The trials of a Paralympian whose disability doesn’t always show

NEW YORK – In the run-up to the Paris Paralympics, Christie Raleigh Crossley’s coach asked her a serious question: Do you really have a hole in your brain?

They were talking about an anonymous online accusation that Raleigh Crossley had exaggerated the disability that qualified her for the Paralympics.

She was taken aback. This was her coach, whom she had trained with for much of the last year. Yes, she answered, and she could show pictures to prove it.

“I had a blood tumour in my brain that had been killing the brain as it took over that area,” she said. “And then they removed it. And so now I’ve just got a nice hole.”

A competitive swimmer since she was three, Raleigh Crossley always dreamt of going to the Olympics. Now, at 37, a single mother raising three children, the American is heading to Paris as a first-time Paralympian.

On a recent afternoon at her home in Toms River, New Jersey, she walked using a forearm crutch, dragging her left leg. As she does every day, she had hit the pool at 5am so she could be home before her children woke up.

“I have become a lightning rod of sorts, where people are like, ‘She’s so fast’, and they don’t see the disability all the time,” she said.

“It’s a pretty toxic environment. But I get it. I’m their competition and everything is money to everybody. And there’s only so many media opportunities, there’s only so many sponsorship opportunities.”

She will arrive at the Games ranked in the world’s top three in each of her four events. She is also a controversial figure.

“It’s because I am so good,” she said, matter-of-factly.

In Paralympic competitions, athletes are classified according to the degree to which their disabilities affect their performances, and compete against others within their class.

The Games, however, have been roiled by charges of athletes gaming the classification system in order to compete against others with more severe disabilities.

The incentives are high. Moving up or down a class can mean the difference between setting a record and going home empty-handed.

“This has been a big issue for a long time,” said Braden Keith, editor-in-chief of swimming news site SwimSwam.

“There’s lots and lots of accusations of this around the world. There are definitely people gaming the system, but it’s very hard from the outside to say who is and who isn’t, because the system is not very transparent.”

Some disabilities are easy to quantify – amputated limbs, short stature. But athletes with neurological impairments, like Raleigh Crossley, are harder to classify.

Their disabilities require subjective judgments and they can change over time, sometimes from day to day. This opens the athletes to charges that they are exaggerating their symptoms.

The classification process, which is overseen by World Para Swimming, involves medical records, a physical exam and an assessment of the athlete in competition, and can be opaque to outsiders.

Because of privacy laws, medical assessments or records are not made public, creating room for suspicions.

For Raleigh Crossley, it is a conundrum. The better she swims, the more suspicion and accusations come her way. How do you prove a disability to people who cannot see it?

“I’ve been the brunt of a lot of that bullying,” she said.

“And it’s hard, because, like, today you see a great day – you’re seeing a very mobile, moving day. I’m also very good at masking things. Like, for instance, I haven’t been able to move my hand for the past 20 minutes.”

Raleigh Crossley had once – when she was well – set her sights on the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Then over a period of 15 months, she was in two car accidents, suffering injuries to her back, neck and brain. “I was just like, OK, let’s just put swimming in the rearview now,” she said.

But, as she watched old friends break records and win medals in the Chinese capital, she was drawn back to the pool and she resumed training to compete in the 2012 Olympics.

However, her preparations were short-lived.

In 2009, she met the man who became her first husband, and she put swimming aside again for motherhood.

It was a volatile time. Within two years, with a young baby at home, the marriage was heading towards divorce.

Again she started swimming, this time aiming for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. But her times were markedly slower than she had posted a few years earlier – far short of Olympic standards.

Looking back, Raleigh Crossley says, the effects of her brain injury were evident as early as 2009. Her left arm was losing strength, and she fell often and walked into walls.

In old video footage, she can see her left foot turned inward and her left elbow dropping when she swam. But the decline was so gradual that she attributed it to ageing or a natural imbalance between her left and right side.

In 2015, with her eyes on the 2016 Olympics, she fell and reinjured her lower back, requiring physical therapy to learn to walk again. Following that, she began to look towards the 2020 Tokyo Games instead as her last shot at the Games.

Then the dream fell apart, yet again.

In December 2018, on a trip to a ski resort, she was in a snowball fight with her children when her son threw a block of ice that hit her on the head. On the drive home, her right eye began to twitch, and her left arm went dead.

At the hospital, doctors asked her to lift her left leg. She could not move. It was the worst experience of her life, she said, explaining: “Not being able to control where your body is moving after having been able to control it so precisely for so long was absolutely devastating.”

Doctors found bleeding in her brain, and eventually a mass of blood cells called a cavernous hemangioma, sometimes called a blood tumour, which required removing part of her skull to extract.

The bleeding caused paralysis on her left side, which has partially abated; the tumour, even after removal, caused weakness and spasticity in her muscles, she said.

Even after the brain operation, she said she did not consider competing in the Paralympics. That was for blind people or those who were missing limbs, she recalled thinking at the time.

Then during the 2020 Olympics broadcast, she saw a Paralympic gold medallist named Michelle Konkoly, who had been a high-ranked swimmer before a spinal cord injury that left her impaired but able to walk.

For Raleigh Crossley, it was a revelation. She, too, was partially paralysed but could still walk.

After six months in the hospital and a neurological rehabilitation programme, she began training again in January 2022, this time aiming for the Paralympics in Paris.

At home, life with her second husband was turbulent. They argued over her pursuit of a dream that took up her time without bringing in money, and over the sexual dysfunction caused by her brain injury, which left her with limited sensation in parts of her body.

The economics of para-swimming can be brutal. Athletes who make the US team are given a monthly stipend of US$1,300 (S$1,700). Endorsements and sponsorships are limited for para-athletes; they do not receive the same media exposure as Olympians.

In Paris, she is scheduled to compete in four solo events and possibly one or two relays, each with prize money attached – US$37,500 for gold, US$22,500 for silver and US$15,000 for bronze. The money comes from the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and is the same for athletes in both competitions.

Having found a new path to achieve her swimming dreams, she is focused only on the next weeks, while fully aware that this may be her last Games.

“You never know what you’re going to be able to do tomorrow,” she said. “But that means that you have to do as much as you can today.”

NYTIMES