Team Ireland’s Patrick Flanagan did not want to start his Paralympic journey like this.
“My chair was destroyed,” the elite swimmer tweeted after finding his wheelchair “completely broken” upon landing at London’s Heathrow Airport on his way to compete at his first Paralympics in Tokyo.
“It’s so devastating,” he told a small group of reporters on Wednesday.
“It really is completely upending for you,” he said.
Flanagan said his wheelchair, which he called “my independence,” was dented and scraped, and its wheels no longer spin.
“That’s just not how we should be treated,” he said from Tokyo Wednesday. “That’s not how our wheelchairs deserve to be treated because they’re so important to us, and it’s just a message to the industry in general that more responsibility needs to be taken around the issue.” (USA Today)