March 13 : Barely an hour passes at the Ottobock repair shop in Cortina without another Paralympic athlete dropping off a damaged piece of kit to be repaired.
It could be a wheelchair, a prosthetic limb, a sit ski or even a race suit that needs cutting down to size.
For Peter Franzel and his 85-strong team of technicians working shifts across Cortina, Milan and Predazzo, finding solutions can be the difference between an athlete fulfilling their dream or suffering heartbreak.
“The athletes are training hard and they have made their goal to come here, they arrive in good shape and then one day before their event something happens to their equipment,” Franzel, who heads up the round-the-clock operation for Ottobock, the official technical service partner at the Milano Cortina Winter Paralympics, told Reuters.
“In that case the journey cannot be over. That’s why we are here. We find the solutions so they can focus on their sport.”
Heading into the final weekend, the highly skilled Ottobock technicians have already carried out nearly 400 repairs – ranging from relatively simple ones such as inflating the tyres on wheelchairs to carrying out modifications on the complicated suspension systems on sit skis.
As Franzel conducts a video tour of the workshop, two technicians are building a customised protective carbon-fibre cast for an American snowboarder who suffered a broken arm.
In another area, sewing machines are being used to make alterations to race outfits.
“It has been very warm this last week and the cross-country and biathlon athletes have been asking us if we can cut their uniforms and racing suits from a long version to a short one,” Franzel explains. “It’s a full range of tasks.”
Franzel has worked at every Paralympics since Beijing in 2008 and prides himself on giving every athlete who arrives at the workshop the best possible chance to compete.
“So far here at Milano-Cortina, we have not come across anything we haven’t been able to fix,” he said.
“We have over three decades of Paralympic experience and our team members are working in patient care centres or in research and development within the company. They know what to do.”
Some of the bigger nations bring their own technicians, who can use the workshop facilities. But Franzel said it is usually a case of working with the athletes themselves.
The workshop has a comfortable waiting area for athletes needing quick repairs, with a television showing the action.
“If you are changing the alignment on a prosthesis, it’s very important to get it right,” he said. “Sometimes athletes have spares, but usually not.”
Other challenges Franzel and his team have overcome include building a custom thumb orthosis for a French para-skier who arrived with a broken thumb, while a Bulgarian athlete needed a new fingertip for his hand prosthesis.
It is all part of the service provided by Ottobock, founded in Germany in 1919 to provide prostheses for World War I veterans.
“When the athletes come back in here with their medals in the mornings, it’s very satisfying,” Franzel said.
