Curtis Lovejoy, a two-time Paralympic champion American swimmer and wheelchair fencer, died of leukemia at the age of 63.
Curtis Lovejoy, a two-time Paralympic champion American swimmer and wheelchair fencer, died of leukemia at the age of 63.
The athlete participated in five Paralympics, swimming and wheelchair fencing. He announced his retirement two weeks ago after learning that a very aggressive form of blood cancer had attacked his body.
– can be read in the insidethegames.biz communication, which gathers news about the Olympic sports.
Lovejoy suffered a car accident at the age of 29 and was then paralyzed from the neck down. During his rehabilitation, he began to swim and wheelchair. He was world champion in swimming in 1994 and a two-time gold medalist at the 2000 Sydney Paralympics. He also won a silver and a bronze medal in swimming at the 2004 Athens Paralympics.
At the 2015 Toronto American Parade, he was the flagship of the U.S. delegation at the opening ceremony, while in 2019, he was elected to the Atlanta Athlete’s Hall of Fame.
He has collected seven world championship medals in wheelchair fencing in two decades.
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