Isabel Newstead

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Is Isabel Newstead (née Barr) was a British Paralympic athlete who competed in seven Paralympic Games from 1980 to 2004. She was born in Glasgow on May 3, 1955. At 19, a flu virus damaged her spinal cord, causing tetraplegia. While recovering, she took up swimming with the Port Glasgow Otters and later moved to Harlow, Essex to work as a systems analyst.

Across three sports—swimming, shooting and athletics—Newstead won 10 golds, 4 silvers and 4 bronzes. Her Paralympic career began in 1980 in Arnhem, where she won three golds in swimming. In 1984 at Stoke Mandeville she earned three swimming golds and a silver, plus a gold in air pistol shooting and silvers in shot put and discus. She skipped swimming at the 1988 Seoul Games for health reasons but won a silver in shot put and bronzes in air pistol and javelin.

She married John Newstead after Seoul. She competed again in 1992 (Barcelona) and 1996 (Atlanta); at Atlanta, the day before the opening ceremony she fell from her wheelchair, had hip surgery, but still took part in her events. In 2000, she won gold in the air pistol SH1 category in Sydney and defended the title with a world-record score in Athens in 2004.

Newstead was honoured for services to disabled sport with an MBE in 2001. She died of cancer in January 2007, aged 51, while still training to defend her shooting title in Beijing and learning Mandarin. She was inducted into the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame in 2008 and into the Scottish Women in Sport Hall of Fame in 2018.