Atkinson was identified as autistic and with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) aged 10, and six years later it was confirmed he had cerebral palsy.

“I’m more than just a label,” he insisted. “I am my own person and even with them you can achieve anything you want.”

He describes his experience of being neurodivergent as both a blessing and a curse.

“It’s a blessing because you can get super focus and special interests, so one special interest for a few months could be aerodynamics or numbers or sprinting,” Atkinson explained.

“You obsessively focus on that specific thing until you have perfected it.”

Atkinson found school challenging and said he was bullied for playing Para-football, clips of which surfaced on social media at the time.

“You do get those certain few who take it to the extreme,” he said.

“They will have something against you completely because you’re autistic or different and, for whatever reason, they don’t like that.”

PE lessons were also particularly problematic.

He was not picked for teams initially because it was perceived that his autism would stop him from being any good.

Atkinson said: “After a few years they worked out ‘oh, he has some talent’ so then they would pick you on their team. It’s not very nice.”

Despite the difficulties, Atkinson stuck to his love of sport, eventually finding Para-cycling.

“I think a lot of neurodiverse kids struggle with sports,” he said.

“I think if schools were to focus on supporting those kids with additional needs to help them do sport, it would massively improve them.”

Atkinson is clear that being neurodivergent can help in making it to elite sport, specifying a “special ability to super focus or hyper fixate”.

And it was also physical activity that taught him how to manage difficult times.

“Sport was there as my sort of freedom, my outlet,” he said.

“If I had a bad day at school, I’d go play football or run around in the garden or ride my bike and that made me happy and feel free.”