Paula Dunn, freshly announced as UK Athletics' Paralympic head coach - replacing Peter Eriksson, the Swede who is now head coach of the UK Athletics able-bodied athletics programme - is wearing a smart suit and blouse and is entirely at home in the surroundings of the Loughborough High Performance Centre.

From our position on the top floor balcony, we can see athletes going through their paces on the indoor track below, the claps and endorsements of their coaches echoing up into the arena. As a former sprinter who earned European and Commonwealth Games medals, Dunn – who has worked for the last three years under Eriksson with responsibility for bringing new talent through – knows all about the demands and requirements of elite performers.

On the staircase behind Dunn, a series of posters offer advice to up-and-coming athletes. "Get that 'niggle' checked or your dreams could be wrecked" reads one. Another reminds youngsters of the need to check thoroughly any nutritional supplements they are about to use, adding, "Don't ruin your fairytale ending".


Dunn, meanwhile, is reflecting upon her own experience of a fairytale ending - a tale which she helped create herself - when she watched Jonnie Peacock win Paralympic gold at London 2012 in the T44/43 100 metres final in an Olympic Stadium full of spectators chanting "Pea-cock, Pea-cock" and watched by a peak television audience of 6.7 million viewers.

"In 2009 when I first started, Jonnie was the person I saw when I first started the job. He was the first person I met on my first day in work. Absolutely true. His mother had been in contact, and I was told that we had a new sprinter down in Cambridge. So I travelled down to see this young schoolboy who hadn't had any coaching and he was a bit lost.

"So we got him involved in the sport and fixed him up with a coach in Cambridge and he raced at Crystal Palace later that year. And after that he just went from strength to strength. So we get along very well, Jonnie and me.

"When I first met him I thought he had character. To put yourself forward and to say 'I want to do this' shows great strength of character, so I liked that. And when I saw him move, you could see he was good. He had just naturally quick legs. It was just a case of putting him into a good environment and watching him progress.

"We kept in really close contact all the time. He went to the World Championships in 2011 and did really well. He came sixth in the final. He then made a transition to Lee Valley being coached by Dan Pfaff.

"So when I saw Jonnie in that Olympic Stadium and all those people started shouting his name. And he just managed himself. And we heard that 6.7 million people had been watching. It was pretty phenomenal to think that three years earlier he wasn't doing anything and in 2012 there he is, competing – and winning a gold. It was absolutely amazing.

"The success of our Paralympic athletes in London will probably turn out to be our biggest legacy. People will have seen the athletes on TV and started to think that maybe they could do the same thing."


By way of indication, the forthcoming British Paralympic Association's (BPA) sporting festival (December 2 and 3) has already attracted more than 800 potential athletes across all sports to sign up.

In her new role, she is determined to ensure that the Great Leap Forward represented by the 2012 Paralympics - where Britain's Paralympic track and field athletes, who had managed only two golds at the Beijing 2008 Paralympics, finished third in the medals table with 11 golds and a total of 29 medals - is followed by Another Giant Stride.

"Obviously London 2012 was really good," she says. "But that was only three years into our programme, and effectively only two years in because it took us a time to establish things. So I think our biggest success in terms of recruitment came after we finished second in the table at the World Championships in 2011.

"I still think there's lots of talent out there that we haven't unearthed. I think that's one of our key messages. As you know, in Paralympic sport you can find someone who in 12 months could be a potential medallist.

"We have got a better system of contacts for athletes coming through now with minimal disabilities, and in the last six months we have picked up two very exciting talents. We have also forged strong links with the Help for Heroes scheme to identify potential future athletes.

"And the majority of our team is young, and so a lot of them should still be around in 2016. So it's still very exciting and I think we can exceed what we did in 2012, although it's not going to be easy. But I'm up for the challenge and the team I work with are up for the challenge, and I've no doubt the coaches and athletes involved will want to be doing that as well."


Dunn has changed very little from the time when I interviewed her - for The Guardian - around the time that she competed at the Seoul 1988 Olympics, where she competed in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay. She still has one of the most radiant faces you will ever see.

At 47, she has spent 11 years working within the UK Athletics Performance team, the last three of which as performance transition director for the Paralympics programme.

"Peter and I gelled from start," she says. "We believed that a no-compromise attitude created the right environment for success. We created that environment for the athletes. He really mentored me. I already knew athletics, but he showed me the intricacies of Paralympic athletics, and he is the one who has motivated me to think big.

"It was mostly about learning the rules, and about the IPC and the different classes of competition. But essentially track and field is track and field, and Paralympic athletes have all the same concerns and issues as athletes within the mainstream. There's absolutely no difference. There was no clear pathway for athletes established when Peter and I started so we created that."

Recruiting new talent, through the UK Athletics Parallel Success programme and funded by Aviva, began to draw new athletes into the sport.

"Since 2009 we have brought 456 new athletes into the sport," Dunn says, adding that this role is now to be played by former Commonwealth 400m hurdler Katie Jones.

"It was difficult to start with. When we did our first talent day in 2009 we could only get 22 potential athletes, and that was after going through all the different disability groups. So it was a bit shallow. We had to start from scratch."

Britain's Paralympic athletes, and Paula Dunn, have come a long way in a short time.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the past five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames.