(Paris) Moving from blind football to triathlon, from swimming to cycling or from the Winter Games to the Summer Games: radically changing discipline is not an isolated phenomenon among the athletes participating in the Paris Paralympic Games until September 8, and can even lead to gold.
From the ski slopes to the velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines: the trajectory of Canadian Mel Pemble may surprise, even if the two disciplines share speed and the search for the perfect aerodynamic position. For the 24-year-old athlete, who suffers from cerebral palsy affecting her right side, the decision to change sports was made without regret. She had been spotted by the cycling federation when she was 14.
“As a skier, I was never ranked very highly. At 17, I was a very different athlete. Just being at the PyeongChang Games [en 2018, dans cinq épreuves différentes, NDLR] “It was a dream. Here I am fighting for a medal,” she told AFP.
Mel Pemble’s quest, however, failed by less than three tenths: despite breaking the world record in qualifying, she finished fourth in the C1-C3 500 metres.
Briton Jody Cundy, 45, a Paralympic medallist since 1996 in swimming and then track cycling, also explained his change of direction to the English newspaper. The Guardian because he had “never been a gifted swimmer.” His compatriot Sarah Storey, who won an 18 on Wednesdaye Paralympic title, followed the same path.
Detect
For federations, the challenge of detection is essential given the obstacles that exist for people with disabilities to play sport, and even more so at the highest level. Attracting high-performing people in the disability categories defined at the international level is not easy.
The French para-sport federation, for example, is planning to capitalise on the swimming performances of brothers Alex and Kylian Portal to form a relay team in the visually impaired categories. But it still needs to find two swimmers “in the right category and with the necessary level”, stressed Guillaume Domingo, the performance director of the French para-swimming team, after the brothers’ joint podium on Sunday.
Since 2019, the French Paralympic and Sports Committee has set up a program, La Rlève, to “detect” people “aged 16 to 35 who have the potential to perform in one or more Paralympic sports.” These detections make it possible to test radically different sports that would not have come to mind for future champions.
Some federations have gotten ahead of this process: “my brother suggested I do my first triathlon in 2018. I met someone from the federation who told me that there were detections,” explained Thibault Rigaudeau in the podcast. The Locker RoomIt was a good move for him: he became Paralympic champion in Paris on Monday.
His first life as a visually impaired athlete was in blind football, until he joined the French team. But a cruciate ligament injury in 2014 and apprehension about possible impacts during matches pushed him away from it.
PHOTO THIBAULT CAMUS, ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thibaut Rigaudeau and his guide.
Some athletes are even real jugglers, switching from one sport to another in a few months, such as the American-Ukrainian Oksana Masters, who is hard to describe given her varied and medal-rich pedigree: she has only missed one of the Games, winter or summer, since London in 2012, for 18 medals.
“I didn’t know I would do so many different sports, or that the sports I do even existed! I fell in love with rowing, and when I injured my back in 2013, I was able to try cycling. I don’t want to live regretting not having tried,” she explained in April to media outlets, including AFP.
But for the one who had to have both legs amputated after birth defects, “the transition is really hard, I have to change my body” between two disciplines. With success in Paris, where she won an eighth title on Wednesday in the H4-5 time trial (5 in winter, 3 in summer).