Super dad takes wheelchair-bound adopted daughter on daredevil adventures
Chloe, 13, was adopted as a four-year-old who could not walk, talk or communicate in any way.
When Stephan and Diane Couture adopted a disabled four-year-old girl she could not walk, talk or communicate in any way.
Chloe was also visually impaired, had cerebral palsy, was fed through a peg into her stomach and had a series of major operations scheduled to correct her curved spine.
Yet 13 years later her loving parents have given her experiences most able-bodied children can only dream of.
Engineer Stephan, 59, from Hurley, Warwickshire, has completed more than 600 challenges with Chloe, now 17.
These include more than 52 triathlons, hundreds of endurance runs, summiting Mount Snowdon and Ben Nevis, abseiling down the Forth Bridge and climbing some of London’s tallest buildings - including The Heron Tower, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Monument to the Great Fire of London.
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“It’s all Chloe’s fault!” Stephan jokes. “Shortly after we adopted her, we took Chloe to a garden centre in her buggy and at the carvery she started pulling herself along using the rails you put your tray on.
“It was just a few inches but the smile on her face was simply magical. This was a girl we’d basically been told would never be responsive or have any kind of life, here she was showing she wanted to go places.”
After getting their daughter a self-propelled wheelchair, they took her to their orthopaedic specialist who was “gob-smacked” by her development.
Diane, also 59, said: “Chloe has extreme Global Development Delay, but we’d obviously woken something up in her brain that we wanted to nurture and grow.
“Since then, she’s never sat still and she can sniff-out any slope which she’ll bend over at the top of, and whizz-down, cackling with laughter. She’s a speed demon!”
The duo will next be seen in the Superhero Tri powered by Marvel (CORR) at Dorney Lake, near Windsor, on August 17, which was created by Paralympian Sophia Warner to put people with disabilities “front and centre”.
- For more details visit superheroseries.co.uk
