‘My favourite world is with the mask on’: irrepressible Bebe Vio lights up Grand Palais

Bebe Vio fences like she is buffeted by the storm – but she is the storm. A curling, bending, surging force, looping backwards like a high jumper, tipping forward on the attack, chair clinging to the ground by its wheel grips.

“You see the world in another way when you have the mask on,” she once said. “My favourite world is with the mask on.” But all worlds are fallible, and in the echoing grandeur of the Grand Palais on Wednesday afternoon, a dream slipped away.

As she pulled off her mask after losing her women’s B foil semi‑final against China’s Xiao Rong 15-9, her beautiful face was screwed up in distress. There would be no third consecutive Paralympic title to add to the gold medals won at Rio and Tokyo. She slipped back into her prosthetic legs, a volunteer passed her a prosthetic arm, and she walked away, foil prosthetic still attached to her left shoulder.

Vio has no arms beyond the elbow, and no legs beyond the knee, after contracting severe meningitis aged 11. She fell into a coma and doctors removed her arms in an attempt to kill the infection. When it came to the decision to remove her legs, she took the choice out of her parents’ hands, saying: “If there is 1% chance of living, let’s amputate the legs.”

Her passion before the illness was fencing. Her passion after the illness was fencing, but she did not see how it was possible, because a fencer’s main strengths are in the fingers and the wrist. At first, she scoffed at the idea of wheelchair fencing as “for disabled people”, but after a year of physio, and learning to wear her new limbs, she was back among the epees and the foils. A few months later, she won her first competition. She is the only Paralympic fencer who fights without arms and legs.

At London, she was a torch bearer, at Rio she won gold when just 19, and she did it again in front of the silent stands of Tokyo. At the opening ceremony last week, she was in the Place de la Concorde, involved in the conclusion of the cauldron-lighting. She and her parents have set up art4sport to help the physical and mental recovery of children with prosthetic limbs, and her Bebe Vio Academy helps to promote Paralympic sport. Her irrepressible spirit and huge popularity – an Instagram following of 1.3 million – have led to endorsements with Omega and L’Oréal.

The skeletal metal bones of the soaring Grand Palais make it the perfect backdrop to a sport that is forged in the sound of epee on epee, foil on foil, and the scrape of the wheelchairs in which all the athletes compete. As Vio fenced in the bronze medal contest against Cho Eun-hye of Korea, the floodlights shone down the central piste and her fans, who had flocked to the towering temporary seats hoping for a gold, stamped their feet like a thousand thunderstorms, shouting: “Bebe, Bebe.”

It was a display of total dominance, beating a tearful Cho 15-2 in the time it takes to drink a quick morning espresso. She is on record as saying that she prefers wheelchair fencing to able-bodied fencing because “you cannot escape, you cannot be afraid”, and there was no sign of the morning’s disappointment carried into the bronze medal match.

“She [Xiao Rong] was a better fighter than me today,” Vio said. “Losing a gold medal doesn’t mean that you lose all of them, there are other medals. Every medal is super important. I’m so happy about the result today, I’m so glad for my friends, my family, my team for waiting with me and helping me to win this medal.”

And with that, the girl her scout group nicknamed Rising Phoenix – because she lived and burned and died and lived again – walked away.