When the athlete Marie-Amélie Le Fur was hit by a car while riding her scooter and had her left leg amputated beneath the knee aged 15, her swift return to the running track saved her mental health and changed her life.
“Sport was so important in those first few weeks after the accident because it allowed me to rebuild myself psychologically and construct an identity,” she says. “While I was doing sport, I wasn’t being seen only as my disability or for what I had lost – there were bigger hopes, projects and ambitions.”
Before the accident, Le Fur had planned to become a fire officer rather than an elite athlete. But after her amputation, she went on to become one of France’s best-known Paralympians: winning nine athletics medals at four Games, including golds in London and Rio. In a sign of her popularity in France, she appeared in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony carrying the torch outside the Louvre.
But Le Fur, 35, is now facing her biggest challenge. As head of the French Paralympics sports committee, which manages the French team and develops parasports across the country, she wants to use the Paris Paralympic Games to push for a more inclusive society in France, revolutionising the patchy access to disability sport and boosting disability rights.
Le Fur wants France to win double the 11 Paralympic gold medals that were achieved in Tokyo and inspire a new generation to take up parasports, bringing in crowds of spectators to rival the massive turnout for the London 2012 Paralympics.
The task is a hard one. It is the first time France has hosted the Paralympics and it has had to catch up fast. For decades, French parasport was underfunded and not well supported. Paris’s bid to host the Olympics and Paralympics began to change things, leading to a quadrupling of funding for parasport between 2015 and this year, but there is still much work to be done.
Traditionally France has sent a relatively small contingent of athletes to the Paralympics, between 120 and 150. But in Paris there will be more than 235 French athletes, and for the first time they will be competing in all sports.
The world leaders at the Paris Paralympics are once again expected to be China, Great Britain and the US. But Le Fur hopes France will reach the top eight in the medals table, with between 20 and 22 golds. French hopes for gold include new, young athletes such as the para-cyclist Heïdi Gaugain and the swimmer Ugo Didier.
For Le Fur, the Paralympics are not just about the medal podium, but accessibility to sport in general. “Being a sporting nation is not only about winning medals, it’s also about offering people with disabilities as many opportunities as possible to practise sport, whether they are competitive athletes or not,” she says.
This is a tricky issue in France. Currently only 1.4% of France’s vast nationwide network of sports clubs and associations say they have the capacity to include people with a disability. France hosting the Paralympics has led to a vast scheme, in which Le Fur has been active, to train thousands of sports coaches and volunteers so that more clubs will now open up.
As a former competitor, Le Fur knows spectator turnout and enthusiasm are central to a successful Paralympics. Paris is offering the same stunning backdrops as during the Olympics, with an outdoor opening ceremony along the Champs-Élysées and at the Place de la Concorde. The blind football will take place beneath the Eiffel tower, para-triathlon swimming in the River Seine, wheelchair fencing and taekwondo at the Grand Palais. Para-equestrian events will take place in the gardens of the Château de Versailles. Ticket sales were slow at first but dramatically increased after the Olympics started.
The excitement of the crowd is something Le Fur experienced firsthand competing in the 2012 Paralympics. “I learned in London that when you value the Paralympic Games, the public is able to appreciate the Games for what they are: an extremely high-level competition between elite athletes,” she says.
“As an athlete, the enthusiasm of the London crowd and the volunteers remains an incredible memory for me. To have been so encouraged, appreciated and recognised for what we are – elite-athletes in the fullest sense of the term – was extraordinary. And I was struck by the acceptance of difference that I felt in London: that sense that the Paralympic Games boosted the feeling of togetherness and offered a place in British society for people with a disability.
“I hope the Paris Paralympics will have the same effect. I hope Paris crowds will give that same gift to athletes from across the world: the gift of being present as spectators, recognising this great high-level competition.”
Le Fur’s wider aim for the Paris Games is to “change French people’s views on life with a disability”, but also to bring structural improvements on work, accessibility of transport and “the place in society for people with a disability”. She is pushing for more women in Paralympic sport – the French team in Paris will have 34% women compared with 25% at the Toyko Games – as well as more athletes with severe disabilities.
Ultimately, for her, the Games are about celebrating difference. “It’s about showing that yes, people may be different, but that doesn’t mean they perform less well or are less productive for society. We must create an environment that enables all people to thrive, whatever their differences.”
