Wheelchair tennis champion Pauline wants to impose driving tests on the elderly

“I will be at peace when this project is over”: handicapped since she was run over by a nonagenarian at the wheel of a car, tennis player Pauline Déroulède fights tirelessly. Its objective: that aptitude tests be made compulsory for seniors.

She does not only dream of the Paralympic Games in 2024 in Paris. Pauline Déroulède wants to believe that the elderly will be subject to mandatory control of their ability to drive a car. “When there is an accident where the ability is called into question, it reminds me how much it is still there“, she told AFP.

In October 2018 in Paris, she was violently hit, along with two other women, by the vehicle of a 92-year-old man. He confused the brake pedal with that of the accelerator, reports Pauline Déroulède. She lost her left leg in the accident.

Since then, the 2021 French wheelchair tennis champion has been actively campaigning for this bill. She launched her own “road safety campaign“, in particular via a series of four clips. They are financed by private partners and broadcast on its social networks.

“Each clip highlights an aptitude issue. And also the place of a relative who finds himself powerless to make someone stop driving, I receive a lot of messages from people who tell me: “I don’t know what to do anymore”. We don’t need to show gore stuff but to embody victims“, says the 32-year-old player.

The first clip showed an elderly man getting into his car facing his unarmed wife. Pauline Déroulède and Cléo, a 10-year-old disabled child, mowed down by an 86-year-old woman when she was three, also appeared in this clip.

Its second part is more symbolic: a septuagenarian pushes a shopping cart in a supermarket, hitting products and crushing a child’s comforter, under the gaze of a paraplegic employee.

In a fraction of a second you can go from valid to disabled

Yann Grandguillaume, in an armchair since a car accident in 2019, plays the role of the supermarket employee. “I saw that in a fraction of a second you can go from valid to disabled, I find it very important to do these tests. Even me today. So a person of 70, 80… I find it super difficult to still have all of your visual and intellectual abilities when you’re 80 or 90“, argues Yann Grandguillaume, who intervenes in companies to raise awareness of disability.

“In my interventions, I compare the elderly who drive because they don’t want to lose their autonomy. I had my accident at 29 and overnight without asking anyone, I lost my autonomy“, says Yann Grandguillaume. “I found her today, I know it’s super difficult but the goal is to avoid there being a drama before having an awareness“.

The question of autonomy

On the road safety side, we want “avoid age stigma, by only one mode of travel“. “Age is not the reason for responsibility for a fatal accident. And seniors are more victims than responsible for road accidents“, insists Anne Lavaud, general delegate of the Road Prevention association. “You have to be very careful: mobility is an essential factor in aging in the best conditions“, she continues.

This is the point of the septuagenarian who agreed to play in the second clip produced by his daughter. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Claude Gobillot, 75, concedes that he is no longer as alert as before, but prevents him from driving “would be difficult to absorb“. “I have to have a means of transport, the nearest bakery is four kilometers away. And I don’t feel bedridden yet, although the disease is eating away at me. I minimize the kilometers, the fatigue“, insists Claude Gobillot, whose “fight would rather be to make regular medical visits from a certain age to ensure that there is no drift“.

In France, Road Prevention specifies working on proposals for aptitude tests during the three free medical visits at 25, 45 and 65 years old that the government intends to introduce. It recalls that a relative can seize the prefect who will be able to require a medical visit with an approved doctor, and possibly restrict or withdraw the permit.