Thank you for listening to my speech which aims to inspire you but also to inspire me because every day we must be inspired by new dreams, new goals that will make us better. Today, the aim is for us all to dream.

I started swimming at the age of five. It was for me the beginning of a journey that would never end; it was the beginning of a dream that never stopped even after my accident.

But let us take things from the beginning. I started swimming at the age of five and slowly, around the age of ten, I started competitive swimming. I took part in many national championships with very good results. Then I moved on to water polo at about the age of 14. At that point, a beautiful journey began, as I became a champion with my teams in the 3 Junior (under 14, under 16 and under 18) and the Senior (born in 2003 and earlier) categories. Thanks to these honours I was able to join the Greek Police Force. It was the Christmas holidays, during my training at the Greek Police School and I was going extremely fast on my motorbike outside the swimming pool – on a road I had been taking since I was five, which I could ride along with my eyes closed – I overestimated my skill and control of my bike. I hit the pavement and as a result became paraplegic, paralyzed in my lower limbs. That’s when all the good stuff started. While as an incident it was something very distressing for my family, especially my mother, my father and my brother, I never changed, not even at that moment. I continued to do what I had been doing before, except that now I did it in a different way, with awareness of the value of life, being healthy and above all, feeling the power of the spirit and the soul. Until then, as we all do, I had relied too much on the material, on the strength of the body. A big mistake we all make. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to change that, to look at it differently. I never changed my way of thinking, my way of living, I just adapted to myself the new way of life I had to follow. That is how I continued to be Antonis, the Antonis who dreams, the Antonis who sets himself goals every day, the Antonis who wants to be a better person. In our society we don’t need better champions, better lawyers, etc. We need better people, people who think about their fellow human beings. That is what we all need to do, to be united to overcome all obstacles. It’s enough for you, yourself, to want this to happen, to be able to see it.

So, on the road where I grew up and became a man, that is where I had the accident. That is where I lost an ability that until then I had thought was the most important thing in my life walking. But there, when I started going again, after a year for physiotherapy, that is where I took back another power, that of inspiring, of making others walk towards their dreams and my power to continue walking towards those dreams even though I am sitting in my wheelchair. It makes no difference at all. What matters is that we walk towards our dream, the dream that everyone has. But a dream that will help the greatest number of people, not each one individually.

I started swimming once or twice a week. I remember that it was very, very, very hard. I could not get to the other side of the pool, I would get tired. And I had put on a lot of weight after the accident because I had been lying in bed for almost seven months and had gained 30 kg. Those two times a week slowly became three and then I was swimming every day. This every day swimming gave my coach the idea of suggesting that we enter competitions: “It is okay, we are going for fun, just for the trip”. But because I am a competitive person, I started to train more seriously and harder, to eat better, to do home workouts; and I remember that time when I shaved my body to be more hydrodynamic. My coach, seeing me in those first competitions, where not much was expected from me, came and said: “Antonis, do not forget that we are going there just for the trip, not to win medals and cups”. He was afraid that I might be disappointed if I did not do well. But I knew deep down that I could do it.

So, we started going to competitions and I got three gold medals and set two national records. You can imagine how happy I felt to be finally able to take the last step on the ladder that would bring me back to life, to equality. That is, equality in my mind, because there is in fact equality, but sometimes we have to convince ourselves, in some tangible way, that we can be the same as before. From there the journey to Paralympic sports began. To this day, I have never once considered giving up.

With the Safe Water Sports team, we have made a video about the safety measures we need in every water activity and in all our every-day activities; I really want others to stand up too, even if they are in their wheelchairs. If your spirit, your soul, stands up, then you have accomplished so much in the world. Because the world is you. We are all together!

That is how my story started, and that is how it continues in general terms. And I am the one to decide when it ends, meaning the dream behind my efforts in the Paralympics.

Last year, with COVID, things changed a lot. We experienced the fear of becoming ill, of our loved ones becoming ill and us being no longer able to go on with our journey towards the dream. I was extremely lucky but also very careful. Sometimes we are responsible for our luck. I followed the government’s instructions to stay safe and I succeeded. I remember when we had the first lockdown in Greece, I did not know if I would be able to train for the Paralympics, if others would have that opportunity, and I thought, “If I get behind with my training, how shall I be prepared?” There was the fear of not training, of getting sick and I started to imagine many bad scenarios. But as a human being I put the good scenarios in my life first and use the bad scenarios as motivation. So, I decided that I would start my training right after the lockdown was lifted because my coaches had a private pool for their academies. So, I was able to continue. I am pretty sure nine out of ten athletes didn’t train, while I was able to get the same thorough training but under different conditions. I didn’t miss a single day and I was sure that I would be one step ahead of them because I really like what I do.

As we all know, the following year’s Games were postponed, and I was able to rest. The new year found us with the same concerns. There was a lot of talk about the Paralympics possibly being postponed and that only the Olympics would be held because they are a larger-scale event. It was thought that because of the Olympics many COVID cases and mutations might be recorded just before the Paralympics leading to their postponement. Up until two months before the Games, we lived with the possibility that they would be postponed at the last minute.

