With her tough robot leg, the fear of not belonging disappeared

On her website, the accident that led to her disability is described in quite some detail, but if you ask paralympic athlete Kimberly Alkemade (33) about it, you will meet resistance. The past no longer feels relevant, she says. It is now more about her as a top athlete. And besides, she doesn’t remember much about it. That she woke up in a French hospital.

But to understand the path Alkemade has taken as an athlete, you cannot ignore the accident of 25 years ago. An experience that she calls traumatic and that has partly determined her life. Without that accident, she would now have had a regular job and would not have participated in the Para-athletics World Championships in Paris this week. That’s why it’s good to stop for a while.

When she was eight, Kimberly, her two brothers and parents drove a coach through France to Spain. She sat with her mother in the front on the top floor of the double-decker. When the driver drove into a traffic jam, her mother died and Kimberly was thrown out through the windshield. Her father and brothers were slightly injured. She attended her mother’s funeral from a bed.

It didn’t matter much if Alkemade had been gone. The specialists who saved her life spoke of a medical miracle. She broke her upper left leg, lost her lower left leg and had a basilar skull fracture. But Alkemade has a positive attitude, she says, just like her mother was. It wasn’t until around the age of 21, when she started therapy, that the realization came: what I’ve been through is not wrong.

What others think

She describes what it was like to have one leg as an adolescent. Difficult, because you are always concerned with what others think. She wanted to belong to the normal people, as she calls it. Going to school, studying, going to work, wearing shorts when it’s hot. But she found out more and more that she was not normal, no matter how many long pants she wore over her prosthesis, although you may wonder what normal is, she immediately adds.

In her twenties she got a job in care for the disabled. Nice work, but she craved more action. As a little girl she was always outside and on the move. So she started asking around: which orthopedic instrument maker does something with sports and exercise? That turned out to be Frank Jol, who helped her with a second-hand sports prosthesis.

And so it happened that Alkemade went for a run for the first time in nineteen years. And after eight weeks ran her first five kilometers. She also started playing volleyball and snowboarding and got the hang of it so much that she signed up for a Paralympic talent day in Amsterdam in 2017. Not to become a top athlete, she says, but to look at the possibilities and to make contact with fellow sufferers.

She was scouted for snowboarding and athletics, but chose the latter because she has more aptitude for it. To her joy, she noticed that with the blade – her tough robot leg she calls it – the fear of not belonging also disappeared. She previously hid her prosthesis under long trousers, now she opted for shorts. The blade is in your face, she says. By doing something active with it you get positive reactions. People no longer stare, no longer ask questions. It’s just cool. Point.

She also became more assertive. When she noticed that the collaboration with her coach Arno Mul was not going well – his personality and way of communicating did not suit her – she decided to form her own team. With Joep Janssen, the man who became national coach at the beginning of this year. How nice is that, she says, when you do something that suits you and benefits from it.

After ‘Tokyo’ she started to reflect: what is needed for a Kimberly 2.0 at the Games in Paris?

Sports have been getting better in recent years. At the World Championships in Dubai in 2019, she took silver in the 200 meters and bronze in the 100 meters. The following year she won bronze at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo in the 200 meters. And next year at the Games in Paris, she hopes to be her strongest self. The World Cup, from 8 to 17 July, is a stepping stone. Because the Games with the public (unlike in corona time) is the highest achievable.

She has made good use of the corona period, she says. After ‘Tokyo’, she started to reflect: what is needed for a Kimberly 2.0 in Paris? And why in Tokyo did she feel like she was carrying heavy ballast? Her aunt had died just before, the aunt who was like a second mother to her. The disbelief and mourning about it came later.

She set out on a walking tour from the Portuguese Valença do Minho to the Spanish Santiago de Compostela. Six days of walking, about 25 kilometers every day. And every day she wrote a letter to her aunt. When she took the plane back home she felt lighter. And that’s important, she says, because 90 percent of the races she runs are decided by her mental state. You won’t run faster from ballast.

Why me?

She is a positive person, she repeats, but sometimes she also thinks: they must have me up there. Most people her age haven’t already lost two loved ones. She finds that helplessness the worst. That feeling of: why me?

But she certainly feels proud too. That she paid attention to the tough times in her life to get where she is now. That her fiancé no longer has to support her because she has an A status since ‘Dubai’. That she ran her best time ever in the 100 meters during a World Cup qualification in May: 12.76 seconds. That this year for the first time she is second in the world ranking at two distances.

But even more than sporting excellence, her goal is to show others that you can turn suffering into something positive, as long as you are willing to live through that suffering.

We live, she says, in a world of beautiful pictures and fun stories. Of people who go through life like robots. By speaking from her heart, she hopes to put others on edge. Like: oh yes, that’s what we live for.