Bowls: Blind ambition and a helping hand able to overcome obstacles

"Two-and-a-half feet at five o'clock." It may have sounded like a message relayed from air traffic control at nearby Manchester Airport but, bellowed across the Heaton Park bowling green by a marker, it conveyed the news to Ruth Small that she was flying high towards victory.

Small is big news in bowls. She is also 70 and blind, one of the 150 physically handicapped competitors playing alongside and, in the case of a one-legged South African swimmer, Natalie Du Toit, against able-bodied athletes in five sports at the Commonwealth Games.

On an adjacent rink, 57-year-old Richard Coates was skippering England's triples to a tense draw against Malaysia. He bowled with championship technique and precision. Yet he has no hands. While Coates, from Stroud, uses a custom-built "claw'' to grip the wood, Small relies on information from the marker to inform her how close she is to the jack and the whispered advice of her coach and husband on the length and direction she should take for the next shot.

Small, although totally blind for 10 years, has, under the regulations, to play in dark goggles. "They make me feel like a downhill skier,'' she giggles. She is perky and vivacious and a good bet for a gold medal if she keeps up the form which saw her rout her similarly afflicted Malaysian opponent 15-1 in the first round.

A former teacher from Tonbridge, Kent, she is Britain's national blind bowls champion, indoors and out. She used to be "an all-round sporty type'' even though her sight was going because of a degenerative disease of the retina. She played netball, cricket and tennis, "but I had to give up when the balls started to come rather fast''. When she finally went blind she took up bowls, playing competitively for the last six years and now regularly beating her fully sighted husband Jack, 71.

"It is a matter of visualisation,'' she says. "To be disabled and have a gift for sport is wonderful because it balances things out.'' Like all the other EADs here (it stands for "élite athletes with a disability") she seems serene and self-effacing. And happy to be accepted as an equal by her team-mates. "You sometimes can detect a slight wariness or unease in the voices of people you speak to because of your disability. Not here, not any more. You feel really comfortable,'' she says.

Coates, a widower, agrees. The triples rink on which he played included two amputees, one man on crutches and another who dragged himself along on stumps. On the next rink they were playing from wheelchairs. Coates lost both his hands at 23 in an industrial accident when working in Canada. He began his rehabilitation back home by playing skittles, and when he moved to bowls a welder friend helped make a bowling "hand'' out of a few bits of metal.

Fitted to his left arm, it works with two elasticised "jaws'' which grip and release the wood. A keen golfer who used to play off 11, he now concentrates on bowls and has skippered an otherwise able-bodied team in the EBA championships.

Should Small and Coates win medals here they will count towards the overall team tally. "It is a brilliant feeling to be part of an entire England team, and accepted as such,'' says Coates.

Mike Todd, the disability adviser to the Games, says: "We are doing it [including disabled sports] because it's the right thing, and we've done it all for the price of Rio Ferdinand's big toe.'' It is something of an experiment, but if successful the events, which include competitors from 30 nations, could be expanded at the next Commonwealth Games.

So when Tanni Grey-Thompson led the Welsh team into the arena on Thursday in her wheelchair she was not only carrying the flag for her country. She was flagging up the fact that sport is finally ready to accommodate the disabled.