Christie Raleigh Crossley’s Long Journey To The Olympics Could Instead Lead To The Paralympics

The Olympic dream Christie Raleigh Crossley had harbored since 1996 ended suddenly 22 years later.

A swimming lifer, Raleigh Crossley grew up in the pool, where her parents coached. Raleigh Crossley was a high school state champion in Florida, the 2006 ACC Freshman of the Year for Florida State and then a Team USA hopeful for the Olympic Games Beijing 2008.

Then a decade passed. It might as well have been a lifetime. But through each life-altering complication thrown her way, Raleigh Crossley always found herself back in the pool, still chasing that Olympic dream. And so there they were in late 2018, training and dreaming of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.

(Raleigh Crossley identifies as non-binary and uses they/her pronouns)

That’s when her son picked up what he thought was a snowball and accidentally sent Raleigh Crossley’s life askew again. Turns out the snow was actually a ball of ice, and when it knocked her in the head Raleigh Crossley sustained a traumatic brain injury.

Though Raleigh Crossley never lost consciousness, her body began to twitch on the drive home. Her left arm felt heavy.

“Something wasn’t right,” Raleigh Crossley said.

Doctors ruled out a stroke. Instead, they found a blood tumor in her brain, and it was bleeding.

On the advice of a friend, who is also a neurosurgeon, Raleigh Crossley elected a craniotomy — surgically removing part of her skull — to extract the cluster of abnormal blood vessels.

“And I wanted to do it as fast as possible to get back to training,” Raleigh Crossley said.

On Jan. 7, 2019, less than a month after the initial injury, Raleigh Crossley arrived at the NYU medical center for the procedure. And as soon as the mandatory recovery period wrapped up, they packed up and headed to the pool. That’s when it hit her.

“I was like, ‘Oh you are not the feel-good story of Tokyo,’” Raleigh Crossley said. “‘You are not going to be an Olympian.’”

There was a time when Raleigh Crossley was hyper-focused on making the Olympics. And for good reason. Growing up in Toms River, New Jersey, they practically lived in the water. Over three years at Pinecrest High School in Fort Lauderdale, the swimmer then known as Christie Raleigh won four Florida state titles. Then, as a freshman and sophomore at Florida State University, they earned All-ACC honors and became an All-American. The Beijing Games were a year away, and the dream felt attainable as ever.

“When I was that 18-year-old kid at Florida State trying to make the Beijing Games, that was our sole focus,” Raleigh Crossley said. “Oh we’ve got to get to the Games, we’ve got to get to the medals, we’ve got to get this, we’ve got to get that.”

Now 36 years old and a mother of three, the focus is different.

“My goal for 2024 is to show my children Paris,” said Raleigh Crossley, choosing her words carefully. “So that’s how I frame it. Because I know that showing my kids Paris means that I made the Games.”

And this time, the Games are the Paralympics.

In a different reality, had everything gone as planned, Raleigh Crossley might have realized her Olympic dream years ago. From just about the start, though, life hasn’t gone to plan.

It began in high school, when Christie was a hotshot freshman swimmer in New Jersey but relocated to Fort Lauderdale to escape bullying. Then, in 2007, a drunk driver struck the car Raleigh Crossley was riding in at upwards of 70 miles per hour. The impact left her with herniated discs in her neck and lower back, making Beijing 2008 impossible. Doctors said her swimming career was likely over. Florida State agreed, according to Raleigh Crossley, and released her from the team.

“I ended up not swimming for a year,” Raleigh Crossley said. “Then, watching all my friends go to the Olympics, break world records, bring home gold medals, I was like, ‘You’re not done with this.’”

After more than a year away from the pool, Raleigh Crossley found a lifeline at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, the home pool of Michael Phelps, who was then coming off his historic eight-gold-medal performance in Beijing.

“My coach Paul Yetter was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work, but we’ll see,’” Raleigh Crossley recalled. “Within just a couple months, I was going just as fast as at Florida State.”

The comeback was never going to be that easy, though. An opportunity arose to finish out her NCAA career at Auburn University. Instead, Christie got married, and three months later was pregnant with her first daughter. It proved to be an abusive relationship, Raleigh Crossley said, and by 2011-12 the swimmer had gotten away from that and back in the pool, this time with her sister Lindsey Raleigh at Division III Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey.

