The trials of a paralympian whose disability doesn’t always show

In the run-up to the Paralympics, which start this coming week in Paris, Christie Raleigh Crossley’s coach asked her a serious question.

“Do you really have a hole in your brain?”

They were talking about an anonymous online accusation that Raleigh Crossley had exaggerated the disability that qualified her for the Paralympics.

Raleigh Crossley was taken aback. This was her coach, the woman she had trained with for much of the last year.

Yes, she answered, she really did have a hole in her brain. She could show pictures to prove it. “I had a blood tumor in my brain that had been killing the brain as it took over that area,” she said. “And then they removed it. And so now I’ve just got a nice hole.”

A competitive swimmer since she was 3 years old, Raleigh Crossley always dreamed of going to the Olympics. Now, at 37, a single mother raising three children, she is heading to Paris as a first-time Paralympian, hoping to bring home four medals, maybe more.

On a recent afternoon at her home in Toms River, New Jersey, Raleigh Crossley walked using a forearm crutch, dragging her left leg. As she does every day, she had hit the pool at 5 a.m. so she could be home before her children, ages 3 to 13, woke up.

“I have become a lightning rod of sorts, where people are like, ‘She’s so fast,’ and they don’t see the disability all the time,” she said. “It’s a pretty toxic environment. But I get it. I’m their competition and everything is money to everybody. And there’s only so many media opportunities, there’s only so many sponsorship opportunities.”

Her dog, a lab-basset mix that she is training to provide mobility support, engaged in full-contact affection. The clutter of three children lined the room.

Raleigh Crossley will arrive at the Games ranked in the top three in the world in each of her events. She is also a controversial figure.

“It’s because I am so good,” she said, matter-of-factly.

In Paralympic competitions, which started in Rome in 1960, athletes are classified according to the degree to which their disabilities affect their performances, and compete against others within their class. Each athlete brings a story of overcoming extraordinary obstacles to be the best in the world.

But as the Olympics have been plagued by doping scandals, the Paralympics have been roiled by charges of athletes gaming the classification system in order to compete against others with more severe disabilities. The incentives are high. Moving up or down a class can mean the difference between setting a record and going home empty-handed.

“This has been a big issue for a long time,” said Braden Keith, editor-in-chief of the online swimming news site SwimSwam. “There’s lots and lots of accusations of this around the world. There are definitely people gaming the system, but it’s very hard from the outside to say who is and who isn’t, because the system is not very transparent.”

Some disabilities are easy to quantify — amputated limbs, short stature. But athletes with neurological impairments, like Raleigh Crossley, are harder to classify. Their disabilities require subjective judgments and they can change over time, sometimes from day to day. This opens the athletes to charges that they are exaggerating their symptoms, as people outside para sports are often accused of exaggerating impairments when they apply for disability benefits or seek extra time on school exams.

The classification process, which is overseen by World Para Swimming, involves medical records, a physical exam and an assessment of the athlete in competition, and can be opaque to outsiders. Because of privacy laws, medical assessments or records are not made public, creating room for suspicions.

The accusations have dogged Raleigh Crossley since her first para swimming competition in March 2022, when she immediately started to break records for her class. As of this May, she held five U.S. records.

“You are ruining the sport for everyone,” a commenter posted on SwimSwam, after Raleigh Crossley set a U.S. record in the 100-meter backstroke. “People like you make us so mad. Ever heard that cheaters never win? You may be winning right now, but it’ll catch up with you. I’d personally be embarrassed to stand on the podium knowing everyone doesn’t believe you.”

For Raleigh Crossley, it is a conundrum: The better she swims, the more suspicion and accusations come her way. How do you prove a disability to people who cannot see it? “I’ve been the brunt of a lot of that bullying,” she said. “And it’s hard, because, like, today you see a great day — you’re seeing a very mobile, moving day. I’m also very good at masking things. Like, for instance, I haven’t been able to move my hand for the past 20 minutes.”

A drive for the Olympics

Growing up in Toms River, with a champion swimmer for a father, Raleigh Crossley loved being in the water, and she loved the competition. She was so fast in the pool that other swimmers questioned whether she was really a girl, she said.

“There was a high school swimming forum, and I was relentlessly bullied,” she said. “Terrible things, like asking where I was hiding my penis.”

The comments were especially hurtful, she said, because she was wrestling with her gender identity. “You are telling me I’m a man, and I’m sitting here not feeling like a woman,” said Raleigh Crossley, who identifies as nonbinary and uses both she/her and they/them pronouns. “And so how do I sit there and defend myself against a comment that I can’t say, ‘I am a woman’? I don’t feel confident in saying that. I’ve always felt very outside of my body, outside of the gender norms.”

She nearly quit swimming after her freshman year, but then transferred instead to a high school in Florida, where she became a state champion. At Florida State University, she was named Atlantic Coast Conference freshman of the year, and twice made all-American, setting her sights on the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Then over a period of 15 months, she was in two car accidents, sustaining injuries to her back, neck and brain. “I was just like, OK, let’s just put swimming in the rearview now,” she said. “You’re never going to be that good. Let’s just move on.” She soon left Florida State.

But as she watched old friends break records and win medals in Beijing, she was drawn back to the pool, relocating to Maryland to train at the powerhouse North Baltimore Aquatic Club, with Olympic phenomenon Michael Phelps, aiming for the 2012 Olympics.

At North Baltimore, Raleigh Crossley’s times were just a split second off those of the club’s best swimmers, the team’s coach, Paul Yetter, said — not fast enough that she could start planning for the Olympics, “but she’s in the game.”

But her training was short-lived. On a visit home to New Jersey in 2009, she met the man who became her first husband, and she put swimming aside for motherhood.

