A stroller is not a sentence: having lost the ability to walk, a St. Petersburg woman opened a sports club to introduce disabled people to sports

First steps in sports

Razilya was very athletic since childhood: she was engaged in gymnastics, dancing, rowing and kayaking. In 1994, in Tatarstan, while diving into the river, she received a serious spinal injury and was no longer able to walk. But the life of the girl did not stop there.

“I am a fighter by nature. In my life there must be a start and finish, and always with a result. Therefore, when they say that the main thing is participation, this is not about me. I must have a result, and a significant one. For me in life it is very important to achieve, to fight, ” – says the president of the sports club “Paralympic” Razilya Ermakova.

After the injury, Razilya rediscovered the sport. The first thing the woman did was to find out what kinds of activities she could do in her condition. It turned out that there are options, and there are many of them. While in rehab, she discovered Paralympic boccia, a ball game often compared to bowling or curling (only the players sit in wheelchairs).

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Bocce (translated from Italian as “balls”) is a ball game similar to curling. A target ball is thrown onto the field. The player’s task is to score six balls as close to the target as possible (you can also knock out opponents’ balls). A point is awarded for each ball that “passes” the opponent’s ball. The one with the most points wins.

Boccia is bocce adapted for people with physical disabilities. The main distinguishing feature is the use of special equipment: guide ramps, stands or bases for ramps, benches for assistants. Paralympic sport.

In addition to boccia, Razila also started playing table tennis and wheelchair fencing.

“My morning began at 9 o’clock, I went to the rehabilitation center, practiced boccia, then I moved to another area, Nevsky, where I already trained with the team. Then fencing lessons at the Chernyshevskaya metro station with the Spartak team. In general, three workouts a day – there was no time to be bored, ” Razil recalls.

Football and floorball on electric wheelchairs

Everything changed again when electric wheelchairs appeared. Razilya again began to find out what kind of sport can be mastered already on them. I learned about the existence of football on electric wheelchairs. But it turned out that in Russia they are not engaged in it. Then the girl went to the Paralympic Committee and offered to organize a new sport in the country – electric wheelchair football. Everyone liked the idea itself, but there were no funds for its implementation. The problem was also that there was simply no such direction in the register of sports. However, the idea of ​​electric wheelchair football did not let Razily go, although she was never interested in football and did not even know the rules of this game.

“I have always been interested in striving for something, achieving results and learning new things. In 2013, I went to Helsinki, because Finland is the closest place abroad where you could watch football in electric wheelchairs. There I attended a training session, talked with the trainees (a friend living in Finland helped with the translation). In the end, I really liked it. Over the next couple of years, I assembled a boccia team, we even went to competitions. And in 2017, I matured and created the Paralympic sports club, formalized it. And in the end, the boccia team became the electric wheelchair football team.” Razila shares.

Of course, in words everything seems simple. Meanwhile, the members of the club did not have sports wheelchairs, they had to use their “household” ones, putting special protection on them. Despite the fact that the speed of the game was low, the eyes of all those involved were on fire. Gradually, Razila managed to purchase sports wheelchairs for her athletes at her own expense.

“Floorball (field hockey in the hall. – Ed.) on electric wheelchairs appeared in 2017. Again, I saw this sport in Finland. There we watched electric wheelchair football one day, and floorball the next, and that’s how I learned about this fast-paced dynamic game. We started with football, then moved on to floorball. Both directions are both rehabilitation and socialization for people with disabilities,” Razil says.

And then, according to our interlocutor, everything started spinning and away. In 2021, we managed to get support from the Russian Football Union, and football lessons on electric wheelchairs went beyond the borders of St. Petersburg: today there are 14 teams in Russia. Razilya notes that people have an interest in this sport, a desire to go to training.

“In St. Petersburg, we created a football team on electric wheelchairs “Paralympic”, in the Leningrad region – a team “Ladoga”. We also have a Neva team and a team for beginners. People who come to us, first of all, ask the question of what to do if they do not have a stroller. We say, they say, come, you will train on ours. And so they come, sit on electric wheelchairs and make their first movements. Their parents usually carry them, many have tetraparesis of the upper and lower extremities, they themselves cannot drive an ordinary wheelchair, and we fix the arm on the armrest, and the athletes can ride on their own. They are indescribably delighted and look forward to the next workout, ” Razil says.

GTO on electric wheelchairs

In 2014, when Razila was 49 years old, she entered the Lesgaft University at the Department of Adaptive Physical Education. Even then, the woman was thinking about the inaccessibility of the TRP complex to various para-athletes. Yes, there is a set of exercises for active wheelchair users who have good working hands. But there are people who move around in electric wheelchairs, and ordinary (or classic) wheelchairs are beyond their power.

“The idea to develop a full-fledged TRP complex for electric wheelchair users came back in 2018. Gradually, this idea was realized, Razil says.

At the end of last year, the first competitions in the new discipline “GTO on electric wheelchairs” were held at the Paralympic sports club. All exercises are aimed at developing physical qualities, they include elements from floorball and electric wheelchair football. The tests are different: drive a distance with obstacles for a while, pass between the cones with a soccer ball, kick the ball into the goal, control the stick and the floorball, and so on.

Future plans

Razilya recalls how happy she was when the first electric wheelchair appeared in the club, then another and another. The inventory was purchased both at their own expense and under the presidential grant, some things were brought by the athletes themselves. Now the biggest difficulty in the development of the club is the lack of its own gym.

“I appealed to the administration of the city and the Frunzensky district, to the Legislative Assembly, asking them to build a small stadium. We could open different rooms for adaptive and physiotherapy exercises there. This would be especially useful for children with spinal injuries, cerebral palsy, and so on. We would make more exercise groups: for children, teenagers, adults… Shopping centers are being built in every district of the city, why not build sports halls for adaptive physical education?” asks Razila.

But the woman does not despair, she understands: it is not harmful to dream, and dreams will certainly come true. Now we have to deal with what we have. And this is renting a gym for 48 thousand rubles a month. Since August, there will be more training, so the rent will also rise in price – up to 60 thousand rubles a month.

“But these are all small things. For me, the most important thing is to see emotions in the eyes of people who come to us to study. Not only their lives are changing, the lives of their parents are also changing,” says Razilya. – Sometimes it seems incredible to me that people with serious spinal injuries play football, floorball. In general, we have different sportsmen: there are those with cerebral palsy, cerebral palsy. And all of them, having visited one training session, look forward to the next one. We have a boy Artem, who lives in Veliky Novgorod, when he found out that there would be training for beginners, he immediately arrived, although the path was long.