Paco Aguilar, basketball and inclusion champion

That car accident was very complicated for him because he was suffering from an illness and its consequences. He was a thirteen month old baby and looked like he had caught a cold. But he had contracted polio. His family, originally from Comares, had emigrated to Madrid in search of a better future. In the town and court, in the popular neighborhood of Carabanchel, his parents ran a fruit shop. When the little boy fell ill, he was treated at the San Juan de Dios Children’s Hospital in the capital of Madrid. He was born in 1959. So the year must have been 1960. «At first there was a lot of ignorance. They called polio ‘the childhood disease’, because it affected children. “It had a lot of impact on the family,” he recalls. And he also remembers the almost half a dozen operations he had to undergo in his childhood and up to the age of 18: “The hardest one consisted of part of my tibias being removed to support my trunk, because I had scoliosis. Furthermore, in Santander, since the tendon that joins the spine to the legs was not growing and my spine was becoming more and more concave, they cut it. “Although the most painful operation was when at 17 or 18 they removed all my prostheses.” His childhood and adolescence, therefore, were marked by his time in the hospital, by the movement between Madrid and Malaga, where the family finally ended up returning because the boy was better suited to a climate in which the temperatures did not drop much in winter. But, although the illness weighed on that child, that young man, he says that he was always very lively, very active: “If I couldn’t walk, I would go on all fours, they would put rag knee pads on me.”

Rehabilitation and exercise led him to be able to walk with the help of two canes for most of his life. It was the traffic accident he had in 2004 that left him in the wheelchair in which he moves around the basketball court today.

He studied, went to university and there he did a teaching degree. With a lot of will. «There were no centers or adapted toilets, although I managed. But there are moments in life that make a big impression on you. For example, when I couldn’t go out to the playground, we all stayed in class during recess. I had a teacher who made very balanced decisions. The truth is that I have come across people in life who dominated and defended equality,” he says, excited.

Force the system towards real inclusion

But, given his drive and determination, he was also forcing the system to improvise as it went along, because there were not yet many laws that protected his inclusion and he and his family forced it. So when his mother went to enroll him in a school, the director told him that his degree of disability was so high that he had to go to a special center; This argument did not convince her and she appealed to higher educational authorities that concluded that the school the family had chosen was the one the child should attend. He is also proud of another of his life milestones, when he took the exams for teacher with the specialty of Therapeutic Pedagogy. He says that the practical case that he was given to solve consisted of how to explain geometric figures to a class in which there were children with down syndrome and he said that he would take all the students to the basketball court and that he would take advantage of the drawings of the court to show them. “They were very impressed, no one had proposed anything like that and they asked me how I had thought of it,” he boasts. “I was just trying to put real integration into practice, because I had lived it,” he says. It is proof, he defends, that the next constitutional change will have to be the one that goes from the name “people with disabilities” to talking about “people with functional diversity.” No one better than him illustrates how everyone can enrich the world with their particular experience and the conditions of their existence. And there was a third great anecdote in his life: when he took the tests to be a football coach and at first they told him that a person with a “physical defect” could not dedicate himself to this job, he complained, and although he did not They granted him the title, they did give him authorization to direct training.

Francisco Aguilar Campos (or Paco Aguilar, as everyone knows him) was always a sports lover. At first, from football. And that is due, first, to living as a child near the old Vicente Calderón de los colchoneros (Atlético de Madrid), on the banks of the Manzanares, and later, to the San Juan de Dios Children’s Hospital, which he frequented so much for his polio, was near the Santiago Bernabéu, since Real Madrid players like Velázquez or Del Bosque visited the children from time to time. “I was so into the sport that if I couldn’t walk, I would kick the ball on all fours,” he recalls.

So he was barely twenty years old and despite his disability he was already a sports instructor for the Vélez-Málaga Sports Board: he was in charge of giving extracurricular sports classes to the children of half a dozen educational centers in the town. And then, when the opposition was removed, he started teaching Physical Education. What did the children say to you when you came in with your canes? At first, they looked at him curiously, he showed them the devices he was wearing, but then, “children don’t see the disability,” he says, excited. In any case, in the town everyone already knew him, he was very popular, so his time in the classrooms and schoolyards was not much new.

The transition from football to basketball

If your first passion was football, how did you move on to basketball? «In football I felt that I had no projection. The ‘normals’ seemed to have preference,” he comments, pointing out that the integration of diversity in football seems more complicated.

In his multiple job, in the frenetic activity that he has carried out all his life, he taught basketball in five schools in Vélez, learned at the capital’s wheelchair club, achieved the title of national coach and… the time came when he set up the Amivel. «At first we had rejection from the people with disabilities themselves; The social workers of the region were explaining the project to the municipalities, but the wheelchair had a very pejorative burden. And this is a sport that has much more value than the normalized one,” he explains. People were very hesitant to come to the fore, to show themselves with their disability and on their chair on a track in front of the public. But that, he continues, supposes true improvement: exposure to others as each one is. It also tells how today, little by little, athletes are normalizing jumping onto the field and sharing their experiences with their disabilities, their prostheses, and their treatments.

Be that as it may, the project took shape until it reached the highest category. In these more than four decades that Paco Aguilar has been in sport, what he values ​​most that has happened is the increase in the visibility of the activities carried out by people with disabilities. Although she also observes that it has been more difficult for women to go out due to family overprotection, although she considers that this is also gradually being overcome. In any case, the teams can be mixed, as is Amivel: among its ranks there is a woman, the Mexican Vicky Pérez.

Standards that guarantee inclusion

And it is precisely this circumstance that invites Paco Aguilar to explain how the sport in which people with functional diversity participate works and what makes it truly inclusive. When a wheelchair basketball team takes the field, it has to do so with a score of 14.5 points, which ensures the insertion of all types of profiles, because each degree of disability corresponds to a number, from 1 to 4.5, from lowest to highest. This means that if there are five players, there must always be people on the court with ratings of 1 or 2. Furthermore, to encourage women to play, 1.5 points are subtracted from their level of disability. This is a measure of positive discrimination that Aguilar supports.

But Paco Aguilar’s initiative is not limited to what is strictly sports. “People with disabilities kept telling me: ‘We’re tired of doing courses, but no one hires us.’ So together with Francisco Delgado Bonilla, who was a labor inspector and who was also mayor of Vélez, we launched the Special Employment Center, which is a company that only employs people with disabilities, who are dedicated to many activities, such as carpentry, ceramics, transportation, the elimination of architectural barriers…».

Athlete, teacher, activist, entrepreneur… enthusiastic, loquacious and eloquent, he jumps from the theory of inclusion to its practice. An example, not of overcoming difficulties, but of their normalization. Human beings are all different. But there are only a few who can be described as unique, essential for the community.