BROADCASTER and former Paralympian Kate Grey has spoken of her “amazing days of action” while covering the Winter Paralympics in Pyeongchang.

Kate, who lives in Almondsbury with fiancée Chris, was the BBC’s sole reporter out in South Korea for the games – Britain’s most successful ever with one gold, four silvers and two bronze medals.

Despite losing her arm in a tragic accident at the age of two, Kate has excelled in sport all her life, first as a student at the Castle School, and later representing Great Britain as a swimmer in the 2008 Beijing Paralympics, coming an incredible fifth in the SB9 100m breaststroke.

She discovered her knack for broadcasting after picking up a commentary microphone during London 2012, going on to cover the Rio Paralympics four years later.

But Kate, who is self-employed and on a contract with the BBC, said being in a small team of three with a lot of responsibility was a daunting task.

“I was really, really nervous before I went out there,” she said. “It was my first independent gig out there, I knew that it was only me that was going to be reporting back so if I mucked up there was no backup plan.

“But getting to go out there was a dream. It’s not a bad job is it?

“As you can imagine I love Paralympic sport and being involved in winter sports was my first experience of sport itself so I did my research and got on the plane and went.”

On her arrival it started snowing, to everyone’s surprise. Almost all the snow in the Winter Olympics had been fake, so for fresh powder to fall right before the games was in her eyes “a good omen”.

“I had done a lot of work with the athletes prior to the games,” she said, “flying out to Norway and Switzerland and filmed with different teams, and I felt like I had got to know them, so heading to South Korea, I hoped that we would be winning lots of medals and there would be a lot of great stories to tell.”

She said that, when it comes to broadcasting and covering stories, medals are all important, so getting to share special moment with the athletes as the successes rolled in was remarkable, culminating in underdog Menna Fitzpatrick claiming gold.

“I got a little bit tearful as I always do when I get so emotionally involved,” Kate joked, making reference to bursting into tears while commentating as friend and former teammate Ellie Simmonds won gold in London 2012.

“I cry all the time, it’s a nightmare, I think I get it from my mum. But it is great to see people overcome those challenges and bounce back, especially when some might assume they had been written off.

“These athletes had overcome all sorts of things to get to that point and because it is, for some, the pinnacle of their careers it’s a big responsibility to tell those stories.”

But it was not all fun at the games, and not just because of the brisk -10 degree temperatures.

Being the only British face in front of a camera, Kate was working to a British news timeline despite the nine-hour time difference, meaning bedtime at 2am after a night of editing, which she said “made juggling the jet-lag, working out what day and time it was, and sometimes even knowing your own name, quite challenging”.

“It was also a big ask to get everywhere. You want to cover everything, but as the games were so spread out it was really hard to do it justice.

“What I love about the Paralympics was that the athletes were happy to come to us and were so willing to share their stories. That made it a lot easier.”

With people in Thornbury knowing Kate was a local, her coverage became a talking point among many in the town, something she said she gets embarrassed about.

“When I am there standing on a box, looking into a camera, I think it is just me and the person talking to me in my ear from the BBC Breakfast studio, and suddenly you get lots of messages from everyone who was watching back home.

“It was quite lovely actually. Having the local support and the amount of people who were talking to my family or sending messages helped me feel that little more connected to home, especially when I was so far away.”