A PhD student at Newnham College was a member of the Great Britain women’s goalball team who were crowned the 2016 IBSA European B Women’s Champions on Saturday. Sarah Leiter, who is currently affiliated with the Department of Clinical Biochemistry, helped Great Britain prevail undefeated over other teams, including France, Portugal, Spain and Germany, clinching both the title and a promotion to the IBSA European A League.

Held in Maia, Portugal, the European Championships Group B 2016 brought together some of the best men’s and women’s goalball teams from across the continent for a 60-game tournament over the course of five days.

Great Britain, who were drawn alongside France, Greece, Hungary and Portugal in Pool X, kicked off their tournament with a game against the French, where Leiter and her teammates put in a dominant display: the win never looked in doubt as they recorded a thumping 13-3 win. Later that evening, in a tighter game against a tough Greek outfit, Great Britain won 6-4, putting themselves in a promising position to reach the quarter-finals.

This was a rich vein of form that Leiter and her fellow Brits managed to maintain throughout the tournament, and over the next three matches – against Hungary and Portugal in the groups, and Spain in the quarter-finals – they continued to remain clinical and destructive, winning all three games 10-0. Kali Holder added the icing to the cake by grabbing her first international goal against the Hungarians.

And the British women were not to be halted: an 11-1 rout over their Dutch rivals in the semi-final saw the team guaranteed promotion and a final match against the Germans, whom Leiter and her teammates overcame in a much closer match by four goals to one.

It was a tournament of great success across the board for British goalball. Just one year after their promotion to the European B League, the Great Britain men’s goalball team also secured promotion to the European A League, finishing in second place in their competition.

Indeed, the men’s team – which included two of Leiter’s teammates from local Cambridge side, the Cambridge Dons – lost to Ukraine 14-6 in a hotly-contested final, despite having scored the opening goal within the game’s first minute.

Goalball is currently the only Paralympic team sport for women and was originally developed to help with the rehabilitation of soldiers after the Second World War. It is played by athletes with visual impairments, such as Leiter, who suffers from albinism, though all players on the court are blindfolded to maximise fairness.

It is played by two teams of three using a ball with bells inside. The ball is the size of a basketball but twice the weight and the aim is to roll or throw the ball into the opponents’ goal as many times as possible within two halves of 12 minutes.

While the sport’s popularity was bolstered by Team GB’s performance at London 2012, it has subsequently faced funding problems. Indeed, last week's victory was something to be savoured for Great Britain, who failed to send a team to Rio after both the men's and women's sides failed to qualify for the 2014 European Championships and the 2015 World Championships in South Korea.

In fact, as Cambridge News reported in 2015, Leiter and her teammates faced difficulties just getting to Seoul to play in the tournament. After UK Sport cut goalball’s funding, a number of the teammates resorted to fundraising activities – including an appearance on the BBC2 quiz show Eggheads, which Leiter described as a “really fun day” in an interview on Newnham College’s website – to raise the £20,000 they needed.

Remarkably, Leiter – whose research focuses on rare syndromes of infantile hypoglycaemia, for which she is attempting to identify and validate genetic mutations which may cause these afflictions – only began playing the sport four years ago with the Cambridge Dons.

In the past, Leiter has spoken to Varsity about her experiences with goalball, describing how “joining the GB squad was not part of my plan – it just happened” as she went through a metronomic rise from competing at novice level competitions with the Cambridge Dons Goalball Club, to attending her first international competition in Poland with the Great Britain development team, all in under a year.