The New York Times - The Trials of a Paralympian Whose Disability Doesn’t Always Show

In August 2024, I spent a day with Christie Raleigh Crossley and her kids for the New York Times. I joined her for an early morning swim training session and a day at the beach with her children. Link to the story is in the bio where you can also listen to the story with commentary by the reporter John Leland.

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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.

In the Paralympics, athletes are classified by the degree to which their disabilities affect performances and they compete against others within their class. However, there have been charges of athletes gaming the classification system so they can compete against others with more severe disabilities. Moving up or down a class can mean a difference between setting a record and not getting a medal.

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.

During college, over a period of 15 months, she was in two car accidents, sustaining injuries to her back, neck and brain. Then in 2018, after being hit with a block of ice accidentally during a snowball fight, she noticed her right eye began to twitch and her left arm went dead. Doctors found bleeding in the brain and a tumor. This caused paralysis on her left side, and even after the removal of the tumor, she had weakness and spasticity in her muscles.

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Some disabilities are hidden. Christie and I talked a lot about this and how she, as someone who appears to be able bodied, often is accused of cheating because of her fast swim times. 

Photo editing by May-Ying Lam and Eve Edelheit