Helen Pierpoint
By Helen Pierpoint
A QUADRUPLE amputee has completed a 14 kilometre swim across the straits of Gibraltar as part of a plan to swim between all the continents of the world.
Philippe Croizon swam the stretch of water from Tarifa to Morocco in just over five hours with the help of prosthetic flippers and a snorkel.
He has already swum the English Channel in addition to the Gulf of Aqaba between Africa and Asia and between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
His mammoth mission, he says, is to prove ‘we’re all the same, that there are no differences, whatever the politics, the skin colour or the handicap’.
The French citizen became an amputee after suffering an electrical shock adjusting his television antenna in 1994.
He’s already looking ahead to swimming across a section of the Bering Straits after which he claims he’ll be received by President Barack Obama.