Raleigh Crossley won an NCAA title there, then became a personal trainer in the New York City area while continuing to train as a swimmer.

The Beijing and London Games had passed.

Maybe the Olympic dream was alive for Rio in 2016?

A fluke injury in 2014, followed by her second marriage and the birth of her son, ended that dream. Then, the December 2018 ice ball revealed her long growing tumor — believed to have stemmed from the 2007 car crash — and left Raleigh Crossley paralyzed on the left side of her body, permanently ending her Olympic hopes.

Prior to the Olympic Games Atlanta 1996, Raleigh Crossley had an opportunity to meet Beth Botsford, then a 15-year-old backstroker on the U.S. team. Soon after, in Atlanta, Botsford raced to a pair of gold medals, one of them individually in the women’s 100-meter backstroke. The performance left young Christie in awe of the Olympics.

“It stuck with me,” Raleigh Crossley said. “I was like, ‘I want to represent the United States. I want to hear the national anthem and watch that flag raise.’”

That dream never died, even when her hopes of making the 2008, 2012, 2016 and then 2020 Olympics did. Yet when Raleigh Crossley turned on the TV to watch the Tokyo Games in the summer of 2021, the former swimmer, now partly paralyzed and using a wheelchair, knew little about the Paralympics. A promo featuring Team USA Para swimmer Michelle Konkoly, a two-time gold medalist in Rio, opened her eyes.

“I was like wait a second: she’s not blind, she’s not missing a limb, she’s not in a wheelchair,” Raleigh Crossley said.

Soon after, Raleigh Crossley underwent the rigorous classification process and became an S9 Para swimmer — the same as Konkoly.

It’s been a sprint from there. Raleigh Crossley began training in earnest at the beginning of 2022, and by the end of the year was a national champion in the 100-meter backstroke S9. Three months later, at a meet in Italy, Raleigh Crossley set a world record in the 50-meter backstroke S9 (a non-Paralympic event). Next up is the World Para Swimming Championships, which start July 31 in Manchester, England.

Nothing can prepare a person for becoming disabled. For Raleigh Crossley, the events of 2019 marked only the latest time her identity had been stripped away from her. This change was especially hard, though. Swimming had been her life, and for years Raleigh Crossley had fine-tuned her body to do exactly what they wanted it to do. Losing those things left her in a deep depression.

“Para swimming saved my life,” Raleigh Crossley says now. “I don’t know if I’d be here if I didn’t find out I was eligible.”

The transition has still been hard. Raleigh Crossley has found a new professional passion as a swim coach in New Jersey, and a new competitive outlet in Para swimming, but relearning to swim without full control of the left side of her body has been a physical and emotional roller coaster. Even her world-record swim this spring felt like something was missing.

“It’s hard because you’re setting a world record going a time that you went when you were 12,” Raleigh Crossley said. “So that kind of messes with your head when people are making a really big deal about something, and you’re like, ‘But I remember what I could do.’”

At the same time, touching the wall that day in Italy brought clarity to her mission.

“What it did give me was a sense of like, 'Okay, you can still get up and perform even though you’ve had all these crazy things happen,'” Raleigh Crossley said, “and even though your body doesn’t work correctly all the time outside of the pool, at least sometimes in the pool it works.”

That’s the clarity Raleigh Crossley is bringing on this mission to make the Paralympic Games Paris 2024. Making — or not making — the Paralympic team won’t define her. Winning a medal there won’t make all her struggles go away. Instead, this journey is a platform.

Raleigh Crossley is making a point of sharing her story, including in candid posts to her Instagram and in traditional media, such as a recent feature in Sports Illustrated, in an effort to build exposure for the Paralympic Movement. Mentoring her teammates, and helping lead them to a better future for themselves and for the sport, is a priority, too.

“I think that we have a duty as national team members who have influence over younger athletes to set a good example and show them it’s going to be better,” Raleigh Crossley said.

Perhaps most important, though, this is an opportunity to show her kids Paris.

“Now it’s such a different motivation,” Raleigh Crossley said. “It’s about the life experience, teaching (my kids) to overcome anything."