Among the athletes to make France shine at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, Stéphane Houdet occupies a prominent place. At 53, the wheelchair tennis champion is participating in his fifth Olympiad. “In Paris or elsewhere I would have gone anyway, because I even consider that these Paralympic Games are not an end point to my career, I am already looking at Los Angeles and Brisbane”, he explained to RMC on August 20.
Holder of three gold medals, one silver and one bronze, the French champion does not attach any importance to his age, which some consider advanced for a high-level athlete. “At the US Open in 2023, I beat the world number 1. At the awards ceremony, he told me that I was older than his father and that he himself was older than my children”he said last month.
Stéphane Houdet: this decisive accident in his career
Stéphane Houdet has been accompanied by fierce optimism since the beginning of his career. “Wheelchair tennis made its debut at the Paralympic Games in Barcelona in 1992. Since then, the evolution has been exponential”the tennis player already enthused in the pages of Mondein 2014. It must be said that the athlete has come a long way.
On August 9, 1996, while traveling across Europe after joining a veterinary practice, Stéphane Houdet violently crashed into a car near Salzburg, Austria. Upon waking from his coma, he discovered that he had lost (…)
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