Paris 2024 Levelling the field

Marie-Amélie Le Fur lost a leg at the age of 15. Nine medals later this elite runner, now head of the Paralympic committee, faces an even bigger challenge – how to ensure Paris 2024 will change French people’s views on life with a disability and open doors for future competitors

- Angelique Chrisafis

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 said. "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 (pictured above): winning nine athletics medals at four Games, including golds in London and Rio. In a sign of her popularity, 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.