Christie Raleigh Crossley Faces Online Bullying: Just a few minutes after Christie Raleigh Crossley, an American swimmer, had set a world record in her first competition at the Paralympics on Thursday morning, dispatching rivals in the 50-meter freestyle-S9 preliminary heat, she beamed ear to ear as joy could barely be contained on her face. “I just want to have fun and take it all in,” she said with laugh and there was humor to her statement as she boarded a bus back to the athlete’s village. There were about six hours to go before she was scheduled to swim in the evening final.
But Raleigh Crossley said, during her wait, she read and commented on the social media in regard to her disability, even from a U.S. teammate and a competitor from another country. She expressed her satisfaction that she discussed the matter with the officials in charge of athletes’ welfare at the Village to see her being forced to come back to La Defense Arena to race to only be accorded a silver medal behind marvelous Chen Yi of China, who created a world record in the women’s 50-meter freestyle S10 category.
“I went from being the record holder of the world to being the most devastated that the whole world thinks I cheated and that I was imitating the hole in the brain and the cyst on the spinal cord,” she said while overwhelmed with emotions full of tears.
The controversy cast a shadow over a night in which the Americans won their first three medals of these Paralympics in the pool, where the athletes are classified in three categories: mechanical, sensory and intellectual. This is in the disability category known as paraswimming, which Raleigh Crossley joined in 2022 and her disability is a neurological condition that is classified under S9, thus competing against fellow swimmers with the same condition.
Raleigh Crossley, the New Jersey native, was struck by a car driven by a drunk driver in the year 2007 and was seriously injured on the neck and back. He had another car incident in the subsequent year that resulted in a brain injury. She nearly became paralyzed on the left side in 2018 after bleeding of a previously undiagnosed hemoglobinoma—a tumor that after vessels blood in her brain—revealed her Team USA bio.
After the accident, she persisted with swimming towards the Olympics before the tumor was surgically removed from her brain. She then watched the Tokyo Paralympics in 2021 and she resolved to participate in paraswimming, where she was setting her first American record in 2022.
Thursday alone was still ‘bullying’ which she has been experiencing for the past two years after chancing Paralympics, according to her.
“To be told online by all of these bullies that I am not in some way disabled as I look, just because I can swim faster than you lot, it’s pretty deflating,” Raleigh Crossley said. “That is why my family sees my disability day-in-day-out and what it does to our family life, what it takes from me, a person, a woman, it has been horrific.”
Raleigh Crossley refused to make public the identities of the athletes behind the online comments about her disability Thursday, but she said the teammate involved was ‘a well-known member of the Team USA, who abuses me more than everyone else.’
In an interview, she made this comment: “It is just absolutely disgusting.” “I have heard them say they want to be role models to the generations to come yet once a new athlete comes in to be treated that way, you are only saying those words because they sound good.”
Kate Hartman, a spokesperson for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said that the organization was “going to look into this matter immediately. ”
“We consider all issues related to bullying, harassment, and abuse very seriously,” Hartman said in a statement. “The rightful treatment of every athlete entails respect and fighting for their worthiness or sheer value in any competitive arena and that is why this competition was designed to embrace sportsmanship and good health of mind as well as the body.”
The pressure could have been clearly seen among Raleigh Crossley’s rivals on Thursday night, where Yi scored 27, an S10 record. 10. Raleigh Crossley into 27th place. 38 for silver, and Canada’s Aurelie Rivard won the bronze place for 27.62. Rivard, one of the most successful swimmers in this sport who won five gold medals for four Paralympics, performs with Raleigh Crossley for the first time at the Games.
“I was informed about what is going on and I certainly hope that she is who she claims to be, and I hope she deserves being in the class and on the pedestal,” Rivard said. “This is the only thing we can do; we have to rely on our system and hopefully it will pan out.”
Raleigh Crossley has three more days of events left in Paris and will be a medal contender in each; some of the such events include the 100-meter free, the 100-meter backstroke and the 100-meter butterfly. But she could barely discuss her show Thursday evening, let alone plan for the future.
She got teary-eyed during the interview with reporters after claiming her first medals. Eventually, what happened on the internet wiped out any chance of her celebrating the silver or her world record that she set earlier in the day, she noted. After approximately five minutes, she had to leave the interview to go attend to her children.
“When I say I am keen on changing for the better the future of the Paralympic movement, I am also saying that I will eradicate this toxic culture,” she said. “It has been quite a terrible day for me. ”
