Marie-amélie Le Fur Lost A Leg At 15. Nine Medals Later She Faces Her Biggest Challenge

The head of Paris’s Paralympics committee hopes the Games can help improve accessibility to sport for disabled people in France

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 says. “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.”