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A Frenchman who lost all his limbs in an electrical accident swam across the English Channel, a challenge he's been preparing for two years.
Philippe Croizon (pictured), 42, set off from Folkestone in southern England just before 8am (local time) and arrived on the French coast just before 9:30pm, propelled by his specially designed flipper-shaped prosthetic legs.
According to an official, Mr Croizon landed on a rock at the bottom of a cliff near the Wissant coast in Calais and his support team said he immediately boarded a boat heading to Britain.
Steadying himself with the stumps of his arms, he was advancing at a constant speed in good weather, his support team said, adding that he was in good form and had been accompanied by dolphins for part of the crossing.
Mr Croizon swims at around 3km/h, slightly slower than the four or five kilometres per hour that an able-bodied athlete might achieve.
In 1994 the metalworker was hit by a 20,000 volt charge as he attempted to remove a television aerial from a house roof and an arc of current surged through him from a nearby powerline.
Doctors were forced to amputate his limbs. As he recovered in hospital he saw a television documentary about a Channel swimmer and an ambition was born.
The father of two said he wanted to complete the dare "for myself, my family and all my fellows in misfortune who have lost their taste for life".
Mr Croizon trained for his feat for two years and last month completed a 12-hour swim between the ports of Noirmoutier and Pornic on France's Atlantic coast.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From AFP:
