The Galician athlete changed acrobatic gymnastics for adapted athletics when, at the age of sixteen, she lost a leg due to medical negligence.
Dice Desirée Vila (Gondomar, 1998) that sport took away his leg but saved his life. At the age of sixteen, when he was practicing acrobatic gymnastics, as he was competing at an international level, he had a fall and broke his tibia and fibula. An injury that was expected to be more or less serious due to the recovery time it required but that ended up costing him the amputation of his leg due to medical negligence.
After a rehabilitation and adaptation process – and with a lot of psychological work – he learned to walk with the prosthesis, he returned to sports and in 2018 he switched to athletics.
In August of that same year, he participated with the national team in the European Paralympic athletics competition and in 2021 he fulfilled his dream of competing in the Tokyo Paralympic Games, in which he achieved a diploma in the T63 category. In addition, he holds the Spanish record in the 100 meter dash. Next goal: the Paris Paralympic Games.
Referent
He has found a source on social networks to explain his desire to live and his experiences in athletics. She has almost 780,000 followers on Tik Tok, 59,000 followers on Instagram, 7,500 on Twitter and 4,200 on Facebook, which has made her a great ‘influencer’ who also takes advantage of having so many followers to normalize adapted sport.
In June 2018 he published ‘The only incurable thing is the desire to live’, a book in which he narrates all his experiences and explains his experiences, how he accepted losing a leg, how he recovered from the blow, and how his desire to live has been his engine all these years. ‘Desi’ also studied tourism in England and Malta but returned to Spain, settling in Madrid where she is studying International Relations, which she combines with his training at the CAR in Madrid. Nothing about her stops her and at 25 years old she still wants to give a lot of fight on the athletics track, on social networks and in life in general.