When the French wheelchair rugby team play their first match on Thursday, all eyes will be on Ryadh Sallem, whose extraordinary journey from thalidomide baby to record-breaking athlete has made him one of the country’s best-loved and longest-serving Paralympians.
Sallem, who will turn 54 at the Paris Games – his sixth Paralympics – is best known for competing in several sports. He began as a swimmer, breaking the 1991 world record for the 400m individual medley. Then he learned circus juggling techniques in order to become one of the first wheelchair basketball players without two full hands.
After Paralympic basketball, he chose the fast-paced intensity of wheelchair rugby, which he describes as a combat, gladiator sport, competing in London and Rio. Finishing his Paralympic career in Paris, his home city, is a “rendezvous with destiny”, he says.
Sallem was born in the Tunisian coastal town of Monastir, with no legs, no left hand and a malformation of his right hand. His mother had taken the drug thalidomide, which was used in the 1950s and 1960s for morning sickness but led to thousands of children worldwide being born without limbs.
“My grandfather fought for France in the second world war and he told my parents: ‘If you want to save your child you have to take him to France,’” he says. So, at the age of two, Sallem’s father took him to a French hospital rehabilitation centre outside Paris. Sallem would spend almost 20 years living in what he described as a hospital setting with a school attached – a kind of hospital boarding school – where he had numerous surgeries.
“It was hard because you don’t really understand as a child that it’s all in order for you to be treated and saved,” he says. “As a child, you just feel you’ve been separated from your family, it’s a heartbreak. It was only later I realised the sacrifices my parents made.”
His mother, who was a hotel manager, and his father, who worked for Monastir town hall, travelled back and forth from Tunisia to visit him and eventually settled in France, in Vitry‑sur‑Seine, in the south‑eastern suburbs of Paris.
He was an energetic child and the centre encouraged sport to channel that. “I wasn’t competitive, I was more artistic, but swimming allowed me to discover the outside world a little. And when you win medals, people don’t look at you in the same way. When you enter the category of champions you realise that, whereas before it was you who adapted to life, now others also begin to adapt to you.”
As a child, he had watched American basketball on TV and dreamed of wheelchair basketball. “But I was told you needed hands to play.” When a charity took the children on an outing to the circus in Paris, Sallem noticed the jugglers. “I thought: ‘Wow, they manage to balance plates on their noses, bottles on their elbows, balls on their backsides.’ I thought maybe I could therefore manage with a ball, so I learned juggling techniques to play basketball. I can’t hold the ball with my hands, so I learned to juggle.”
He trained in several sports simultaneously – basketball, swimming and athletics – then began decades as an elite athlete. Sallem credits sport with saving his life twice. “First, by bringing meaning to my life. Then a second time, when I had a heart problem and the doctors said if I didn’t have the heart of a sportsman, I wouldn’t be alive.”
When he moved out of medical centres, as a young adult, he found the transition to the world outside quite brutal. “We had been taught a lot about values and ideals, but the reality on the ground wasn’t like that at all. Everywhere I went I’d always say hello to everyone because that’s what we did in the centres, but I felt people saw that as odd. It was a bizarre situation, very hard to understand society’s codes.
“Sport helped because sport is about physical strength – you’re valued. A disability is sometimes viewed from the outside as a lack of accomplishment – you’re physically diminished in people’s minds. But sport is about physical performance. When you put sport and disability together, there is a spark, an electricity.”
Sallem founded his own organisation to raise awareness around disability and disability rights, often giving talks in schools. “We explain that in an intelligent, civilised, human society, difference is the norm and everyone’s singularities should be accepted. Because you don’t choose who you are or the body you have. Religion, skin colour, sexual orientation – there are a lot of things we don’t choose in life, but what we can choose is to respect others.”
He was once contacted by a woman in France whose son had a physical disability. The young boy saw so few adults with a physical disability in society that he had asked: “Will I die after school?” Sallem went to speak at his school. “All the children in the class thought a physical disability was something you were born with. I explained that no, for the majority of people it comes after an accident or an illness.” Physical disability is something that could happen to anyone at any point in their life, he says.
He hopes the Paris Paralympics will change not just infrastructure and accessibility for para-athletes, but mindsets towards everyone with any disability going about their daily lives. “We have to think about how to build a culture of kindness and inclusion that does not push people to the side because they had an illness, an accident or were born with a disability.
“That’s why I like to use the term ‘extraordinary people’, because living in a society like ours – which isn’t necessarily accessible and where attitudes to difference are not generous – is a real achievement. We’re everyday superheroes. It’s not just about winning a medal – simply doing your shopping or going to work is a huge challenge.”
For Sallem, the Paralympic Games is a moment for acceptance and celebration. One of his best memories is playing a France v Great Britain wheelchair rugby match on his birthday during the London 2012 Paralympics. “It was half-time and suddenly I heard the whole stadium – around 20,000 people – singing: ‘Happy birthday to you.’ I had goosebumps all over. Only sport can give you that. It was magical, an incredible moment.”
