In the Paralympic Fix-It Shop, Plenty of Fractures but No Blood

Spend some time watching the Paralympics and it will soon become obvious from seeing wheelchair athletes bash into each other while playing rugby and basketball that their flattened tires and dented frames might need multiple repairs over their tournaments. But at the Games’ fix-it shop in the Paralympic Village, repair requests can and do come from every sport.

Tire replacements and the spot welding of chairs broken in collisions made up only about 56 percent of the shop’s service requests through the first half of the Games, which continue through Sunday. And many of those chairs were never actually in the shop. Instead, the fixes were made by technicians on-site during rugby matches at Champ de Mars Arena.

“My feeling is that I see wheelchairs the whole time,” said Merle Florestedt, communications director for Ottobock, the Germany company that runs the shop. But the reality is different, he said. “It’s just as much as prostheses. And we also count when somebody brings in sunglasses that are broken.”

The repair shop has refitted prostheses — by traditional methods and via 3-D scanning — sewn loose straps back into place on braces, and even restored the silicone to a man’s prosthetic leg. The facility, 7,750 square feet, is a cross between a mechanic’s garage and a bloodless emergency room, where 164 staffers are available to triage damage to the equipment and assistive devices of more than 4,000 athletes competing in the Games.