How Moroccan Paralympian Kassioui beat cerebral palsy and society
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- 27 Jul 2022
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Under the blazing summer sun, and not worried about the drops of sweat forming on her face contours that quiver involuntarily with Parkinson’s tremors, Paralympics medalist Fouzia El Kassioui devotedly went about her training in the Moroccan town of Benslimane.
She grabbed a silver at the Tokyo Paralympic Games but her journey to the medal in the F33 shot put event was “far from easy”, she says, before adding: “But I did it.”
Aside from Parkinson’s disease – which progressively damages the brain, affecting movement, speech and mental capacity – Kassioui, at the age of 10, was also diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a condition that causes body stiffness, affecting body motion and coordination, and leads to constant pain at the joints.
Her persistence at sports began as defiance to school bullying, as her body’s tremors limited her ability to do what other children her age could do.
Through an insatiable passion for sports, she overcame physical, social and financial hurdles to first achieve normalcy and then ultimately excel.
“Every day, I’d come back from school and repeat, in front of my mother, the aerobatic moves we were shown by our sports teacher,” she told Al Jazeera.
Unaware until she was 24 that certain sports were more suitable for those with physical disabilities, Kassioui spent her childhood trying to blend in. Read More...
