Dame Sarah Storey is Britain’s most embellished Paralympian – now lighting up our screens on Strictly. But in a startling confession she reveals that vile bullies drove her to the brink of anorexia

For a woman who has dedicated the last three decades to being at the very top of her game, Dame Sarah Storey is remarkably enthusiastic about the prospect of being – as she puts it – ‘absolutely terrible’ at something.

In fact, after a sporting career which saw her become Britain’s most successful Paralympian, the 48-year-old seems to be positively relishing the idea of becoming a novice again.

Which is just as well because, as millions of viewers discovered when the new series of Strictly Come Dancing launched last Saturday, Sarah has swapped the reassuring certainties of elite sport for sequins, fake tan and the frightening prospect of being judged on something rather less quantifiable than speed and power.

‘In sport you’re the fastest, or first across the finish line, but now a panel of judges will tell me if I’m any good, and that’s much more subjective. I have never experienced that,’ says Sarah, winner of 30 Paralympic medals in swimming and cycling, including an astonishing 19 golds.

There is, however, one thing she emphatically won’t be doing – and that’s worrying about how she will dance with only one fully formed hand, having been born without a functioning left hand after her arm became entangled in the umbilical cord.

In fact, she’s baffled by the suggestion: ‘It’s something I literally never think about.’

If anything, her left arm – which is also shorter than her right arm – has so far been a source of amusement during rehearsals with her professional partner, Australian Julian Caillon. ‘We’re doing one routine with all this frantic twirling and I’m like, “Well, you’ve got it even harder because you’ve got to find my arm as well.” It’ll probably be just a form of hilarity most of the time.’

It is a revealingly matter-of-fact attitude from a woman whose life has been shaped not so much by overcoming physical limitations as by refusing to consider herself limited in the first place.

‘I don’t see it as a problem,’ she says. ‘I’ve never known any difference, so I’ve never really considered how I navigate the world.’

Nor did her family. When Sarah was born in Manchester in 1977, her grandmother worked for what is now the disability charity Scope and was familiar with children and adults with far more profound disabilities.

‘She just sort of shrugged and went, “Yeah, yeah, she’ll be fine,” to Mum and Dad. And so it was never a thing and we just cracked on,’ she says.

Crack on she certainly did. Growing up in an outdoorsy family helped: she recalls learning how to ‘throw and catch’ from the moment she was able to stand up, and joined the cub scouts as an infant. Then, already the fastest swimmer in her primary school by the age of nine, Sarah joined a swimming club aged ten.

Just four years later, she won two swimming golds at the Barcelona Paralympics in 1992, making her Britain’s youngest double Paralympic gold medallist until swimmer Ellie Simmonds – who has also been on Strictly – surpassed her years later.

Yet sporting success did not make her teenage years easy. Bullied at school, she became a target not because of her left hand but her sporting achievements.

‘Looking back it was jealousy,’ she says. ‘I was going to awards ceremonies with people who were very important, and it was just a world too far away from the classroom.’

She pinpoints one well-intentioned gesture by her school as the moment things deteriorated. An area of grass usually forbidden to pupils was opened for her to show off her medals after Barcelona, with a picnic thrown in.

‘The school were trying to make me feel special,’ she says.

‘But in reality it made the other children think, “Who does she think she is?”’

Swimming training made it even harder to fit in. Weekend sessions meant she often missed out on social plans, while early mornings in the pool often left her arriving at school with wet hair and no make-up – enough, in her memorable phrase, to make her ‘a walking conversation stopper’.

‘I realised something was going on when I’d walk into a classroom and there’d only be one desk left at the front between two boys, or I’d walk in and everyone would stop talking,’ she reflects. ‘Then I’d be in the toilet cubicle, they’d not realise I was in there, and they’d be talking about me. It just became harder and harder to integrate into the group knowing what they were saying behind my back. It was pretty vile.’

The fact that boys in her class admired her achievements merely gave the girls another weapon. ‘It was, “Oh, look at her, just hanging out with the boys.”’

While she had friendships in the sporting world, the bullying had a profound impact, prompting a period of what Sarah is careful to describe as ‘disordered eating’.

‘It came off the back of just having no control over that social environment, and the only thing I could control was food intake,’ she says.

There was also the secret thrill of deceiving those around her. ‘The secretiveness, pretending I was eating when I wasn’t, and feeling empowered by the fact that I could pull the wool over people’s eyes… there’s no real logic there, except if you’ve had disordered eating or an eating disorder, you will understand that logic.’

Because her weight loss happened gradually, even her parents had failed to appreciate how thin she had become. It was only at the junior nationals in February 1992, when Sarah was 15, that somebody asked her father if she had been ill over Christmas because she looked so gaunt.

‘He looked at me and thought, “Oh gosh, she does,”’ she recalls. Her parents took her to a doctor whose decidedly no-nonsense approach Sarah credits with pulling her back from the brink.

‘The GP basically laid it out for me dead straight. She said, “Sarah, how are you expecting yourself to win any more gold medals if you’re going to behave like this with your food?”’

If Sarah did not change, the doctor warned, she would have to diagnose her with anorexia, bringing with it a cycle of medical appointments that would interfere with training.

For the teenage Sarah, it was the most effective threat imaginable. ‘I remember thinking, “Well, that sounds like hell.” My mindset was such that anything that was going to stop me training was clearly to be avoided. And I’ll be forever grateful for that direction.’

Within six or seven months Sarah was physically well again, although she admits: ‘I remember having to have words with myself on a regular basis because it was easy to fall back into that way of thinking –being dominated by the scales, being dominated by things that meant you compared yourself and how you looked as an athlete.’

