'If I didn't have the heart of a sportsman I wouldn't be alive'

Ryadh Sallem, France's most loved Paralympian, on taking inspiration from jugglers and changing people's mindsets

- Angelique Chrisafis

When the French wheelchair rugby team play their first match today, all eyes will be on Ryadh Sallem, whose extraordinary journey from thalidomide baby to record-breaking athlete has made him one of the country's best-loved and longest-serving Paralympians.

Sallem, who will turn 54 at the Paris Games - his sixth Paralympics - is best known for competing in several sports. He began as a swimmer, breaking the 1991 world record for the 400m individual medley. Then he learned circus juggling techniques in order to become one of the first wheelchair basketball players without two full hands. After Paralympic basketball, he chose wheelchair rugby, which he describes as a gladiator sport, competing in London and Rio.

Finishing his Paralympic career in his home city of Paris is, he says, a "rendezvous with destiny".

Sallem was born in the Tunisian coastal town of Monastir, with no legs, no left hand and a malformation of his right hand.

His mother had taken the drug thalidomide, which was used in the 1950s and 1960s for morning sickness but led to thousands of children worldwide being born without limbs.

"My grandfather fought for France in the second world war and he told my parents: 'If you want to save your child you have to take him to France," he says. So, at the age of two, Sallem's father took him to a French hospital rehabilitation centre outside Paris. Sallem would spend almost 20 years living in what he described as a hospital setting with a school attached - a kind of hospital boarding school where he had numerous surgeries.