Stori Alys tonight follows the story of a nine-year-old dancer from Ammanford who lost her leg in an accident – but achieved her dream of competing on the Urdd Eisteddfod stage less than a year later.
As a small child, Alys followed her big sister and her mother into the world of creative dancing, and fell in love with dancing, competing every chance she got. But everything changed one Sunday afternoon in June 2022, when Alys was seriously injured in an accident in the garden.
After receiving emergency treatment at Morriston Hospital, her parents had to explain to their daughter that she would lose her leg below the knee. “It wasn’t an easy thing to say,” said her father, Dylan Davies. “It’s a day I’ll never forget.”
But Alys’ courage and determination didn’t fade. Her mother, Nia Davies said: “If the physios came in the morning and set her a few challenges, well by the middle of the day she’d say ‘Mami, you need to tell them to come back because I can do that now’.”
Two weeks after the accident Alys was back at school, and less than two months later she was walking with the help of a prosthetic leg. “She turned a corner when she was given that leg. When she got home, she went straight to the park – after seeing that, I knew there wouldn’t be a problem” said her mother.
Alys was determined not only to dance again, but to compete with others from the Penrhyd Area in the 2023 Urdd Eisteddfod in Carmarthenshire. In February 2023, she started the process of being fitted with a specialist sports blade on which to dance, and her journey to the stage – and to victory – started.
“I’m not going to let my leg stop me from doing what I love” she said. “I love dancing because it makes me feel that I’m free.”
DRYCH: Stori Alys is broadcast as part of Disability History Month on S4C tonight at 8 pm
