Page 30 - BPW-UK - E-news - Edition 124 - September 2024 - COMPLETED

Paris Olympics

A friend of mine has limited mobility and relies on her mobility scooter.
She and her sister have always loved and owned horses, riding when she had been able to.
They went to the London Olympics together to watch and had planned to visit Paris too.
Then her sister died suddenly.
Depression and sadness threatened to overwhelm her. Finding out her sister had left
her some money, she decided to spend it in a way her sister would have approved of and
rented an Airbnb near Paris for the week the dressage competition was on and bought some
tickets for the Olympics.

Olympic visitor wheelchair tickets allow a carer to accompany the user, so she called
up some friends to go along and share the holiday with her. Six women sharing a house !
To make things a bit easier, I offered to drive my partner’s Shogun with 4 of us in
from the UK and booked tickets on Le Shuttle. The other 2 ladies followed a day later by Eu-
rostar. The car, despite being huge, was crammed full with the mobility scooter and every-
one’s luggage, plus some food for the first couple of days until we found the local shops.
Driving through passport control and queuing for the Shuttle the excitement started mount-
ing and having a disabled person onboard we were supposed to have priority boarding;
however we ended up in the middle of the train and had to walk through 8 carriages to the
toilets which our host struggled with and then couldn’t make it back to the car so when we
arrived at Calais, all the cars and vans in front of us had to drive off and I had to drive for-
ward to the front half of the train where she was sat outside the toilets waiting for me so
she could get back into the car before we could continue disembarking.
The first day of Dressage was on the Tuesday and the setting was Versailles. The Pal-
ace of Versailles and the Gardens are in a setting of 800 hectares of parkland. The Olympic
information was rather sparse about parking for the disabled but it did say to arrive at your
destination 1.5 hours before the start of the competition. So 2 of us set off for the first day
as we were going to take it in turns to play carer. The Palace of Versailles was easy to find
and having found it we proceeded to ask several policemen where to park the car, showing
both Olympic tickets and disabled badge. We were ushered into a car park. Brilliant; now,
where was the arena?