It was a volatile time. Within two years, with a young baby at home, the marriage was heading toward divorce. Again Raleigh Crossley started swimming, this time aiming for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She entered Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, staying just long enough to win an NCAA Division III championship in 2012. But her times were markedly slower than she had posted a few years earlier — far short of Olympic caliber.

Looking back, Raleigh Crossley says, the effects of her brain injury were evident as early as 2009. Her left arm was losing strength, and she fell often. She walked into walls. In old video footage, she can see her left foot turned inward and her left elbow dropping when she swam. But the decline was so gradual that she attributed it to aging or a natural imbalance between her left and right side.

“I was falling a lot, tripping over myself a lot, bumping into things, but I was just like, Oh, I’m a clumsy person,” she said.

In 2015, with her eyes on the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, she fell and reinjured her lower back, requiring physical therapy to learn to walk again. Now in her early 30s, she began to look toward the 2020 Games in Tokyo as her last shot at the Olympics.

Then the dream fell apart.

A life transformed

In December 2018, on a trip to the Mountain Creek ski resort in northern New Jersey, she was in a snowball fight with her children when her son, who was 3, threw a block of ice that hit her on the head. On the drive home, she said, her right eye began to twitch, and her left arm went dead.

At the hospital, doctors asked her to lift her left leg. She could not move. It was the worst experience of her life, she said. “Not being able to control where your body is moving after having been able to control it so precisely for so long was absolutely devastating,” she said.

Doctors found bleeding in her brain, and eventually a mass of blood cells called a cavernous hemangioma, sometimes called a vascular tumor or blood tumor, which required removing part of her skull to extract.

The bleeding caused paralysis on her left side, which has partially abated; the tumor, even after removal, caused weakness and spasticity in her muscles, she said.

Over a long conversation in Toms River, Raleigh Crossley incrementally tilted her torso and neck to the left, as the muscles on that side grew tighter from the morning’s workout. Because she had to drive that morning, she had skipped the anti-spasm medication that might have prevented the contractions. Her left arm, which had rested atop the table during a previous visit, was hidden in her lap.

Even after the brain operation, she said she did not consider competing in the Paralympics. That was for blind people or those who were missing limbs, she recalled thinking at the time. She had never even watched the competitions. Then during the 2020 Olympics broadcast, she saw a Paralympic gold medalist named Michelle Konkoly, who had been a high-ranked swimmer before a spinal cord injury that left her impaired but able to walk.

For Raleigh Crossley, it was a revelation. She, too, was partially paralyzed but could still walk. After six months in the hospital and a neurological rehabilitation program, she began training again in January 2022, this time aiming for the Paralympics in Paris.

At home, life with her second husband was turbulent. They argued over her pursuit of a dream that took up her time without bringing in money, and over the sexual dysfunction caused by her brain injury, which left her with limited sensation in parts of her body.

“That’s something that nobody ever wants to talk about,” she said. “When you’re not physically able to do things and it’s expected of you to do those things, being told that you are less than human in that respect is very difficult, because it’s like a constant reminder of how broken your body is.”

Trauma as motivation

Her coach, Wilma Wong, said Raleigh Crossley channeled that trauma into her swimming. “It’s the people that are happier that don’t ever want to go to be an Olympian, because they are satisfied with their life,” Wong said. “It’s the people who aren’t satisfied with their lives who want to go be better and do something different. And we shall see where this is going to take Christie. She’s coming from trauma. And so we go to our sport to escape our trauma. And that fuels us up to a certain point, until it no longer can fill that hole in our hearts.”

The economics of para swimming can be brutal. Athletes who make the U.S. team are given a monthly stipend of $1,300. Endorsements and sponsorships are limited for para athletes; they don’t receive the same media exposure as Olympians.

The para athletes who do find sponsors tend to be those whose disabilities are visible to the camera, Raleigh Crossley said. She pointed to the swimmer Jessica Long, whose lower legs were amputated when she was 18 months old, and who has been the subject of a television documentary and a Super Bowl commercial, and has written a bestselling memoir.

“You look at her missing both of her legs and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, yes. Look at the incredible things that she can do, missing both of her legs,’” she said.

But those opportunities have not come for Raleigh Crossley, whose disability is less apparent. When she uses a wheelchair to be more mobile or take the strain off her muscles, it only fuels accusations that she is faking it.

In the Paris Games, Raleigh Crossley has been approved to have a “tapper” at each end of the pool, to touch her on the head with a foam device when she nears the wall, because her vision goes blank during hard swims. And she will have a spotter to hold her hips on the starting block so she does not fall over.

She is scheduled to compete in four solo events and possibly one or two relays, each with prize money attached: $37,500 for gold, $22,500 for silver and $15,000 for bronze. The money comes from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and is the same for athletes in both competitions.

If she wins, it will likely renew accusations of cheating.

Win or lose, the biggest challenge may come after the Games, said Hall of Fame para swimmer Trischa Zorn-Hudson, who won her first Paralympic gold medal in 1980. “You go home and you may have a small celebration, but after that, it’s like nothing happened,” she said. “If you don’t have anything in place to fall back on, that’s when a lot of the mental health factors come in and a lot of athletes get depressed.”

Raleigh Crossley said she would like to give speeches about adapting to life’s setbacks and about her experiences of living with a disability, and maybe write a book.

But for now, sitting at her table in Toms River, she was focused only on the next few weeks. She knows that this may be her last Games before her lifelong dream to be part of Team USA, having finally been realized, slips once more out of reach.

“You never know what you’re going to be able to do tomorrow,” she said. “But that means that you have to do as much as you can today.”

The children were starting to make demands, and the dog needed a walk. Raleigh Crossley finished her thought.

“And that’s how I have been living,” she said. “We’re going to make this happen now.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company