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French amputee and swimmer Philippe Croizon, shows his father before he starts from British coast near Folkestone, to reach late on September 18, the French coast near Wissant. The Frenchman Philippe Croizon, who lost all his limbs in an electrical accident, succeeds his attempt to swim the English Channel, a challenge he has been preparing for two years. (AFP)
A French father-of-two who swam across the Channel 16 years after losing all his limbs in an electrical accident said Sunday that he was "the happiest man alive."
Philippe Croizon, a 42-year-old former metalworker, said he had performed his feat to inspire all those "who think life is nothing but suffering."
He set off from Folkestone in southern England just before 8:00 am on Saturday, and arrived on the French coast near Wissant just before 9:30 pm, propelled by his specially designed flipper-shaped prosthetic legs.
Steadying himself with the stumps of his arms, Croizon kept up a constant speed in good weather and was accompanied by wild dolphins for part of the 33-kilometre (20-mile) crossing, his support team said.
"For a while, I didn't realise what I'd done. It was only that night, when I went to bed, that suddenly I burst out laughing, and told myself, 'You did it!'," he told AFP by telephone from his home in northern France.
In 1994 Croizon was hit by a 20,000-volt charge as he attempted to remove a television aerial from a house roof and an arc of current surged through him from a nearby powerline.
"I was on my hospital bed, they'd just finished cutting off my last leg. You can imagine how that felt. And then I saw a television documentary on a female swimmer who crossed the Channel," he explained.
"There and then, I asked myself: 'Why not me one day?'," he said.
Croizon trained for two years and last month completed a 12-hour swim between the ports of Noirmoutier and Pornic on France's Atlantic coast, but his final Channel crossing was much faster than he had anticipated.
"At one point I told myself, 'Woah, slow down, you'll never get there if you try to keep up this speed'. I wanted to slow down, but I couldn't. The motor was running," he said, adding that he had expected to be at sea for 24 hours.
"It was huge. I was in the zone. I was inside my head. I didn't want to disappoint anyone," he said, declaring that his next long-distance challenge will be to swim between Europe and Africa.
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