Bo Kramer is a world, European and Paralympic wheelchair basketball champion who is determined to help Loughborough Lightning maintain their status as the team that has never been beaten.<\/span><\/p>\n The 24-year-old Netherlands international can also mathematically model an epidemic outbreak.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sitting an exam to prove it meant she missed the start of Loughborough’s Women’s Premier League title defence.<\/span><\/p>\n The victory against Worcester Wolves kept their immaculate record intact, having won every game on the way to collecting the crown in the competition’s inaugural season.<\/span><\/p>\n Kramer is their high-profile international recruit for 2023 and is set to feature for the first time against East London Phoenix in the capital on Sunday.<\/span><\/p>\n Delaying her Lightning debut to work on her masters in biomedical science is all part of what it means to have big ambitions on and off court.<\/span><\/p>\n “It’s not hard for me to stay motivated,” Kramer told BBC Sport. “I have to balance this dream of becoming a cancer researcher and being the best wheelchair basketball player in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n “They are two things that don’t really work together. They both take up a lot of time.<\/span><\/p>\n “When I’m in Loughborough, it’s really clear what I have to do there and when I’m here in the Netherlands, it’s clear what I have to do here. That’s what I’ve needed.<\/span><\/p>\n “I just believe that if you have a dream you can achieve it. If you are your own hero, nothing holds you back to reach those dreams.”<\/span><\/p>\n Kramer sees her move to the world’s only professional women’s wheelchair basketball league as a way to realise her ambition to be the best player in the world by the Paris Paralympics in 2024.<\/span><\/p>\n She has spent much of her club career playing in Germany, where men and women play in the same team.<\/span><\/p>\n Kramer was part of the Essen side that won promotion to the top flight last season, but with a desire to be a starting guard she decided a move to England was best in the lead up to the World Championships later this year.<\/span><\/p>\n “I can play basketball, what I had to learn is how to lead a team and in Loughborough I get a chance to lead one,” she said.<\/span><\/p>\n Kramer was 14 when she took up wheelchair basketball.<\/span><\/p>\n It was three years after bone cancer was found in her right leg.<\/span><\/p>\n Nine operations – the complete removal of her tibia from her right leg, its replacement with the fibula from her left leg, as well and metal rods and screws – rid Kramer of the cancer but left her in pain when trying to play sport.<\/span><\/p>\n She could walk, but the discomfort of running and jumping meant chasing her dream as a footballer was gone.<\/span><\/p>\n “The fact that I wasn’t allowed to play football any more was, I think, the hardest thing of getting the cancer,” Kramer said.<\/span><\/p>\n “I knew it wasn’t deadly, I knew I would probably get better.<\/span><\/p>\n “Every opportunity that I got, I took with both hands to get better and be stronger. But then I learned I wasn’t allowed to play football any more, and that was tough.”<\/span><\/p>\n Until she attended a Paralympic talent day, she had never sat in a wheelchair before.<\/span><\/p>\n But when she did, she says “it was love at first sight”.<\/span><\/p>\n “It was the first time I experienced playing sport again without pain in my legs,” Kramer added.<\/span><\/p>\n “So in one minute my joy of playing sport was back and I think that was really beautiful.<\/span><\/p>\n “This dream of being a football player was switching over to going to the Paralympic Games and the fact I created this new dream gave me this new goal to train for every day, and to show the world that nothing can stop me.”<\/span><\/p>\n While Kramer “had to learn to drive” her wheelchair after taking up the sport, she quickly progressed and earned national recognition.<\/span><\/p>\n Within five years she had helped the Netherlands to a world title in 2018, with the first of her two European crowns coming a year later.<\/span><\/p>\n At the delayed Paralympic Games in Tokyo in 2021, she completed the set of major international honours with a gold medal in Japan.<\/span><\/p>\n Her early years in the sport saw her benefit from the help of one of the country’s most famous footballers, in Johan Cruyff.<\/span><\/p>\n The legendary forward and manager’s foundation has helped children with disabilities access sport worldwide.<\/span><\/p>\n Kramer, like Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, is now an ambassador for the foundation and continues to see Cruyff – <\/span>who died in 2016<\/span><\/a> – as someone she looks up to.<\/span><\/p>\n “He was a great football player, but also a person that really did a lot for the community and society,” she said.<\/span><\/p>\n “I want to do both as well. That’s why I want to go into cancer research.”<\/span><\/p>\n Kramer, who has already done a degree in physiotherapy, wants to focus her career off the court on childhood illnesses.<\/span><\/p>\n She sees it as going full circle.<\/span><\/p>\n “Being an athlete is really cool, but it’s all about me and I do it because I love it,” Kramer said. “It’s my dream and my goal.<\/span><\/p>\n “I also love helping other people.<\/span><\/p>\n “I’m really aware that I was really lucky as a child that they found out early that I had cancer.<\/span><\/p>\n “There are a lot of children and a lot of people with cancers that are not curable yet. If I can be even 1% part of a process that helps find a medicine, or I can help in research, I just think that is my life goal.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Bo](\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/onesport\/cps\/624\/cpsprodpb\/1492\/production\/_128466250_gettyimages-1338264163.jpg\")
<\/span><\/span>‘My dream was to be a footballer’<\/h3>\n
![\"Bo](\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/onesport\/cps\/624\/cpsprodpb\/62B2\/production\/_128466252_gettyimages-1338022096.jpg\")
<\/span><\/span>![\"Bo](\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/onesport\/cps\/624\/cpsprodpb\/8552\/production\/_128503143_2023-01-13wheelchairbasketball-petersimmons-86.jpg\")
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