“And now, what sports can I practice?”, he asked Pau Navarro (Granollers, 1999) to your occupational therapist at theGuttmann Institute the first day of rehabilitation in the center, after forty-eight days admitted in Hebron Valley. Two months before popping the question, the young man suffered a cervical spinal cord injury due to a traffic accident on his way to l’Montilivi stadium to see a match of Girona and since then – it was at the end of 2018 – he has been in a wheelchair.
He cannot move his legs – where the damage is total – but he can partially move his upper limbs. Enough to satisfy their desire to continue playing sports and competing. “It’s not a physical thing, it’s also a mental process. But when I found out that I had a spinal cord injury, the first thing I thought about was when I could play sports again”, explains Pau in a conversation with the Newspaperfrom the same editorial group as Girona newspaper.
Before the injury, Navarro lived one of his best sporting stages: he was one of the promises of the handball spanish At the age of 18, he had already played with the first Handball team Granollersthe club of his life, and was part of the junior team of the Spanish team.
Sport and the ball have been part of his DNA since he can remember: first he started with football, then he realized that what he was passionate about was handball and later on, life forced him to take a different direction Currently, he is a player of wheelchair rugby in the ‘Spartans Granollers’ team. And in 2022 he wore the shirt of the Spanish national team again with this sport, having played in two Europeans so far.
“I hadn’t finished my rehabilitation at the Guttmann and I was already trying out sports to be able to practice them later,” admits the Valaisian. Before opting for wheelchair rugby, Navarro tried cycling and tennis, but they did not convince him. “I wasn’t ready to leave team sport after twelve years,” he says. That’s why he focused on playing wheelchair rugby. And he chose well, because in addition to competing, this sport allowed him to find a safe place where he was just another. “In the dressing room we all understand each other very well, we have the opportunity to talk about things that may be taboo in the street, but here they cease to be”, he explains. “We are the first to make dark humor among ourselves”, he comments with a laugh. “It’s a brutal freedom,” he adds.
Undeniably, sport has been a key part of his rehabilitation in all his processes. “When I started the sessions I decided to take it as training. I learned from a very young age that training requires commitment, effort and sacrifice. And I unconsciously internalized this in my rehabilitation”, comments Navarro who, in any case, stresses that the process was very long and expensive: “I lost twenty-four kilos from the injury, the majority of muscle mass. The doctors asked me to be patient, I had to relearn how to do everything from scratch». Eight months after the accident, he returned to playing sports.
Navarro, during a match with the Spanish junior team / Instagram
Paralympic sport still has many challenges ahead, such as the economic cost -uA rugby chair can cost up to 13,000 euros-, but it plays a very important role in the inclusion of people with disabilities in society. “I know people who after an injury have found it more difficult to reintegrate, but by trying the sport and creating this bond as a team, they have started to cheer up and be more independent”, he explains.
“But I’m not here to inspire anyone”, the athlete makes it clear. “What I want to show is the naturalness and normalization of my situation and that of many other people”, says Navarro, who regularly publishes videos of his training sessions through his social networks. «If I manage to break this taboo and ignorance that society has, I have already won».
Many things have changed, but today Pau Navarro continues to play in the club of his city with a ball in his hands. A different sport, a different pavilion and new teammates. But the same desire to overcome. “Tetraplegia is not the end of life, but the beginning of a new one», he concludes with conviction.
2024-03-24 05:30:45
#Tetraplegia #life #beginning
