Film explores life of Paralympian who chose the moment of her death

M arieke Vervoort died aged 40 on Tuesday 22 October 2019 about 8.15pm. She was at her home in Diest in north-eastern Belgium, her parents and loved ones at her bedside, following a small party with friends. It all was exactly as she had planned.

Vervoort, a world-record breaking Paralympian with an incurable, degenerative condition that caused her agonising pain, chose to die under Belgium’s euthanasia law. Now a documentary film on release in her native Flanders recounts the story of her final years and how she chose the moment of her death.

Pola Rapaport, a Franco-American documentary film-maker, stumbled across Vervoort’s story when she read a newspaper article about the Belgian athlete during the 2016 Rio Paralympics. Vervoort had won a silver and bronze in Rio in the T52 400m and 100m wheelchair races, adding to the gold and silver she claimed at the London Olympics four years earlier. But many journalists only wanted to know when the athlete would die, after the international press had picked up on a Belgian media report that she had filed her euthanasia papers.

“I’ll go for gold, then kill myself,” blared the headline of one British tabloid. The reality was somewhat different, Vervoort explained to the world’s media in Rio. She did not plan to die within a fortnight of leaving the medal podium, but had signed her papers for euthanasia in 2008, an act she said had saved her from suicide. “With euthanasia you are sure that you will have a soft beautiful death,” she told reporters. There is a feeling of peace, a feeling of rest on my body that I can choose how far I will go.”

Rapaport was immediately compelled. “I was so moved and so intrigued by someone young, beautiful, an amazing sports woman, who saw that her