Reda Haouam, captain of the Dutch wheelchair rugby team, calls wheelchair rugby “the most beautiful sport you've never heard of.” These beautiful words come from a report made by NOS during the Paralympic Games in Paris. For 20 years, Reda's life has revolved around wheelchair rugby. As a teenager, he suffers a spinal cord injury after an accident. During a vacation, he dove into shallow water, hit his head on a sandbar and broke his neck.
Reda approaches his rehabilitation with an athlete's mentality and sees it as intensive training. He wants at all costs to return to his active life, in which sports played a major role. Initially, he shies away from wheelchair rugby, which looks rough in his eyes.
During the first training session he hesitates, but at the second he gets into the wheelchair anyway - and discovers what he can still do. He turns out to be talented and is soon selected for the Dutch team. Within a year he is captain, plays for international clubs and travels the world. Eventually, he also started a company that manufactures and supplies wheelchair rugby chairs.
Attractive sport
For years, wheelchair rugby has been one of the most attractive team sports at the Paralympics. That's why it's all the more a shame that the sport is so unknown in the Netherlands, says Reda at TeamNL. To date, the Netherlands has not yet managed to qualify for the Games.
That is why he will be in Paris in 2024 as a spectator, where he is impressed by the amount of audience in the stands. “I think my maximum number of spectators is something like 2,000.Those still make a lot of noise, but the 8,000 sitting here is really different cake.”
Why is this sport so beautiful?
“Wheelchair rugby is a perfect mix of spectacle, with lots of speed, agility, beautiful passes, but also tremendously hard contact.There's also super much tactics behind it.It's not just bumper cars with a ball, but figuring out how your opponent plays.There are so many layers to it, and because of that I never get tired of this sport.”