Mick Brennan was a sergeant in the British Army Royal Signals corps serving in Iraq when he fell victim to a suicide bomb blast in September 2004. The blast threw him 25 feet along the ground, with a direct result of his legs being severed from the knees downwards, and the landing combined with the force of the blast sending him into a 15 day coma. Mick’s career ending injury came a mere 5 months before the introduction of the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme was introduced in 2005, leaving him and his family open to sudden financial instability and difficulties even entering his own home.
Things started looking better for Mick when he took part in Exercise Snow Warrior, an annual military ski training exercise involving adaptive sports, ensuring Mick was completely and unchangeably hooked to skiing. In 2009 he joined the GB Olympic development squad and travelled to the 2010 Vancouver Paralympic games as part of the Paralympic Inspiration Programme. It was as a result of this experience that Mick realised his determination to represent Britain in the Paralympics, to arrive at the Sochi 2014 Paralympic games as an official sportsman representing his home country.
Mick suffered a major blow to his life and career aspirations at an age where most of us are settled and safe in our future. In his late twenties, Mick had to do a complete re-evaluation of his life, turning in a completely different direction that held new challenges in whole new areas, and still he didn’t back down, instead choosing to release his full potential, not being defeated by forces he could not control.
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