Aoki, who was born with a nerve disorder and can’t feel his hands or feet, was already playing wheelchair basketball at a facility called the Courage Center in Minnesota when he saw the movie at age 15. “I was, like ‘Oh my God—they’re crashing into each other, they’re talking trash. This looks amazing—I want to play that sport,’” he said on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “I basically went to a practice, I got absolutely beat up for an hour and a half straight, and I fell in love with it.”
Players do sustain injuries from all that banging, although research suggests they tend to be minor, and many of them don’t require medical treatment. And there are rules and guidelines about collisions: For instance, players can’t strike another chair behind the rear axle and cause it to rotate, and contact between actual bodies isn’t permitted. Plus, the equipment players use is designed to absorb impact and protect their feet and other body parts.
“When you first see it, you’re going to see people in these tank-like wheelchairs,” Aoki told Clarkson. The one he wheeled into the interview weighs about 20 pounds, he explained, but rugby chairs are much heavier. “Those weigh about 45 pounds. They’re literally built for combat, to smash into each other, knock each other around.”
While the crashes might draw people in, watch longer and you’ll start to appreciate the underlying strategy, Aoki told Team USA. “What people don’t realize is there are many tactics in terms of who crashes into who, why we hit the way we hit and why we do certain things,” he said. “The aggression is very purposeful.”
Adam Pretty/Getty Images
Sponsors don’t always love the name murderball, but for the athletes themselves, it resonates, according to Sarah Adam, the first woman to go to the Paralympics for Team USA. (Yes, despite its brutal reputation, wheelchair rugby is a mixed-gender sport.) “Murderball breaks down stereotypes,” Adam told the Chicago Tribune. “People see us in wheelchairs and think we’re going to take it easy. No. We’re going to be elite athletes and we will be playing hard.”
After a bronze medal in London in 2012 and silver medals in Rio and Tokyo, Team USA is gunning for gold in Paris. Their first match is against Canada at 1:30 p.m. on August 29 in Paris (that’s 7:30 a.m. Eastern)—here’s how you can watch it.
SELF is your go-to source for all things Paralympics. Follow our coverage of the Paris Games here.
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