Karine Grimaldi: “The suffering remains the same”
She was just an 18-year-old when the grandstand collapsed on her and so many other spectators, leaving 19 people dead and 2,357 injured. “I have done more life in a wheelchair than in a valid one. Thirty years is a lifetime”, asserts the one who has been quadriplegic since 1992.
“The suffering is always the same. We are not only hurt the day we fall. We drag our evil on a daily basis with this chair, ”she says. Ten years ago, she was diving and painting, “because you have to have the strength to move forward”.
Today, Karine is married, has “sports or associative activities”, plays ping-pong, but recounts days “long because we don’t work”.
She still remembers her fall: “On the ground, the screams, this hubbub, all this metal. These noises still startle me today. The unconscious puts them aside, but it comes back anyway. »
She will not participate in the commemoration at the stadium: “inconceivable” to return there. “I’ve always agreed that the stadium should stay in its place so that we don’t forget, but I can’t go there”.
The birthday is all the more difficult for Karine since she lost her father this year, a “living-dead” after this disaster in her words, which had taken away a daughter, Karine’s sister, and left the other disabled for life.
The “national recognition” of May 5 is important for Karine, but she regrets that a Europa League match is still being played on Thursday in Marseille (OM-Feyenoord Rotterdam). “It shocks me. It’s still OM who will play. There will be joy and we will cry. There was no listening even if there will be banners to support us. »
Paul Calassi: “An even worse life”
He was 44 when his life changed. On May 5, 1992, Paul Calassi was at the very top of the stand which collapsed, 17 meters above the ground. “I left in a vacuum,” he recalls, referring to an accident that left him paraplegic.
He still lives in the village of Poggio d’Oletta (Upper Corsica), about twenty kilometers from the stadium of Furiani.
Twenty years after the disaster, he had recounted the three weeks of resuscitation, then the eight months in rehabilitation on the continent before returning to Corsica, to live a disrupted life. The one who would become the owner of a restaurant in Nice could no longer work and had to go regularly to the hospital in Bastia for treatment.
“Thirty years after the accident, my state of health has deteriorated again,” he told AFP by telephone. “For five or six years, I had my right leg amputated”. Paul no longer has any autonomy: “I have been bedridden for some time, I have lost 30 kilos. I don’t even have the strength to get up on my own. »
“An even worse life than the one I lived”, he notes, admitting that “the drama is always present”.
Paul Calassi kept a “hatred towards those responsible”. “There was a construction without authorization, the demolition of the old platform, without authorization, he accuses. It makes you gamble”.
Regarding the sanctification of May 5, obtained in October – no professional match in the context of a French competition can no longer be held on this date – he does not understand that it took so long to pass this law: “It is atrocious, indecent, vis-à-vis the wounded and the dead. However, it was easy to delete this date.
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