Tanni-Grey Thompson: Paralympic legend faced online backlash after having to ‘crawl’ off train

Former British Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson has said she received abuse after complaining about being forced to “crawl off” a train after arriving at London’s King’s Cross on Monday night. 

The 11-time wheelchair racing gold medallist missed her train and arrived at the station from Leeds just after 10pm, starting her journey to Paris for the Paralympic Games, which begin in the French capital on Wednesday.

After waiting for about 16 minutes for help with leaving the train, she said she “decided to crawl off”.

In a series of posts on social media platform X, she complained about the lack of assistance, saying: “@LNER [London North Eastern Railway] who do I need to call to get off this train!!! It got to KGX 10 mins ago!!!!!”

Baroness Thompson told Sky News on Wednesday the “backlash” she has received since included emails saying “‘how dare I be out on a bank holiday; I should be at home. I shouldn’t dare to travel without anyone else. And how dare I miss a train’ so it’s interesting to see some of the attitudes towards disabled people that are still out there.”

On Tuesday she responded on X, saying: “To the ableist people who have said I should stay at home, not work, not expect to travel on a bank holiday, not travel on my own…. Ummm not happening.”

Along with the abuse, she said she has received plenty of support, as “lots of people have emailed me to say they’ve had problems across the whole train network”.

She added: “The complaints they’re making are not being responded to. They’re being fobbed off. LNER are normally a lot better than this. I think that’s why it’s been shocking for a lot of people. But there is a problem with the whole network.”

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The experience left her angry, she said, adding: “I’ve been put on a train. So, in my mind, there’s a contract between me and the system that somebody knew that I was on a train.

“The booking system… every train company has a different way of doing it. There’s a passenger booking app which is just bolted on the front of a system that doesn’t work terribly well, and we have a legal right to turn up and go.

“We don’t have to book assistance. I can just turn up at the train station. I don’t have any right to be on a train that’s leaving in the next two minutes. But I do have a right to not book. Every disabled person does.

“I sometimes think it’s much harder when you haven’t booked, when you have to turn up at a train station and, depending on which company and which station, you almost have to beg to get on a train. ‘I haven’t booked; please, can I get on the train?’ That’s more humiliating than what I went through.

“But I’m lucky I can still get off the train. There are thousands of disabled people who can’t do that and would have been stuck.

“I was thinking about pulling the emergency cord. I couldn’t actually reach it. And that would have delayed the train going north. So, there’s all these things going through your head.”

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The chief executive of LNER has personally apologised to her, she said, and by the time she arrived at Eurostar, “they might have seen some of the media coverage and couldn’t do enough for me”.

She added: “But the public transport system, you know, just isn’t working for lots of people. And certainly, the train network isn’t working for disabled people.”

LNER managing director David Horne said “something has clearly gone wrong” and added the company will investigate how the Paralympic legend was treated.

An LNER spokesperson said: “We are sorry to understand there has been an issue at London King’s Cross station on Monday evening.

“We are in the process of investigating this and are in contact with the customer directly.”