Natalia Partyka was born in Gdansk almost 35 years ago without her lower right arm. She is a six-time Paralympic table tennis champion. On August 13, 2008, at the Beijing University Gymnasium, she succumbed to Hong Kong’s Tie Ya Na and, as a member of the Polish women’s team, became the first tennis player to compete in both the Olympic and Paralympic Games of the same edition. It would repeat in London, Rio and Tokyo.
Partyka would not impose herself as the only one in her discipline to embrace duality: the Australian Melissa Tapper would emulate it in Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020. Nor as the only athlete: since the Italian Paola Fantato, in archery in Atlanta ‘96, there would be six repeaters. Five women and Oscar Pistorius.
Six until Paris 2024, a game in which Brazil’s Bruna Costa Alexandre, third in the world’s Paralympic ranking, will stretch the wake of the Polish multi-champion (whom she described as a source of inspiration) and Tapper. At 29 years old, she will be entered in the seventh line of the record. It will compete in the two multi-sports festivals at Arena Sud 4 between July and September.
The amputation of her right arm due to thrombosis after two months of life placed her for the bulk of her professional career in the orbit of athletes with disabilities, in which she won a world title in Bratislava 2017 and four Paralympic medals: two bronze in Rio 2016 and one silver and one bronze in Tokyo 2020. Broken down, one was placed in the individual test and the rest in the team test in both Games, in which she flirted unsuccessfully with the greater glory.
Her significance in those tournaments provided her with a possibility of privilege among athletes with her condition: the transition to absolute competitions. In October 2023, she became the first parathlete to play a Pan American Game. She won the bronze medal in the team event in Santiago. In February, she represented a Brazilian team dismissed in the round of 16 at the Busan World Championship. The most prominent challenge is already looming on their horizon.
After being included in her country’s women’s Olympic roster together with Bruna and Giulia Takahashi, Alexandre expressed in one of her multiple Instagram posts her euphoria over the call, which she labeled as a “feat”: “This day will mark my career forever. Today I can celebrate, sing and even cry. God’s dreams will never die,” said the first Latin American athlete to delete and rewrite, a handful of days later, the prefix “para”.
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