Olympic Hopeful Who Became Paralyzed Doing Flip Finds New Purpose Reviewing Restaurants for Wheelchair Accessibility (Exclusive)

Taylor Lindsay-Noel became paralyzed at 14 after a gymnastics accident that ended her Olympic dreams

NEED TO KNOW

• Taylor Lindsay-Noel became paralyzed at 14 after a gymnastics accident that ended her Olympic dreams
• She launched Access By Tay to review restaurants and public spaces for accessibility, inspiring others with disabilities
• Her tea company, Cup of Té, was featured on Oprah’s Favorite Things list, boosting her entrepreneurial success

When Taylor Lindsay-Noel enters a restaurant, she notices details that many other diners might overlook.

She looks at whether the entrance has steps, if there is enough room between tables to maneuver her power wheelchair and whether the bathroom is truly accessible. Then, she shares what she finds with her followers through Access By Tay, her social media platform dedicated to reviewing restaurants and public spaces through the lens of accessibility.

For Lindsay-Noel, 32, the work is deeply personal. Nearly two decades ago, she was a Canadian national gymnast training for what she hoped would become an Olympic career. Then, one attempt at a new skill changed the trajectory of her life.

On July 15, 2008, the Toronto athlete arrived at the gym for what she expected to be a routine day of training. Instead, she says her longtime coach asked her to perform a skill she had never seen or attempted before.

“It was something that we definitely fought about back and forth over the course of an hour,” Lindsay-Noel tells PEOPLE exclusively. “But because of the dynamics in our gym and me appreciating and respecting authority, I eventually broke down.”

Lindsay-Noel says her coach assured her that other gymnasts around the world were performing the skill and told her she needed to trust him.

“I couldn’t fathom that somebody who was an Olympic-level coach would lie about something so serious,” she recalls. “Even though I was telling him over and over again that I didn’t really believe him, he was telling me that I was being a silly girl and that I was letting my fear cloud my judgment.”

“When you are a gymnast, you are very connected to your body,” she explains. “I knew instantly in the air that something really bad was going to happen because I was lost. I had no idea where I was.”

She landed headfirst, breaking her neck and becoming instantly paralyzed.

Lindsay-Noel never lost consciousness. As she lay on the mat, she remembers hearing her coach repeatedly tell her to get up and try again.

“I took a deep breath to get up, and when I tried, nothing moved,” she says. “That was terrifying because, as a gymnast, you fall all the time, but you always get back up.”

After several unsuccessful attempts to move, Lindsay-Noel told her coach something was wrong. He came over and began touching different areas of her body, asking her to say when she could feel something.

“He had the most icy blue eyes, and they kind of glazed over,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I’ve been touching you this whole time, and you can’t feel it?’ ”

It wasn’t until he brushed her chin that Lindsay-Noel felt his touch. An ambulance rushed her to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, where she underwent emergency spinal surgery.

Still, it would take weeks for the severity of her injury to fully sink in.

“The doctors in the ICU were telling me, ‘You will never walk again,’ and it’s a very jarring thing to hear,” she says. “However, I had always been an athlete, and I’m like, ‘They just don’t know me. I’m going to bounce back, and it’s all going to be fine.’ ”

After seven weeks in the hospital, Lindsay-Noel was transferred to Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. There, as she learned more about the spinal cord and the extent of her injury, she began confronting the possibility that she might never walk again.

She spent 19 months in rehabilitation, relearning how to navigate everyday life. When she first arrived, she couldn’t lift her arms and could barely sit upright without fainting. Tasks that had once been effortless suddenly required assistance.

“I hated people seeing my body when I couldn’t take care of myself to shower,” she says. “I hated having to ask for help to go to the bathroom.”

To cope with the grueling physical work, Lindsay-Noel drew on the mindset she had developed as an elite athlete.

“I started treating my everyday physiotherapy like training,” she says. “That mindset of being an athlete really helped me get through some of the most difficult parts of physical rehabilitation.”

Her earliest goals were seemingly small but significant: sitting upright without feeling faint, no longer needing her legs wrapped daily to maintain her blood pressure and eventually completing a bicep curl.

One of her biggest breakthroughs came when she received her first power wheelchair and learned how to maneuver it independently.

“That power wheelchair gave me a bit of freedom back that I didn’t have,” she says. “I was able to move about rehab by myself. When I was comfortable, I was able to navigate back into the community and go out to a mall.”

“That was my first step into feeling like, ‘Okay, this is going to be different. Life is going to be strange, but when I’m in my chair, I can be independent,’ ” she adds. “That is huge to me.”

@accessbytay

To the parents, siblings, caregivers, friends, and partners, we see you, we appreciate you and we love you for being on this journey with us 🫶🏾 – #disability #caregivers #relatable

♬ Lacy Official Instrumental – Dan Swift Del Rey

Although Lindsay-Noel made progress physically, she says the emotional toll was far more difficult to navigate.

“People think that being disabled is just a physical journey, but it’s a mental journey as well,” she says. “I struggled in silence.”

Lindsay-Noel describes herself at the time as “a functioning depressed person.” Already overwhelmed by the ways her body had changed, she worried that sharing her emotional pain would become too much for her loved ones to bear.

“I hid it from a lot of people for a very long time,” she says. “It brought me to a really dark place that I was scared I would never get out of.”

Throughout that period, her mother became her fiercest advocate. She slept beside Lindsay-Noel on a pullout chair every night during rehabilitation, retired early to care for her full-time and oversaw the construction of a fully accessible home for her daughter.

