PARIS — Spend any time watching the Paralympics and you’ll see wheelchair athletes crashing into each other while playing rugby and basketball, and it quickly becomes clear that their flat tires and mangled bodies may need multiple repairs during their tournament. But in the Games’ repair shop in the Paralympic Village, repair requests can and do come from every sport.

Tyre changes and spot welding of chairs broken in crashes accounted for only about 56% of the shop’s service requests in the first half of the Games through Sunday. And most of those chairs were never actually in the shop. Instead, repairs were carried out on-site by technicians during rugby matches at the Champ de Mars Arena.

“I feel like I see wheelchairs all the time,” says Merle Florestedt, communications director for Ottobock, the German wheelchair and prosthetics company that runs the shop. But the reality is different, she says. “It’s just as important as the prosthetics. We also count when someone brings in broken sunglasses.”

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The repair shop has reattached prosthetics using traditional methods and 3D scanning, sewn loose straps back into place on supports and even reattached silicone to a man’s prosthetic leg. The 7,750-square-foot facility is a cross between a garage and a bloodless emergency room, where 164 staff members are on hand to sort through damage to the equipment and assistive devices of the more than 4,000 athletes competing in the Games.

At nearly a dozen workstations this week, technicians and mechanics welded, sewed and even cut the equipment needed to make the Games possible. Their services are free to all Paralympians.

On Monday, members of the Brazilian men’s sitting volleyball team were heard playing a board game as they waited for a teammate’s prosthesis to be reattached. A wheelchair athlete from Ghana played on his phone at a table in a waiting area outside the main workshop that Ottobock has operated at every Paralympic Games since 1988.

In a chaotic, yet largely unseen, moment of relative calm at the Paralympics, Jeffrey Waldmuller and another technician received an emergency call two hours before the men’s 100m wheelchair final at the 2021 Tokyo Games when Belgian competitor Peter Genyn and two teammates discovered their competition chairs had been vandalized.

“It was really bad. He blew out his tires, he broke the steering linkage, all these things — these are the specific parts that they broke,” Waldmuller said. “And so we stole some parts from his teammate’s wheelchair that was going to race the next day, and we put them on his wheelchair. But then none of them fit or aligned. And we zip-tied them together and taped them together.” Genyn won the gold medal in the judged chair and set a Paralympic record in his class.

This week, Gemma Collis, a 31-year-old British wheelchair fencer, dropped by with a more mundane request. Her foam seat, sized for her competition chair, had gone missing on the way to the Games. She needed something that would fit her chair and be the same density, or nearly so, as her old cushion.

It was a small request compared to the one he made at the last Paralympics in Tokyo. He broke his wheelchair frame in two places while training the day before the competition. Fencers’ chairs are strapped to the floor during matches, angled parallel to each other, and absorb the full force of their parries and attacks.

“My chair is pretty old too,” Collis said, explaining that he thought it had only broken in one place due to metal fatigue. “Then I took it to Ottobock and they said, ‘Oh, we fixed it in both places.’ I said, ‘There were two of them?’”

The company brought two tons of equipment and spare parts to the Games and set up shop a week before the competition began, in part to fix any scratches and dents that might have occurred during transportation.

American Lindi Marcusen, who competes in the 100 meters and long jump, is a above-knee amputee who travels with more than one leg for competition and daily use. When she arrived in Paris, the socket on her “day leg” was not closing properly (it uses a vacuum to stay in place), a problem that can cause alignment problems and scarring at the graft site.

Marcusen was particularly concerned because he suffered a chafing injury in July 2018 that didn’t fully heal until late 2021. At the time, he chose to continue training without legs for the Tokyo trials, using a ski machine and resistance bands to maintain his strength. In Paris, technicians spent less than a day removing and cleaning the valve that was helping Marcusen’s socket stick.

The Ottobock team said it had produced 11 sockets for Paralympic athletes using the traditional method, which involves plaster casting and plastic moulding shaped with heat and pressure. Eleven were made using the company’s 3D scanning and printing software, marking the first time the technology has been used at the Games.

To create a model for a custom socket, technicians can scan an athlete’s limb using a handheld device about the size of a computer mouse, avoiding invasive manual poking and measuring. The image can then be used to create a plastic mold on the shop floor or sent to a nearby lab for printing.

Marcusen said replacing a competitive socket has cost him $20,000 in the past. “I work full time, like putting money aside to pay for the legs,” he said. “I don’t have a car payment. I have a leg payment.”

He said that the technicians in the repair shop represent the spirit that disabled athletes carry into every aspect of their lives.

“When you’re looking for solutions, you have to be aggressive and not pay attention to the problem,” Marcusen said.

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