The Good Work and Good Deeds of Salvatore Cimmino
Salvatore Cimmino, an Italian amputee and long distance swimmer who became the first disabled athlete to successfully swim across the Cook Strait, recently wrote, “Sports represents for all boys and girls with disabilities, the means to establish relationships, develop motor and cognitive skills, and to discover their own creativity.
Often, for boys and girls with disabilities, athletics is intended exclusively from a therapeutic and non-playful perspective. Therefore, almost always the groups to which they belong do not prescribe those functional aids to make toys accessible. These toys can be bought in specialty stores, but they just don’t have prices accessible for all.
Thus, many disabled boys and girls are deprived of a privileged opportunity to explore the outside world. That is why there is a need for legislative instruments to equate the rights of civil disabled individuals with those who are injured at work.”
Cimmino was nominated for the 2012 World Open Water Swimming Man of the Year award. His nomination read, “Salvatore Cimmino is relentlessly positive and positively impatient. He continues his Swimming in the Seas of the Globe (A Nuoto Nei Mari del Globo) and completed two noteworthy swims this year. His first swim in 2012 was a 40 km swim across Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo near the Rwanda border. Cimmino’s second swim was a 25 km crossing of the Boston Harbor in America. After getting his leg amputated at the age of 15, his passion to help others has enabled him to combine his love of swimming with a campaign to raise awareness about physical disabilities. In Israel, Italy, Argentina, Canada, New Zealand, America and Congo, he shows people what is possible and inspires people to dream big. His swims enable others to obtain prosthetic aids and to remove architectural barriers. For his ability to attract funds and scientific resources to his campaign, for his ongoing efforts to prove that disabilities do not need to define individuals, for the audacity of his dreams, Savatore Cimmino is a worthy nominee for the 2012 WOWSA Open Water Swimming Man of the Year.“
For more information about Cimmino’s work, visit www.salvatorecimmino.it.