“She gave me a voice when I didn’t have one for myself,” Lindsay-Noel says. “I would not have been able to get through this experience without her.”

@accessbytay

To say we left disappointed would be an understatement. Truly, one of the least satisfying dining experiences I’ve had in a long time 🫤 – #noyaa #torontorestaurants #toronto #accessibility #AccessByTay @Emily The Recruiter @kenzie @kenziebrenna

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Returning home, however, brought a new set of challenges. Lindsay-Noel had grown comfortable at Holland Bloorview, where she had around-the-clock support and was surrounded by other young people facing difficult circumstances. Outside the hospital, she struggled as she watched her friends experience teenage milestones she feared she might never have herself.

Eventually, she began rebuilding her identity beyond the sport that had once consumed her life. She joined clubs at school, became involved in morning announcements and was elected student council president during her final year.

“Student council was a big part of me rediscovering who I was as a person,” she says. “Not Taylor the gymnast or Taylor the future Olympian, but just Taylor.”

After high school, Lindsay-Noel studied radio and television arts at Toronto Metropolitan University with hopes of becoming an entertainment reporter. She interned with Entertainment Tonight Canada and Global News but says she soon realized the industry was not yet designed for someone with a disability to easily thrive.

She ultimately created her own opportunities, first launching the interview podcast Tea Time with Tay. When a major tea company did not respond to her sponsorship request, she decided to launch a tea company of her own, Cup of Té.

The gamble paid off. In 2020, Lindsay-Noel received an email from Oprah Winfrey’s team asking her to submit products for consideration. Convinced it was spam, she initially deleted it.

The timing only made the message seem more unbelievable: It arrived on July 15, the anniversary of her accident.

“On top of this being the worst day of the year, I get this really horrible spam email suggesting that Oprah wanted to try my teas,” she remembers telling her mother.

Her mother encouraged her to investigate, and the email turned out to be real. Cup of Té was selected for Oprah’s Favorite Things list that year and again in 2024.

“It changed the trajectory of my business,” Lindsay-Noel says. “As an entrepreneur, that is one of the holy grail signs that you’re doing something right.”

@accessbytay

A gorgeous patio that you need to visit this summer! Will Bar Filo be Access By Tay approved? 👀 – #barfilo #torontorestaurants #toronto #accessibility #AccessByTay

♬ Golden Hour Bossa – Bossa Nova Terrace

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lindsay-Noel began thinking about another problem she had repeatedly encountered. Whenever she and her friends went to dinner, they tended to return to the same few restaurants because those were the places she knew she could safely navigate.

“I thought, ‘Why do people with disabilities have to worry so much about where they go?’ ” she recalls. “It’s because we don’t have accurate information about the places in our city.”

Once it became safe to dine out again, Lindsay-Noel began filming detailed accessibility reviews of restaurants, event venues and other public spaces around Toronto. Through Access By Tay, she shows viewers what it is actually like to navigate each location in a wheelchair.

The platform quickly found an audience far beyond what Lindsay-Noel anticipated. Along with wheelchair users, her followers include older adults, caregivers and parents looking for places they can navigate with strollers.

“I thought my audience would only be disabled people, but to this day, I get messages from able-bodied people saying, ‘Thank you for opening up my mind. I didn’t even think about this before,’ ” she says.

Her first viral review documented a disappointing birthday dinner at a restaurant Lindsay-Noel had been told was wheelchair accessible. Although she could enter through the front, she says the interior was difficult to navigate and the bathroom could only be reached using stairs.

“It was a horrible experience,” she says. “I shared my experience, and I was very honest about what had happened, and it blew up. It reached millions of people.”

For Lindsay-Noel, one message in particular demonstrated the impact of her work. A fellow wheelchair user told her she had become afraid to leave her home following a spinal injury. After eight years, the woman used one of Lindsay-Noel’s reviews to select a restaurant and ventured out again.

“Because of how detailed my reviews were, and just seeing my joy navigating the city, for the first time in eight years, she left her home and went to a place that I had suggested,” Lindsay-Noel says.

The woman has since begun visiting more of the places featured in Lindsay-Noel’s videos.

“To know somebody has gotten out of the house when they were almost paralyzed by fear of it because of my videos is beyond,” she says.

Lindsay-Noel now hopes to expand Access By Tay internationally, bringing the accessibility conversations she has helped foster in Toronto to cities around the world.

She has also maintained her love for gymnastics, though she hopes her story reminds young athletes that they have the right to speak up when something feels unsafe.

“Make sure that they feel and understand that they have a voice that matters, that their body is theirs and they should never do something that they don’t feel comfortable with, even if a person in authority is telling them to do so,” she says. “No sport is worth that.”

@accessbytay

Will La Pizza & La Pasta be Access By Tay Approved? 👀😩🇮🇹 – La Pizza & La Pasta (Eaton Centre) – #torontorestaurants #toronto #italianrestaurant #accessibility #AccessByTay

♬ Italian Parmigiano – Kley Kley

Nearly two decades after the accident that upended her Olympic dreams, Lindsay-Noel says her life may not look the way she once imagined, but it remains rich with meaning.

“Even if life throws you the most horrible hand of cards, you’re still able to live a really full life,” she says. “I feel and am very happy. I have the most incredible people in my life.”

“There’s so much life after tragedy,” she adds. “I hope that’s what resonates with people.”

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