Daniel Dias

Daniel Dias was born in Campinas, in the state of São Paulo, with both arms ending above the wrist and one leg shorter than the other. His mother has said she was told he would never be independent. He grew up playing football in the street and was, by his own description, a normal, noisy kid who did not think of himself as disabled.

He did not learn to swim until he was 16. In 2004 he watched the Athens Paralympics on television and saw Clodoaldo Silva, a Brazilian swimmer with cerebral palsy, winning gold after gold. He decided to try it, and within a couple of months he was winning regional races. He had to teach himself a stroke that worked with his body, and he trained in a public pool with a coach who had never worked with a disabled swimmer before.

At Beijing in 2008, four years after his first lesson, he won nine medals, four of them gold. In London in 2012 he won all six of his events. In Rio in 2016, in front of a home crowd, he won nine more medals. He finished his career in Tokyo in 2021 with a total of 27 Paralympic medals, including 14 golds.

He has said that he wants to be remembered for showing other disabled Brazilian children that a pool is a place for them too.