'Utterly devastated': American Paralympian Christie Raleigh Crossley verbally attacked

Christie Raleigh Crossley excelled at the 2024 Paralympics, but some comments from fellow athletes and social media users gave her experience a bitter aftertaste.

As detailed by Yahoo Sports, Crossley started her Paralympics run in style, setting a world record in a heat for the 50-meter freestyle in the S9 class. She swam the event in 27.28 seconds. The S9 class includes athletes who have weakness, limb loss or difficulty with coordination.

Crossley would build on her strong start, bringing home the gold in the women’s 100 meter backstroke S9 class. She also won the silver medal in the 50-meter freestyle finals, which combined S9 and S10 athletes.

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It was a massive triumph for Crossley, who initially had goals of competing in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, according to Yahoo Sports. However, she had several life changing events that altered her timeline.

Crossley told USA Today after her first medal, “I got off a bus and got verbally accosted by another athlete from another country.”

Crossley would go on to say “To be told online (and in person) by all of these bullies that I’m somehow not as disabled as I appear just because I can swim faster than them is pretty devastating.”

The swimmer would also tell The Washington Post, “I went from enjoying a world record to being utterly devastated that the entire world seems to think I was a cheater and that I was somehow faking the hole in my brain and the cyst in my spinal cord.”

Turning back the clock, Crossley seemed to be on track to compete for her Olympic dreams in 2008, but as noted by The Washington Post, she struck by a drunk driver in 2007. This left her with neck and back injuries.

The very next year, Crossley was involved in another roadway mishap. Yahoo Sports wrote that she was hit by a car as a pedestrian, which caused her to suffer brain injuries.

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Crossley also suffered a blow to the head in a snowball fight with her son in 2018, which led to the discovery of a tumor in her brain.

The final accident left Crossley with paralysis on her left side for good.

The 2024 Paralympics is not the first time Crossley has had to deal with questions about the extent of her disability. She told Today’s website, “I’ve dealt with bullying because I’m not missing limbs or because people think I don’t look disabled.”

She would go on to say “I want to show that Paralympians are more than athletes who are missing limbs. We are not just people in wheelchairs. We are not all blind. There is a spectrum of what makes someone eligible and there are many athletes who are missing out because they just don’t know.”

Even after her first two setbacks, Crossley still had her sights set on making an Olympics as soon as possible. She told Today that she was hoping to qualify for the 2016 Olympics, but her back would not cooperate.

Crossley would then set her sights on the Paralympics after watching the 2021 Games in Tokyo, and locked in on what would become a reality in 2024.

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Crossley talks about fellow Paralympic swimmer Michelle Konkoly as a guide on her Paralympic path. Crossley was fully aware of Konkoly’s story, which involved falling five stories out of a window, which left her with a spinal cord injury that she’ll have for the rest of her life.