In the 22 Paralympic sports in which athletes compete alongside a guide or assistant, successful collaborations are often marked by their quiet.
“During the race we try not to speak so much, just as strictly necessary,” Jerusa Geber dos Santos of Brazil said of her relationship with her guide, Gabriel Garcia. Geber dos Santos, 42, who became blind in her teens, holds the women’s world record in the 100-meter dash (11.83 seconds) in a classification of athletes who are blind or nearly so.
When she competes alongside Garcia, 26, he runs to her left holding a short tether in his right hand while she holds the other end in her left. If they have started well, he matches her strides with the opposite foot and doesn’t need to alert her to a competitor’s pace.
“There is really harmony and synchrony between Gabriel and me,” she said. It’s important that they remain connected through the finish line: An Australian distance runner was stripped of a bronze medal on Saturday because he let go of the tether too early.
The role of Paralympic guide, mainly in classifications of severe vision loss and mobile impairment, is governed by just a few restrictions across sports to ensure that the athletes are in charge. But while the Paralympians are not allowed to gain a competitive advantage from their guides, the supporting athletes can, and often do, contribute in ways that extend beyond the field of play. Able-bodied track guides sometimes help runners pick out the design of the blindfold they’ll compete in (to ensure all competitors have the same visual restriction). And a pilot in a cycling tandem may break up the monotony of training days by taking a blind athlete on the open road instead of a closed track.
Since 2012, guides in most assisted Paralympic sports have received medals alongside the athletes they support. But the relationship between athlete and assistant can extend beyond a technical connection into something more personal and deeply reciprocal.
Garcia, Brazil’s reigning national champion in the men’s 200, said he trained daily with Geber dos Santos while also preparing to compete on the Brazilian men’s 4×100 Olympic relay team last month. “I actually prefer to be an athlete guide rather than an Olympic athlete,” he said, adding that he felt more pressure to perform at the Paralympics than in the Olympics.
“You have to give 200 percent of yourself not to cause any mistakes and to keep the other athlete at a high level,” he said.
Geber dos Santos, who enters the Paris competition having run the fastest times in the 100 and 200 at the world championships in Kobe, Japan, in May, has a singular goal for these Paralympics, her fifth.
“I have still not got my gold medal,” she said. “I have two silvers and two bronzes in Paralympic Games, and my golden medal that I have dreamed so much about, I haven’t achieved.”
Weekly Check-ins
After the American para cyclist Hannah Chadwick, 32, snaps into the pedals of a tandem bike behind her guide, Skyler Espinoza, she’ll feel Espinoza reach back during the roughly 50 seconds of silence before their start and squeeze her hand.
“It’s a reminder that we’re doing it together,” Espinoza said.
Chadwick’s coach, Jennie Reid, thought to pair the two together in 2020, after Chadwick’s first guide decided — with her encouragement — to pursue her solo racing dreams. Espinoza was in U.S.A. Cycling’s development program, but she missed the dynamics of team sports that she had enjoyed as a college rower. As a duo, Espinoza and Chadwick share the same cycling and strength training regimen, meeting three or four times a year in Colorado Springs, where Chadwick lives, or near Menlo Park, Calif., Espinoza’s home city, to prep together.
In between, there are weekly check-in calls that include some talk about training, but more discussion of their romantic partners and what’s going in on life.
Chadwick was born blind in a rural Chinese village and adopted at 13 by a family in Humboldt County, Calif. She said she spent her teens catching up academically, which kept her from participating in sports. “A lot of people have that Olympic dream that I didn’t grow up with,” she said. After discovering cycling at a camp when she was 19, she threw herself into the sport.
She said she quickly took to the adventure of tandem cycling, in which a blind athlete is guided by a pilot rider who steers the para athlete around a closed track. In time trials, another duo starts simultaneously on the opposite side of the track; they compete against an opposing team in match sprint events like cycling’s world championships. Chadwick, the shorter of the pair, provides strong bursts of energy, particularly at a race’s start, while Espinoza says her endurance helps later.
The pairing has given Chadwick a window into the camaraderie of team sports. “I definitely have those days when if training starts going well or if it’s too hard, then you think about your teammate and you guys have the same exact goal,” she said. “So like, you don’t train just for yourself, but for other people, too.”
Espinoza, 30, said in an interview on Thursday that she often gets complimented for “sacrificing” on behalf of a disabled athlete. She was quick to emphasize that she has also benefited from piloting the tandem: She gets a monthly stipend from the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee and health insurance that was not available to her as an able-bodied athlete.
Espinoza said she was certain that if she hadn’t begun piloting she would never have had the opportunities that para sport has afforded her. “I’m really lucky that Hannah decided to choose me to do this in the same way that I chose to do it with her,” she said.
During qualifying the next day, Chadwick raced a personal best for a sixth-place finish in the 1,000.
Turning Her Back to the Action
The Greek bocce player Grigorios Polychronidis uses a ramp attached to his wheelchair to roll the ball during competition. The rules allow his wife and assistant, Katerina Patroni, to add and remove extensions to the ramp and line up the balls according to his instructions.
Polychronidis offers only terse direction during games. Nods and short phrases make up the bulk of his communication with Patroni.
“We talk a lot during the 24 hours that we have today, so in the match, it’s less that we talk. To be honest, sometimes even if I confuse my words, Katerina, because she knows me very well, she knows what I mean,” he said.
To prevent her from influencing Polychronidis’s aim, the rules require Patroni to keep her back turned to the game at all times. Her husband, who uses a motorized wheelchair because his spinal muscular atrophy limits his mobility, gives instructions to her after consulting handwritten notecards that contain information about the different weights of the balls, ramp angles and trajectories.
“Every ball is different,” he said. “They’re my friends.”
After Patroni sets a ball onto the ramp, Polychronidis taps it into motion using a pointer attached to his head. She can hear its impact with other balls and read the look on her husband’s face to know if it has met its target.
They train six hours a day. They are raising their 3-year-old daughter, Valentina, while maintaining a competition schedule that takes them all over the world. Bocce, more than most Paralympic sports, is full of competitors aided by family members — siblings, spouses, parents — largely, Polychronidis said, because of the cost of competition. Before Patroni took on the role, his father, Daniel, was his ramp aide. Polychronidis said he plans to compete in three more Paralympics so that Valentina can take over.
It costs more than 1,000 euros to enter a World Cup competition in bocce, and the added expense of travel for the athlete and an aide makes for a pricey lifestyle. “So you can understand that it’s the family budget that takes all this expenses,” Polychronidis said. His sponsors defray costs.
A six-time Paralympic medalist (one gold, three silver, two bronze) before these Games, Polychronidis lost his last match of the bocce qualifiers on Saturday after a few stunning tosses from his opponent, Mateus Carvalho of Brazil, late in the match. Polychronidis moved to the next round anyway because he had won the first two matches of the preliminary round. He went on to win the bronze medal.
Exiting the court after her husband’s early-round loss, Patroni held the bottom ramp piece in one hand and the couple shared resigned smiles.
“He doesn’t want to lose, so I can’t blame him ever,” she said after.
“Definitely I cannot blame her, because she does what I say,” he responded. “So it’s my fault.”
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