Nonetheless, despite those early difficulties, Dame Sarah (she was made a Dame in 2012 after the London Olympics, in which she won four gold medals) went from strength to strength, even after switching from swimming to cycling in 2005 when a persistent ear infection made it difficult to train in the pool.

She went on to win 16 more Paralympic golds, including, aged 46, in the women’s road event at the Paris Paralympics in 2024 –her ninth successive Games.

It is an extraordinary tally. Ask what she is proudest of, however, and it is not a particular medal or race: ‘I think it’s the ability to keep reinventing myself,’ she says. ‘It’s that theme of reinvention and not being afraid to be the worst person in the room or to start again.

‘It’s one reason I jumped at the chance to do Strictly. I’m back to something that I’m a complete novice at. I’ve done that a number of times, and I think it’s really healthy.’

She also, for the first time in decades, has the time: Sarah announced her retirement in July, meaning she will not compete at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

Strictly producers had actually first approached her after the London 2012 Games, but the arrival of her daughter Louisa in June 2013 – she also has a son, Charlie, nine, with her cyclist turned coach husband Barney – meant ‘there was no way I could juggle that and a small child’.

The demands of the autumn sporting calendar also made committing to the show impossible for years. ‘So this year was really genuinely the first year I could do it,’ she says.

After winning two golds in Paris two years ago – competing against cyclists more than half her age – some thought she might have another Games left in her. But it was not to be.

‘I achieved beyond my wildest dreams in Paris, and I’m very aware that I’m going to be 50 next year – not that age would hold me back, but it’s kind of a milestone,’ she says. Not least because the years leading up to it had brought an unfamiliar realisation: for the first time, the body whose capabilities she understood with almost scientific precision was beginning to behave in ways she couldn’t predict.

She believes she was around 43 or 44 when she first noticed her menstrual cycle changing. By 46, she was experiencing debilitating exhaustion and headaches caused by perimenopause.

For an athlete who had never previously noticed any effect from her monthly cycle, it was bewildering. ‘It was never even a consideration. It was there, it came and went, and I carried on. So this was new.’

She recalls waking on the morning of one race event in recent years feeling ‘really ill’, with throbbing headache and what felt like debilitating fatigue.

‘My husband said to me, “You can’t even travel, Sarah, don’t even think about it.” The race was nearly 200 miles away and we were due to ride part of the way there, then he’d pick me up. I took paracetamol and I started to feel a bit better, so I said I would ride part of the way rather than the 70 miles I’d planned.

‘Then we got to the race that night, and I did the biggest personal best of the previous four years. It was surreal.’

Another incident left her more shaken. For years Sarah had drunk beetroot juice, high in nitrates, to help maximise performance. But nitrates also dilate the blood vessels and can lower blood pressure, something which can already occur in perimenopause. Travelling alone to a race in her motorhome, as she routinely did while her children were at school, Sarah took her usual dose before a time trial.

‘I nearly passed out by myself in the pitch-black campsite that I was staying at,’ she recalls. ‘There was nobody else staying at the campsite because it was a tiny, really rural one, and it frightened me a little bit because I thought, “You know what, if I had passed out, what would have happened?”’

The following day she raced again without the beetroot juice. The reaction disappeared.

Her experiences prompted Sarah to work with Kirsty Elliott-Sale, a professor of endocrinology at Manchester Metropolitan University, to find ways of managing her symptoms without suppressing her cycle. ‘Some people promote phase-based training or manipulating your menstrual cycle with synthetic hormones and that’s not always the right thing to do, so we wanted to find other less invasive interventions – simple paracetamol to manage pain for example, or supplementation – so that you could continue to train as normal.’

Today, she uses a combination of supplements including collagen and magnesium.

For Sarah, of course, high performance may no longer mean crossing a finish line first – unless you count lifting that Strictly glitterball this year. In her favour is stamina and core fitness; against her, she says, is ‘zero dance experience’ other than what she calls being a ‘dance mum’.

By that she means her son Charlie, nine, who has taken up ice dancing and recently completed his gold skating level, and daughter Louisa, 13, an accomplished ballerina who has performed with English Youth Ballet. It is a world historically associated with anxiety around weight and body shape, yet Sarah says that despite her own experiences as a teenager she does not worry unduly. Last year, on a family holiday in the US, Louisa, then 12, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes – the same condition Barney has had since he was four.

Counterintuitively, Sarah believes the diagnosis may offer some protection from unhealthy attitudes towards food.

‘In some ways I think the diabetes is going to be a protective measure because she’s now got a continuous glucose monitor, which links to my phone and my husband’s phone. And she’s got a different reason to do food properly,’ she says.

When she can, Sarah acts as a chaperone for the troupe. She was backstage with the ballet when, earlier this year, her participation in Strictly was made public. ‘The older girls started seeing it on Instagram, and they’re looking at Louisa and saying “I think this is related to you”. It was lovely.’

Her children are thrilled – her daughter’s reaction to news her mum was doing ‘Strictly’ was just one word, ‘finally’ while Charlie has deemed it ‘a good plan’.

She confides that watching her daughter and her peers dance has given her pause. ‘They’re so dainty and effortless, and that’s not really two words you can use about me,’ she says. ‘I do have this fear that I won’t be able to pick up the moves.’ Not that it’s stopping her, of course.

‘It’s healthy to try new things, to start new chapters,’ she says. ‘Depending on who you are and what you’re doing in your job and who your family are and where you live, there are similar new chapters for everyone – albeit not with millions of people watching on national telly.’

She pauses: ‘You should never assume that because so many years have passed already there aren’t enough years ahead to try something new. And the fact that in this case it comes with lots of glitter is so much the better.’