and shrapnel with it.

      All this happened in a split second, and Josh took the brunt of it.

      Flesh and bone, no matter how strong and fit that person is, is no match for an IED. Josh was lifted clean off the road and hurled into a ditch – ‘It felt like being punched really hard in the gut. Or winded in a rugby tackle, you know? I was just trying to suck the air back in. I had dust in my eyes and I didn’t really know what was happening.’

      His mates, on the other hand, knew exactly what was going on. They were on him in a flash. Through the shock and adrenalin, Josh gradually realised what they were doing. They had a tourniquet on each leg and another on his right arm: putting pressure hard on his arteries to stop him bleeding out right there in a dusty Afghan ditch.