Paralysed by polio, competing alongside men, winning medals: Lis Hartel, an Olympian like few others

The word trailblazer fits Olympian Lis Hartel perfectly.

In the great history of the Summer Games, there are only a handful of athletes who can claim to have overcome the sheer number of hurdles Hartel had, before bagging not one but two Olympic medals.

Should she be remembered for breaking the glass ceiling in equestrian, a sport that women were not allowed to compete in before 1952? Should she be remembered as the first woman to win a medal competing alongside men in her chosen discipline?

Or should be remembered for personifying the triumph of sheer human will, having been paralysed following a polio attack when she was 23? Or, perhaps, as an ambassador for people with disabilities? Or winning accolades after motherhood, long before icons like Serena Williams and Mary Kom wrote memorable scripts of their own?

Take your pick.

Simply put, there are very few boxes that Hartel didn’t tick during her extraordinary journey to the top. While some wilted and faded away in the face of adversity, she seemingly revelled in it.

An inspiration in every sense of the word

Born on March 14, 1921 in Hellerup, Denmark, Hartel was coached by her mother Else having taking a liking to horse riding at an early age. While dressage (one of the equestrian disciplines) was her first love, she also took part in show jumping competitions as a teenager.

She married a horseman at the age of 20. While being pregnant with her second child at the age of 23, Hartel’s life changed upside down. She suffered a massive polio attack.

While she delivered a healthy baby, Hartel was left wholly paralysed. Between 1944 and ‘47, Hartel took baby steps to get her life back on track. The doctors had only given her a slim chance of walking with crutches. But determined to get back to riding horses, Hartel went through several months of toil just to be crawling again; the polio attack was so severe that it had affected the movement of her hands too.

Within eight months, Hartel was able to walk with the help of crutches. For the next three years, she devised ways to balance herself while riding her horse. There were frequent falls with little or no support from the leg muscles that is a part of an equestrian’s drill.

Hartel was now using the support of her back a lot more while her hands were slowly recovering. After three years of toil, she made a memorable comeback in the Scandinavian Equestrian Championships in 1947, finishing second and subsequently qualifying for the Olympic Games in 1948.

Alas, an archaic rulebook stopped her from participating; only recognised male army officers could take part in dressage, ruling out women and civilians. But four years later, in Helsinki, Hartel would make history. The spectators who had gathered at the race course would also witness one of the most emotional Olympic stories of all-time, as reported in The Independent.

She needed help with even mounting and dismounting from the horse named Jubilee but once she was on it, she was grace personified. Hartel won a silver medal in the individual dressage event, becoming the first woman to do so in the Summer Games in direct competition with her male counterparts.

Now, for the medal ceremony, Hartel had trouble walking up to the podium

Gold medallist Henri Saint Cyr of Sweden, who had edged his opponent out by just 20 points, picked Hartel up and took her to the stage for the medal ceremony. The story goes that there were few dry eyes in the arena as Hartel summoned her might to stand on her weakened legs, weeping, as she received her silver.

Hartel would go on to become the Danish dressage champion four more times (in 1953, ‘54, ‘56 and ‘59) and won silver again at the 1956 Games, yet again finishing behind Saint Cyr. By this time, she had already become an icon for people with disabilities.

With help from her therapist, Hartel pioneered the first therapeutic riding centre in Europe. There were therapeutic centres all over the continent by the late-1960s.

The accolades kept pouring in even well after she had retired. She was included in Denmark’s hall of fame in 1992 and was named as one of the top ten athletes from her country of all time in 2005.

She founded the Lis Hartel Foundation in the Netherlands which supports therapeutic riding for people with disabilities, and raises money for polio victims. Hartel was in the midst, showing demonstrations of how it is done. There is little wonder that she ranked setting up therapeutic riding higher than either of her Olympic-medal wins.

The Danish great died in 2009 at the age of 87, quite comfortably becoming an Olympian par excellence: defying gender norms, combating a deadly disease, and importantly, displaying hope and courage to people with disabilities.