Paralympic GamesProsthesesWheelchairsMedical DevicesWelding and WeldersParis (France)
Repair technicians at the Paris Games fix everything from bent wheelchair frames to broken sunglasses.
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If you spend any time watching the Paralympics, seeing wheelchair athletes crash into each other while playing rugby and basketball, you quickly realise that their punctured tyres and dented frames can need multiple repairs over the course of their tournaments. But at the Games’ repair shop in the Paralympic Village, requests for repairs can and do come from all sports.
Replacing tires and spot welding chairs broken in crashes accounted for only about 56 percent of the workshop’s service requests during the first half of the Games, which continue through Sunday. And many of those chairs never made it to the workshop. Instead, technicians repaired them on-site during rugby matches at the Champ de Mars stadium.
“I feel like I see wheelchairs all the time,” said Merle Florstedt, communications director for Ottobock, the German company that runs the workshop. But the reality is different, she said. “There are as many as there are prostheses. And we also count when someone brings in sunglasses that are broken.”
The repair shop has reassembled prosthetics — using traditional methods and 3-D scanning — sewn loose straps back into braces and even restored the silicone on a man’s prosthetic leg. The 7,500-square-foot facility is a cross between a mechanic’s shop and a bloodless emergency room, where 164 employees are on hand to triage damage to the equipment and assistive devices of the more than 4,000 athletes competing in the Games.
This week, at nearly a dozen work stations, technicians and mechanics welded, sewed and even sawed the equipment needed to make the Games possible. Their services are offered free of charge to all Paralympians.
On Monday, the voices of members of the Brazilian men’s sitting volleyball team rose in intensity as they played a board game while waiting for a teammate’s prosthesis to be readjusted. A wheelchair athlete from Ghana looked at her phone at a table in the waiting area outside the main workshop, where Ottobock, a wheelchair and prosthetics company, has been present at every Paralympic Games since 1988.
It was a moment of relative calm in what can be a chaotic, if inconspicuous, place at the Paralympics. At the Tokyo Games in 2021, Jeffrey Waldmuller and another technician received an emergency call two hours before the men’s 100-meter wheelchair final, when Belgian racer Peter Genyn and two teammates discovered their competition chairs had been vandalized.
“It was really bad. They punctured his tires, broke the steering gear, all this stuff — it’s custom parts that they broke,” Waldmuller said. “So we stole some parts from his teammate’s wheelchair, who was racing the next day, and put them on his. But then none of them fit or lined up. And we zip-tied them together and duct-taped them together.” Genyn won a gold medal in the makeshift chair, setting a Paralympic record in her classification.
This week, Gemma Collis, a 31-year-old British wheelchair fencer, came with a more mundane request. Her foam seat, sized to fit her competition chair, had been lost on the way to the Games. She needed one that would fit her chair and have the same density, or close to it, as her old cushion.
It was a minor incident compared to the one she suffered at her last Paralympic Games in Tokyo. While training the day before the competition, the frame of her wheelchair broke in two places. Fencers’ wheelchairs are tied to the ground during bouts, at a parallel angle, and absorb the full force of the athletes’ attacks and parries.
“My chair is also quite old,” Collis said, explaining that he thought it had broken in one place due to metal fatigue. “I took it to Ottobock and they said, ‘We’ve fixed it in both places.’ And I said, ‘There were two?'”
The company brought two tons of equipment and spare parts to the Games and set up shop a week before the competition began, in part to cope with the knocks and dents that can occur during transport.
Lindi Marcusen, an American who competes in the 100 meters and long jump, is an above-knee amputee who travels with multiple legs for competition and everyday use. When she arrived in Paris, the socket on her “everyday leg” wasn’t sealing properly (it uses suction to stay in place), a problem that can cause alignment issues and wounds at the graft site.
Marcusen was particularly concerned because she had a friction injury in July 2018 that did not fully heal until late 2021. At that time, she chose to continue training for the Tokyo trials without a leg, using a ski machine and resistance bands to maintain strength. In Paris, it took technicians less than a day to remove and clean the valve that helps Marcusen lace up.
The Ottobock team said it had made 11 sockets for Paralympic athletes using the traditional method, which requires plaster casting and plastic moulding under heat and pressure. Eleven were made using the company’s 3D scanning and printing software, the first time this technology has been used at the Games.
To create a custom-made cast, technicians can scan an athlete’s limb with a handheld device the size of a computer mouse, avoiding invasive hand-pinning and measuring. The image can then be used to form a plastic mold in the shop or sent to a nearby lab for printing.
Marcusen said replacing a race-appropriate socket had cost him $20,000 in the past. “I work full time to save money to pay for the legs,” he said. “I don’t have to pay for the car. I have to pay for the legs.”
The repair shop technicians, he said, embodied the spirit that disabled athletes bring to every area of their lives.
“You have to be clever in finding solutions,” Marcusen said, “and not pay attention to the problem.”
Elena Bergeron is an editor and writer on the culture section of the Times. More from Elena Bergeron
James Hill is a photographer who has worked regularly for The Times since 1993. He is currently based in Paris. More from James Hill
