The astonishing lie of Monique van der Vorst, the Paralympic athlete who miraculously regained the use of her legs

“After such a gift, I don’t expect anything more from Santa Claus,” she whispered to the Quebec newspaper on December 24, 2011. The Press in a portrait entitled: “The miracle has a name: Monique van der Vorst”. “I never want to sit down again. From now on, I want to walk, cycle, run.” A Dutch disabled athlete specializing in handcycling, Monique van der Vorst was known until then for having won two silver medals at the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing, while confined to her wheelchair. Having become paraplegic following an accident at the age of 13, she had gained recognition in her country and the sporting world. Until one evening, in a hospital room, she miraculously regained the use of both her legs and discovered a new life. Story.

Touched by grace

It was March 2010 when the top athlete began her regular training on a road in Mallorca in the Balearic Islands. At that time, Monique van der Vorst was 26 years old, paralysed in both legs since the age of 13 following a road accident in 1998, and a star in her country. Despite her youthful appearance, the young blonde woman, born in Gonda in the Netherlands, had become an icon of disabled sport by winning two silver medals at the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing in the handcycle category – a device specially designed for paraplegics. As spring began to bloom, Monique felt confident about starting her training. But as she sets off, she is hit by another athlete, an accident which results in her being taken to a facility in her hometown, in Holland, for three months of hospitalization.

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The media quickly became concerned, as fate seemed to be against the young woman. Several months before Beijing, Monique had already been the victim of a collision, this time with a car, while she was training in Tampa Bay, Florida. With serious consequences: in addition to being paralyzed in the legs, the shock had caused a rupture of the spinal cord. Faced with this background, the doctors were alarmed. And yet: one evening, lying motionless on her bed, the athlete felt spasms. “The inactivity was driving me crazy. And the spasms were exhausting me in addition to causing unbearable pain. Worse still, my body was atrophying to the point that I only had one hand that responded,” she always explained in The Press. One night, I started to make a fist to regain some strength in that hand. That’s when I felt a tickle in one of my feet. The doctors did some tests. They couldn’t find anything. But even though they didn’t really understand what was happening, they encouraged me. My leg moved a little, then a little more. I started with a few steps, then by standing for 5 minutes, then 10.” Three minutes later, she was walking.

Room for doubt

Faced with the miracle, the press went wild, and Monique got caught up in the spotlight. The spotlight called her. She went on the BBC, spoke into the RTBF microphone, and agreed to have cameras follow her on a report. Especially since things moved quickly: she immediately resumed training, to the point of becoming a professional cyclist, among the able-bodied. She also started her first marathon running the year she recovered, cycled from Italy to the Netherlands in three days, and gave various conferences to share her incredible journey, “her adventure”, she said. A true miracle – she even received the Legion of Honour in her hometown, from the hands of the mayor – everything seemed to go well for Monique, who also undertook studies in the science of body movements, between sports medicine, biomechanics and physiotherapy. “I was a very active child, but I had few memories of myself running. It’s wonderful to be able to do it! But it’s in the little details that I realize how easy life is when you have two legs,” she continued in the newspaper. The Press.

But as she embarked on this unexpected rebirth, doctors struggled to explain her recovery and doubts eventually set in. In 2011, while her recovery was making headlines in the press, more and more health professionals expressed their questions, even their suspicions. “I have never heard of a case of spinal cord injury where a person lost strength and feeling in their legs, then had a second accident that gave them back,” explained – among others – a certain Dr. Michael Boninger to NBC News. And he continued: “The fundamental truth is that accidents do not cause the damaged nerve cells to regenerate.” Especially since tongues were also starting to loosen, with witnesses claiming, according to a report recently broadcast by Brut on the biggest cheating cases at the Paralympics, to have seen Monique van der Vorst walking well before the Beijing Games and putting her wheelchair away herself in the trunk of her car. After several months of pressure, the athlete had no choice but to admit the unspeakable truth: she had, in reality, always been able to walk.

Having fallen from grace, kicked out of the famous Dutch women’s cycling team of Rabobank that had recruited her after her recovery, Monique had until then completely avoided the media life. For almost ten years, she would not appear anywhere. Neither on Facebook nor on Instagram. But since 2021, she has regularly updated her profile on LinkedIn, visibly having converted to medicine. In addition to lectures given with a certain discretion, we discover an internship in rehabilitation and rheumatology, then a research position at the Jeroen Bosch hospital in the Netherlands. Monique van der Vorst is also said to have obtained a doctorate from a university in Amsterdam, splitting a master’s thesis on “the effects of electrical stimulation of the trunk and hip muscles on sitting posture, extension and arm strength after spinal cord injury.” A joke.