Paralympic champion with severe spinal condition 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 the degenerative spinal condition from which she suffered.
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 time of 19.68 seconds. In doing so, she held off
Michelle Stilwell of
Canada, the dominant athlete of the era and defending champion from 2008, 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 that she would never return to her previous level. Characteristically, this only spurred her to exceed it.
Having overseen her rehabilitation herself, she went on to set three world records, and in
2015, at the world championships in Doha, she won the 100, 200 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 after 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 told the BBC of her decision. “She knows what she wants. But she also knows what she doesn’t want. A living hell is not the life that she wants.
‘‘I immediately had the feeling it was something that she could control, and if she had control of her life, she would live longer
. . . She says to the pain – I decide when to go. Not you.”
At the Rio Paralympics, Vervoort won her second silver medal, in the T51/52 400m, but she 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 that meant racing with a temperature well above fever level.
Marieke Vervoort was born in Diest, eastern Belgium, to Odette and Jos, a professor of tax law. She was a sporty child who enjoyed diving and ju-jitsu and had early ambitions to become a PE teacher.
“She is stubborn. She knows what she wants. But she also knows what she doesn’t want. A living hell is not the life that she wants.’’
Friend Lieve Bullens
When she was 14, however, she began to suffer repeated infections in her Achilles tendon. At first, this left her able to walk only on tiptoe, but soon she had to use crutches and it became apparent that 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 and lasting bouts of pain. She was often unable to sleep more than 10 minutes a night, and she began to suffer from epilepsy.
Sport offered an outlet, not least as a way of commanding a body intent on betraying her. At first she took up para-triathlon and twice became world champion before she had to renounce the sport in 2008 after becoming confined to a wheelchair.
In recent years her vision had begun to deteriorate, her finger function to decline and she had given up racing after creeping paralysis reached her chest in 2017; she took up indoor skydiving in a vertical wind tunnel instead.
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.
Vervoort had also fulfilled several longheld ambitions, notably visiting Japan to watch sumo and to see the cherry blossoms. She had published a memoir, in Flemish, and co-operated on a forthcoming film about her decision to end her life, Death and the Racer. Last month, she got her final wish, to be driven around the Zolder race circuit in a Lamborghini Huracan.
Pragmatic as ever, she had 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.” –