Fresh off of her silver medal win at the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris, swimmer Christie Raleigh Crossley reveals that her triumphant moment has been shrouded by “bullies” questioning her disability.
After her win on Thursday, Aug. 29, Raleigh Crossley said some hurled criticism her way because of her participation in S9 events. “It’s so great that I just broke a world record and won my first Paralympic medal on the same day,” Raleigh Crossley said per USA Today. “But I got off a bus and got verbally accosted by another athlete from another country.”
“To be told online by all of these bullies that I’m somehow not as disabled as I appear just because I can swim faster than them is pretty devastating,” she added.
Paralympic swimming events are divided into 10 classes based on degree of functional disability. According to Paralympic.org, the classifications “determine which athletes are eligible to compete in a sport and how athletes are grouped together for competition.”
Raleigh Crossley has said that she’s been critiqued for competing in S9 events. S9 includes athletes who “for example, swim with joint restrictions in one leg or with double below-the-knee amputations,” a Paralympic breakdown explains.
Following the comments, Raleigh Crossley said she met with a representative for athlete safety in the Paralympic Village, according to USA Today.
Raleigh Crossley has had multiple injuries throughout her life, but a 2018 snowball fight with her son led to her partial paralysis.
When she was hit in the head with ice during the incident, doctors examined her brain and discovered bleeding and a blood tumor — requiring part of her skull to be removed in order to extract the tumor. The subsequent bleeding and surgery resulted in Raleigh Crossley sustaining paralysis on her left side, per USA Today.
Raleigh Crossley earned Team USA’s second medal of the 2024 Paralympic Games with a silver in the women’s 50-meter freestyle S10. China’s Yi Chen of China took gold and Canada’s Aurélie Rivard earned bronze. The athlete set the world record during an earlier heat in the qualification rounds of the race.
She still has three events left this Games: the 100-meter backstroke S9, 100-meter freestyle S9 and the 100-meter butterfly S9.
In an as-told-to for Today.com, Raleigh Crossley, highlighted, again, what she’s experienced: “I’ve dealt with bullying because I’m not missing limbs or because people think I don’t ‘look disabled.’ “
“I want to show that Paralympians are more than athletes who are missing limbs. We are not just people in wheelchairs. We are not all blind,” said the Paralympian. “There is a spectrum of what makes someone eligible and there are many athletes who are missing out because they just don’t know.”
