Recent off of her silver medal win on the 2024 Paralympic Video games in Paris, swimmer Christie Raleigh Crossley reveals that her triumphant second has been shrouded by “bullies” questioning her incapacity.
After her win on Thursday, Aug. 29, Raleigh Crossley stated some hurled criticism her manner due to her participation in S9 occasions. “It is so nice that I simply broke a world report and received my first Paralympic medal on the identical day,” Raleigh Crossley stated per USA Today. “However I bought off a bus and bought verbally accosted by one other athlete from one other nation.”
“To be instructed on-line by all of those bullies that I’m by some means not as disabled as I seem simply because I can swim sooner than them is fairly devastating,” she added.
Paralympic swimming occasions are divided into 10 lessons primarily based on diploma of purposeful incapacity. In line with Paralympic.org, the classifications “decide which athletes are eligible to compete in a sport and the way athletes are grouped collectively for competitors.”
Raleigh Crossley has stated that she’s been critiqued for competing in S9 occasions. S9 contains athletes who “for instance, swim with joint restrictions in a single leg or with double below-the-knee amputations,” a Paralympic breakdown explains.
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Following the feedback, Raleigh Crossley stated she met with a consultant for athlete security within the Paralympic Village, based on USA At the moment.
Raleigh Crossley has had a number of accidents all through her life, however a 2018 snowball combat together with her son led to her partial paralysis.
When she was hit within the head with ice through the incident, medical doctors examined her mind and found bleeding and a blood tumor — requiring a part of her cranium to be eliminated with the intention to extract the tumor. The next bleeding and surgical procedure resulted in Raleigh Crossley sustaining paralysis on her left facet, per USA At the moment.
Raleigh Crossley earned Workforce USA’s second medal of the 2024 Paralympic Video games with a silver within the girls’s 50-meter freestyle S10. China’s Yi Chen of China took gold and Canada’s Aurélie Rivard earned bronze. The athlete set the world report throughout an earlier warmth within the qualification rounds of the race.
She nonetheless has three occasions left this Video games: the 100-meter backstroke S9, 100-meter freestyle S9 and the 100-meter butterfly S9.
In an as-told-to for Today.com, Raleigh Crossley, highlighted, once more, what she’s skilled: “I’ve handled bullying as a result of I’m not lacking limbs or as a result of folks assume I don’t ‘look disabled.’ ”
“I need to present that Paralympians are greater than athletes who’re lacking limbs. We’re not simply folks in wheelchairs. We’re not all blind,” stated the Paralympian. “There’s a spectrum of what makes somebody eligible and there are a lot of athletes who’re lacking out as a result of they only don’t know.”
To be taught extra about all of the Olympic champions and Paralympic hopefuls, come to folks.com to take a look at ongoing protection earlier than, throughout and after the video games. Watch the Paris Paralympics, starting Aug. 28, on NBC and Peacock.
