Paralympics 2024: Ottobock-run repair shop keeps athletes’ wheelchairs and prosthetics in top shape

German athlete Josco Wilke lies on his back after a collision during a wheelchair rugby match at the Paralympic Games in Paris. The sport is really tough on the chairs, which often need repairs. Photo / James Hill, the New York Times

Spend some time watching the Paralympics and it will soon become obvious from seeing wheelchair athletes bash into each other while playing rugby and basketball that their flattened tyres and dented frames might need multiple repairs over their tournaments. But at the Games’ fix-it shop in the Paralympic Village, repair requests can and do come from every sport.

Tyre replacements and the spot welding of chairs broken in collisions made up only about 56% of the shop’s service requests through the first half of the Games, which continue through Sunday. And many of those chairs were never actually in the shop. Instead, the fixes were made by technicians on-site during rugby matches at Champ de Mars Arena.

“My feeling is that I see wheelchairs the whole time,” said Merle Florestedt, communications director for Ottobock, the German wheelchair and prosthetics company that runs the shop. But the reality is different, she said. “It’s just as much as prostheses. And we also count when somebody brings in sunglasses that are broken.”

Technicians work on a prosthetic leg at the Paralympic Games’ fix-it shop, which has 164 staff members available to triage the equipment of more than 4000 athletes. Photo / James Hill, the New York Times

The repair shop has refitted prostheses – by traditional methods and via 3D scanning – sewn loose straps back into place on braces, and even restored the silicone to a man’s prosthetic leg. The facility is a cross between a mechanic’s garage and a bloodless emergency room, where 164 staffers are available to triage damage to the equipment and assistive devices of more than 4000 athletes competing in the Games.

Across almost a dozen workstations this week, technicians and mechanics welded, sewed and even sawed the equipment necessary to make the Games possible. Their services are offered at no cost to all Paralympians.

On Monday, the voices of the members of the Brazilian men’s sitting volleyball team rose as they played a board game while waiting for a teammate’s prosthetic to be refitted. A wheelchair athlete from Ghana scrolled through her phone at a table in the holding area outside the main workshop, which Ottobock has operated at every Paralympics since 1988.

A technician repairs a wheelchair at the Paralympic Games’ fix-it shop, run by the German company Ottobock. Photo / James Hill, the New York Times

It was a moment of relative calm at what can be a chaotic, though largely unseen, locus of the Paralympics. At the Tokyo Games, in 2021, Jeffrey Waldmuller and another technician received an emergency call two hours before the men’s 100-metre wheelchair final, when Belgian racer Peter Genyn and two teammates discovered their competitive chairs had been vandalised.

“It was really bad. Flatted his tyres, broke the steering linkage, all this stuff – these are custom parts that they broke,” Waldmuller said. “And so we robbed some parts from his teammate’s wheelchair that was competing the next day, put it on his. But then none of them fit or lined up. And we zip-tied and duct-taped it together.” Genyn won a gold medal in the jury-rigged chair, setting a Paralympic record in his classification.

Athletes at the Paralympic Games compete in a heat in the women’s 1500-metre race at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis on September 3, 2024. Photo / James Hill, the New York Times

This week, Gemma Collis, 31, a British wheelchair fencer, stopped in with a more quotidian request. Her foam seat, sized for her competition chair, had been lost in transit getting to the Games. She needed one that fit her chair and was the same density, or just about, as her old cushion.

It was a minor ask compared with the one she made at her last Paralympics, in Tokyo. Training the day before competition, she snapped her wheelchair frame in two places. Fencers’ chairs are strapped to the floor during bouts, angled parallel to one another, and absorb the full force of the athletes’ parries and attacks.

“My chair is also quite old,” Collis said, explaining that she thought it had broken in just one place because of metal fatigue. “And then I took it to Ottobock and they were like, Oh, we’ve repaired it in both places. And I was like, ‘There was two?’”

At the Games’ fix-it shop, run by the German company Ottobock, technicians weld, sew and saw athletes’ assistive equipment into top shape. Photo / James Hill, the New York Times

The company brought two metric tonnes of equipment and replacement parts to the Games, setting up shop a week before competition began in part to handle the nicks and dings that can happen in transit.

Lindi Marcusen, an American who is competing in the 100 metres and long jump, is an above-the-knee amputee who travels with multiple legs for competition and daily use. When she arrived in Paris, the socket on her “day leg” wouldn’t seal properly (it uses suction to stay on), an issue that can cause alignment problems and wounds at the graft site.

Markusen was particularly worried because she’d had a wound caused by friction in July 2018 that did not fully heal until late in 2021. On that occasion, she opted to continue training for the Tokyo trials without a leg, using a ski machine and resistance bands to keep up her strength. In Paris, technicians took less than a day to remove and clean the valve that helps Markusen’s socket stick.

A basket holds old prosthetic equipment at the Paralympic Games’ fix-it shop. Photo / James Hill, the New York Times

The Ottobock team said it had produced 11 sockets for Paralympic athletes via the traditional method, which requires plaster casting and plastic moulding shaped by heat and pressure. Eleven were made using the company’s 3D scanning and printing software, the first time the technology has been used at the Games.

To create a model for a custom socket, technicians can scan an athlete’s limb using a hand-held device the size of a computer mouse, avoiding invasive prodding and measuring by hand. The image can then be used to form a plastic mould in the workshop or sent to a nearby lab for printing.

Markusen said replacing a competitive socket had cost her $20,000 in the past. “I work fulltime to, like, set aside money to pay for legs,” she said. “I don’t have a car payment. I have a leg payment.”

The technicians at the repair garage, she said, embodied the spirit disabled athletes bring to every area of their lives.

“You got to be scrappy looking for solutions,” Markusen said, “and not paying attention to the problem.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Elena Bergeron

Photographs by: James Hill

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