‘Live the sport with passion’: Ricardo Ten Argilés paved the way for Para sport

By Alex Carpenter, University of Tennessee

The time trial event of the 2026 Paracycling World Championships is nerve-wracking. Cyclists line up in single file after making the brisk ride to the start line from the athlete village. Some in silence, lost in thought; others with coaches biking alongside them.

Broden Ala made his solo ride to the start chute. The 15-year-old has only his learner's permit, with his dad, Eero, watching him from afar, a camera around his neck documenting every moment.

He reaches the tunnel, enters the chute, and prepares for 9.1 miles of solitude. There is no working with other cyclists. When 10:22 am local time arrives, the young cyclist is off.

Thirty-five minutes later, an MC1 rider takes off from the shoot – this is not his first ride.

Ricardo Ten Argilés of València, Spain, the 51-year-old veteran of seven Paralympic Games, explodes onto the track.

The embodiment of the Paralympic movement, the energetic multisport para-athlete has lived through the dramatic transformation of adaptive sports. 

He has no idea how many medals he’s won throughout his career. It’s reported that he has an Excel file at home where he tracks his collection of 11 Paralympic medals, 48 World Championship titles combined in swimming and cycling, and hundreds of additional national titles. 

Calm, cool, and collected, the cyclist crosses the finish line—another silver medal and an infectious smile on his face. 

Decades of experience separate the pair, yet their careers intersect at a crucial moment for the Paralympic movement: Ala’s is just beginning, while Ten Argilés has battled through a shifting landscape along the way. 

When Ten Argilés was 15 in 1990, there was no information available in Spain about parasports, but that didn’t stop him from trying to participate in sports. An accident at age eight led to Ten Argilés losing both arms and his left leg. 

A chance newspaper article about a girl near his hometown who was competing in a national swimming competition opened his eyes to what the para sport world offered.

He immediately fell in love with swimming. 

“I’ve been involved in the Paralympic movement for a long time,” Ten Argilés said in Spanish– and interpreted for this story through a translator. “And I’m really proud to have lived through the whole change in the Paralympic movement because when I started it was completely an amateur sport, hardly recognized at all.”

The year is 1996, and the Games are being held in America for the first time since the 1984 LA Games; it also marked the first Paralympics to be held in conjunction with the Olympic Games in North America. 

The Spanish Ten Argilés was one of the first athletes to experience the shift to what is now known as the modern Paralympic Games.

Back then, there was no high-performance technology, self-paced training, few sponsorships, and minimal equipment available to athletes. It was more about participation and half-hearted inclusion. 

Not for Ten Argilés. He was there to compete just like every other athlete was – and he was good, with a silver and a bronze for his debut Games. 

Then came the technology for him to break into the paracycling field; he immediately became a force on the track and set world records with his times. 

“Thanks to the many new technologies, the internet, and above all the work done by the different international communities, I've been able to experience that huge, huge change,” Ten Argilés said. “I’ve been able to experience moments that when I first started in Paralympic sport I never even dreamed of.” 

Since then, the movement has taken off, and Ten Argilés has been there every step of the way. He claims he never believed he’d be able to make a living from his success as a para sport athlete, and he became teary-eyed while speaking about the importance of being part of a culture of athletes making change.

The change these older athletes strove for opened doors for people like Ala to represent their country at a World Championship, with a system around him that cultivates talent and welcomes newcomers. 

“One of the other riders — He saw me — and we had a good chat, and he was really nice, excited for me. Another one-legged cyclist — He was the one who started around 15 that we talked to; he introduced me to another Australian cyclist,” said Ala. “He was talking about how the one-legged cyclists try to work together against the two-legged cyclists in the C1 category.”

As Ten Argilés crossed the finish line for another medal in a long line of success, another young cyclist from France, Thomas Tarou, bested him for gold. The Spanish rider was frustrated as a natural-born winner, but something inside him was also proud. 

He heads back to the athlete village—littered with tents from nations around the world—where athletes cool off with slushies and mist machines while staff tend to their hydration, work on their bikes, and meet their every need. 

Ten Argilés looks around. He still can’t believe how much the sport has changed in the time he’s been around it. He’s been a part of the change that allows Ala to now compete in a World Championship and have the support to be the best competitor he can be. This is the Paralympic movement. There's a simple message from the legendary paraathlete to the next generation. 

“I'd tell them above all that they have fun. That they live the sport with passion,” Ten Argilés said. “That they really live it, because they enjoy it, because they've got a strong drive to compete, you know? To get better, to enjoy the day-to-day of training, to make sure it isn't just one specific moment in competition but that they really have to enjoy the day-to-day a lot.”