Marieke Vervoort
Paralympic Games gold medal winner who ended her life by euthanasia
MARIEKE Vervoort, who has died by euthanasia aged 40, was a Belgian athlete who became one of the faces of the 2012 Paralympic Games in London, winning gold in the 100m T52 wheelchair class.
She became the focus of worldwide attention four years later, before the Rio Games, after revealing she had already decided to end her life when she could no longer endure the pain caused by a degenerative spinal condition.
With her shock of blonde hair, fearlessly frank ways and vocal competitive spirit, the “Beast from Diest” scored a major upset in 2012 by becoming the wheelchair sprint champion in a European record 19.68sec. In doing so, she held off defending champion Michelle Stilwell of Canada, who had earlier pipped her to gold in the 200m.
A year later, however, Vervoort suffered a serious shoulder injury while racing. She was told by a doctor she would never return to her previous level. Characteristically, this only spurred her on.
Having overseen her rehabilitation herself, she went on to set three world records and at the 2015 world championships in Doha, winning the 100m, 200m and 400m titles in her class. She then went to see the doctor who had given her the gloomy prognosis and thanked him: “You gave me the power to fight back like an animal. You make my mind only stronger.”
In 2014 she suffered a serious accident when boiling water spilt on her legs when she had an epileptic fit while cooking pasta. She had to spend four months in hospital and, as increasing pain made it harder for her to train, she began to contemplate euthanasia. This is legal in Belgium if three doctors deem quality of life to be intolerable.
“She is stubborn,” her friend Lieve Bullens said. “She knows what she wants. But she also knows what she doesn’t want. A living hell is not the life that she wants.
“She says to the pain, ‘I decide when to go. Not you’.”
At the Rio Paralympics, Vervoort won her second silver, in the T51/52 400m, but had spent the previous 30 hours being violently sick and on a rehydration drip. She went on to claim bronze in the 100m despite a bladder infection and a temperature above fever level.
Marieke Vervoort was born in Diest, eastern Belgium, on May 10, 1979, to Odette and Jos. She was a sporty child who enjoyed diving and ju-jitsu and had early ambitions to become a PE teacher.
When she was 14, however, she began to suffer repeated infections in her Achilles tendon. At first, this left her able only to walk on tiptoe, but soon she had to use crutches and it became apparent the disease was moving up her body. Doctors eventually diagnosed a rare and incurable deformity between her fifth and sixth vertebrae which would cause progressive tetraplegia.
Less well understood was the accompanying reflex sympathetic dystrophy which caused her excruciating pain. She was often unable to sleep more than 10 minutes a night, and she began to suffer from epilepsy.
Sport offered an outlet, and
Vervoort took up para-triathlon and twice became world champion before she had to quit the sport in 2008 when confined to a wheelchair.
She was much cheered by an assistance Labrador, Zenn, who was trained to warn her if she was about to have an epileptic fit by pushing its head between her knees.
Pragmatic as ever, Vervoort planned every detail of her funeral: “I want that everybody takes a glass of Cava, because she had a really good life.
“She had a really bad disease, but thanks to that disease, she was able to do things that people can only dream about.”
Marieke Vervoort died on October 22, 2019.