Winner of the Keep Living Award 2006 was the Danish shot putter Jackie Tony Christiansen, who for years has been found in the very elite of disability sport. Within the last five years alone he has won all major international championships, including a Paralympic gold medal, two European championships and two World championships.
This year the athletes selected the winning athlete themselves. This illustrates the general sympathy for Jackie Christiansen, and the fact that his popularity is supported by his results surrounds Jackie Christiansen with a great deal of respect from both colleagues and competitors.
To overcome limitations
At the same time Jackie Christiansen is a symbol of how a person can turn his limitations into advantages. 14 years ago he had a complicated fracture of his leg, and a medical error caused an amputation of his left leg. But this did not stop Jackie Christiansen, and today he is one of the biggest names in Danish disability sport. And his personal strength makes him a role model for young people in a similar situation.
Therefore it was a pleasure for Pressalit Care to assign Jackie Christiansen the Keep Living Award 2006 and the 20,000 DKK that followed, and CEO Dan Boyter said: “I am very pleased that the colleagues have chosen to vote for Jackie Christiansen as winner of the Keep Living Award 2006. Jackie is a very talented and serious athlete, who for a number of years has been at the top of the world’s elite, and outside the arena he is a role model, who uses his background to inspire others. He is the soul of a “Keep Living person”, and Pressalit Care sees him as a very worthy winner of the Keep Living Award.”
The Keep Living Award
The Keep Living Award is given in a collaboration between Pressalit Care and the Danish Sports Organization for the Disabled (Dansk Handicap Idrætsforbund). Additionally, Pressalit Group last year opened the Pressalit Sports Academy, which provides training facilities and possibilities for optimizing results for the athletes. The academy has an ambition of placing Denmark among the very best at the next Paralympic Games in Beijing in 2008, but also to raise the current level of the Danish disabled athletics elite in general.