The preparation included not only swimming, but also gymnastics and weightlifting, i.e., workout out of the water. This was another difficult scenario that I would have to cope with. Fortunately, I found a physical therapy centre that had weight-lifting equipment that was able to meet this need. So, I did my gym workout, it changed almost nothing in my routine. I was able to continue and increase the chances for the achievement of my dream, the dream of getting a medal at the Paralympics. Two days before travelling to the Village, I remember feeling extremely anxious when we did the PCR test because I could not be sure that I would not test positive and risk being excluded from the event, and even participation. But because I had followed all the safety rules, I was able to travel. The anxiety about COVID did not stop, however, because every day in the Village we had to do tests to confirm that we were clean. You can imagine how we, the athletes, woke up every day, having that stress. Whereas the only stress we should have had was productive stress for the day of the competition, about how we were going to perform, not about getting sick, not about getting COVID.

But it all went well. There were some problems in the last week in terms of how my body was responding to the water, because the beds there were designed for able-bodied people, not disabled. So, you can imagine that the hardness of the mattress and the material it was made from made my sleep very difficult, especially combined with jet lag. My back was sore, my legs were cramped, even in the preliminaries my body was stiff. However, on the competition day I was able to relax my body. But I relaxed my mind first. I got rid of all negative thoughts, put on my headphones, went to the call room, waited for the competition to begin and listened to Cretan music. Cretan music is the music of my homeland, Crete. I put on this music because I could feel my body wanting to get up and dance. I realised from the morning when I heard this music in my ears that it was what I needed to activate myself, to activate my body and my spirit. That day my body was ready to dance, it was restless in a positive way. So, I dived into the water with what I wanted to hear in my ears, and what I wanted to achieve in my mind. In doing so, I finished 3rd in the 100m breaststroke in the SB4 category. When I finished, I didn’t look at the scoreboard. All I did was celebrate without even looking at the result. When it was time to leave, I asked the coach who was helping me, “What happened in the end?” and he replied, “You got it”. “The medal?”, I asked him, and he said “Yes” and that’s when I started celebrating too.

After all that, after that one day, I realised that no medal would put me in any category, it was only my efforts that would make me a winner. As far as I was concerned, once I was at the start and taking the first step, I was already a winner. I didn’t care about the result. The result wouldn’t make me better. What would make me better throughout my life, in swimming races or in the race of life, was making the effort, going ahead, going forward with a dream to be better and make the world a better place.

That is why I wrote a story. It is a bit autobiographical. The hero is Tony. Tony had an accident that left him unable to walk and using a wheelchair. So, Tony had doubts about whether he could help support his poor family, earn money so they could live normally. He believed he couldn’t do it and decided to ask a wizard’s help to make him well. This wizard lived on top of a mountain near his home. On the way to the mountain, he met another child, Aris. Aris was blind and he too was going to the wizard to make him well. So, they both started the journey to the top. One pushed the other and the other, who could see, told him which way to go. They became one: the blind man with the one who couldn’t walk. So, they reached the wizard. They knocked on the door of the tower and his assistant came out. At that moment a girl arrived. This girl didn’t appear to have any disability. They asked her her name and she said it was “Zoe”. “What’s wrong with you, Zoe?” they asked. She replied, “I have no one to love me, no one to look after me, my parents have died, I am alone in this world and I have come to ask the wizard to find people to love me”. The wizard’s assistant at that moment said that “...because everyone comes here and wishes for the wrong things, I will grant only one wish, I cannot grant any more, this will be the last wish, so choose which of the three will go into the tower and ask for his or her wish”. At that moment Tony, the protagonist, realised what he really had in his life and if he was missing something. He realised that he truly had it all, that he didn’t have to walk or offer something to be loved. He pulled Aris aside and told him: “Let’s go, we have no business here, we already have everything at home, as long as we return and embrace them. Let Zoe go in and get the most precious gift, which we have had all along but couldn’t see”. So, Zoe went in, Aris and Tony went back home, hugged their folks, told them how much they loved them and so “....everyone lived happily ever after”.

That’s how it happened to me. This story with a few changes is based on my life. But the love you have for yourself, and the love others have for you is the solution to everything. The solution that will give you the ability to make an effort and subsequently make you a winner; a winner who doesn’t need a medal or a record. Winning in life is more important than any race and this will make you a better person. And when you make yourself a better person, you will make the whole world a better place.

That’s all I have to tell you. This is my story, a story that will continue and become more inspiring for everyone.

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TSAPATAKIS Antonios, "My Paralympic experience at TOKYO 2020", in: K. Georgiadis(ed.), Olympic Games and the Pandemic: Opportunities,Challenges and Changes , 61th International Session for Young Participants(Ancient Olympia, 17-23/09/2021), International Olympic Academy, Athens, 2022, pp.74-79.

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