Wheelchair rugby Paralympian Chuck Aoki is moving the ball forward | Team USA Athlete Voices

- I'm not gonna let this define me. I'm just gonna let this be an opportunity to be great at something. Every athlete on the court or on the track or in a pool is an elite athlete. It just looks different. And I thought, wow, that looks really cool, where people get knocked around and beat up all the time. And I said, okay, I want to try that. My name is Chuck Aoki. I play wheelchair rugby for team USA - Good defensive work first from Charles Aoki as the USA to try to auc the ball in the allowed time. - I got started playing wheelchair rugby because I saw the movie Murder Ball and I thought, wow, that looks really cool, where people get knocked around and beat up all the time. And I said, okay, I want to try that. So I showed up to a practice in Minnesota and got knocked around and beat up for two hours straight and instantly fell in love with it. There's nothing else like it. There's no other sport in the world like it. And I just, I love it so much. It's brought me so much joy in my life. During my first Paralympic games, I didn't know what to expect, honestly, because it was this thing I'd always dreamed of doing. And suddenly I was there and I was like, I don't know what's gonna happen. Like, you know, there's a McDonald's, you can get all the McDonald's you want at, there's people everywhere. There's thousands of fans to watch. I'm getting delusion by fans on the street. It was incredible. So I didn't know what to expect, but I think that made it, made it just so special being my very first time. But it was, it was really, really amazing. It ended up being, but it was definitely something I, I had no idea what to expect. I think we've seen a lot of growth really across the entire world, including the United States and the Paralympic understanding. You know, it's like when I first started the sport, people would say the Paralympics like, what is that? Like, most people have not even heard of its concept. But now I'll meet people all the time and they'll ask, am I Olympic athlete or Paralympic athlete? Oh, Paralympics, oh, that's so cool. And they talk about, they've heard of the Paralympics, they've heard of some Paralympic athlete. We've really seen so much understanding grow here in the United States and now we have to take it from people having just heard of it to being fans of it. But people have heard of it now, and that's, that's a huge first step we have to take. I hope that people can learn about para sports between now in Paris that, that every athlete on the court or on the track or in a pool isn't an elite athlete. It might look different than you're used to seeing, but every athlete there is an elite athlete at what they do. It just looks different because their function's different, their body's different. That doesn't make them any less elite, doesn't mean they don't work any harder, but it just looks a little different. So I hope people can understand that and appreciate every single athlete there for how hard they work and train to be the absolute best in the world. My hope for the future, Paralympians, is that they, they will all grow up in a world where there is no sort of question if Paralympics is equal to Olympics. You know, I think that my dream is that it's always viewed the same. Every Paralympic athlete is as much a household name as every Olympic athlete, you know? And I think that dream is coming, you know, Paris is gonna be an amazing game. It's gonna launch people on the journey, but the LA 28 games coming back to the United States are gonna just transform the Paralympic movement in an incredible way. What makes the Paralympics so unique is every single athlete there has gone through something in their life that transformed their life. You know, they never expected to have a spinal cord injury, grew up with cerebral palsy, suffer a stroke. That's something no one anticipate happening, and it changed their lives and it could have led them to be upset, be frustrated, be mad, and all those things are valid. But what they did is they took that frustration, they took that, and they channeled it into achieving something great and becoming the best at what they do. And I think that's why the title of Paralympian is so important to me and why it's such an incredible community to be a part of is every single time I'm at a Paralympics or an event, you look around, you see everyone in that room with you has gone through a similar challenge to you. They've gone through a struggle, they've gone through a really dark time where they were frustrated, they didn't know what was gonna happen. They had no control over the body, but they took back that control and they took their power back and they said, no, I'm not gonna let this define me. I'm just gonna let this be an opportunity to be great at something. And that's why the title of Paralympian is so, so important to me.