Have you all been following the Paralympics? It’s not too late to go to UniversalSports.com and catch up on what you’ve missed. You can see the entire quad rugby gold medal match, U.S. vs. Australia.
There’s some interesting articles, too. Here’s one I liked by Steve Goldberg, “From the Games: the Making of a Paralympian.”
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” –William Shakespeare Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene V
BEIJING — Every competitor here in Beijing has a compelling story about how they got here. For most of the athletes, the Paralympic Games or the world championships in their sport have been their first experience on the global stage. Some of them have been athletes most of their lives while others came to Paralympic sport only after an accident or illness changed their physical circumstances.
Such is the case for three athletes, an American, a Canadian and a Spaniard, who came to the Paralympics after making their mark elsewhere.
The American
Dave Denniston was a 1999 NCAA team and individual champion while swimming for Auburn University. He set American records in the 50 and 100 meter breaststroke in 2000 and swam for the USA in the 2003 World Short Course Championships setting a world record as part of the 400 meter medley relay team with teammates Aaron Peirsol, Peter Marshall and Jason Lezak. Peirsol and Lezak swam in the Olympic Games here last month.
“Watching them swim was exhilarating to say the least.”
Denniston says he hadn’t determined if he was going to try for the U.S. team in 2008 after falling just short of making it to Sydney or Athens. He placed fourth in the 100 meter breaststroke and sixth in the 200 meter breaststroke at the 2004 trials.
After his accident though, getting to China for the Paralympics absolutely became a goal.
A few months later, in early February 2005, Denniston was sledding with a friend in a remote region of the Snowy Range back in his home state of Wyoming. It seemed like a harmless decision at the time when he made the choice to go down the hill head first. Despite his strength and coordination, Denniston lost control of the sled which slammed into a tree. He remained conscious the entire time but realized something was wrong when he couldn’t feel his legs.
Because of the backwoods area they were in, it took more than two hours for help to arrive. He was first taken to a hospital in Laramie, then to spinal cord specialists at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado where he learned that he was completely paralyzed from the T-10 vertebrae down.
At the insistence of Jimmy Flowers, a former coach from Auburn, Denniston set his sights on Beijing and the Water Cube where his friends competed. “He encouraged me into looking to do the Paralympics for real in August of 2007.”
Honored by his teammates who elected him captain, Denniston says he was only vaguely familiar with the games. “I hate to admit it, but I was one of the people who confused the Special Olympics and the Paralympics and didn’t realize they were separate.”
“Now that I’m involved with it, it’s amazing how quick people seem to be responding to the Paralympics and getting to recognize many of these athletes.
Going into Monday’s 4-by-50-meter relay, he had finished ninth in two other events, not making it to the evening finals. But he recognizes that his past victories don’t mean immediate success in the Paralympic pool. He says he’s encouraged by the fact that his times keep improving.
“I basically had to learn to swim all over again the past year. It’s still the water, it’s still the pool. It looks like swimming but it feels completely different. There’s a lot of ways that I’m learning to make my body go through the water without the use of my legs.”
“At this meet, I’ve dropped two to three seconds in every event that I’ve swam.”
“I’m definitely looking to continue swimming until I feel like I’m not getting faster anymore. If I can keep doing that for four more years, then heck yeah, I’ll go to London. I’d love to go to London.”
The Canadian
At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, Misty Thomas marched in the opening ceremony as a member of the Canadian women’s basketball team.
“It was a childhood dream coming true, a fantastic dream,” said Thomas.
The Canadians would finish fourth, losing the bronze medal to China 57-62.
At 20, she was an Olympian. Two decades and four years later, she is in China, marching into the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing as a member of another Canadian national team, the women’s wheelchair basketball squad.
Though admitting that it was anything but redemption, Thomas would have her revenge, beating hosts China in placement game 53-46 after the Australians had knocked favored Canada out of medal contention the day before.
To wear the Canadian uniform again, this time in the Paralympic Games, to a full and cheering stadium made her just as proud as she was in Los Angeles. She’s been averaging 13 points and 10 rebounds a game.
Born in Los Angeles to an American mother and Canadian father, Thomas grew up in Windsor, Ontario since she was five and came up through the Canadian basketball system. She made a number of national teams before playing college ball at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas where her No. 4 jersey has been retired. In 1998, at 34, the former point guard became the youngest individual inducted into the Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame.
Thomas only uses a wheelchair to play basketball. Though she can stand and walk, nine surgeries, including three reconstructive on both knees, have left her unable to play the stand-up game. In her work managing high performance sports programs for the Sports Medicine Council in British Columbia, she was more than familiar with Paralympic sports.
“I interact with all the athletes living in BC, both Olympic and Paralympic, so I had known the wheelchair basketball crew for years.”
The players had asked her repeatedly to come out and join them but it took a while before her schedule let it happen three years ago. The basketball part she understood, but the chair was daunting.
“It was fun to have this challenge of figuring out this really important piece of equipment alongside this game that I loved but had not been able to play for so long.”
When asked how long it took for her to get comfortable with the chair, she laughs and says her team is still working on that. She says that being ambulatory and not having to use a chair every day like many of her teammates and opponents is a disadvantage on the court.
“People will say: ‘How is it fair that you as a player that can stand up gets to play in a wheelchair? How is that fair?’ and I tell them, ‘You’re totally right, it’s unfair to those of us who are ambulatory because they are so skilled in the chair.”
“It’s such a steep learning curve. Put Kobe Bryant in a chair and a junior girl would be able to stop him from scoring.”
“I still have a lot to get better at. The chair really is a part of them and I’m no where near that.”
The Spaniard
For Javier Ochoa, the highpoint of his professional cycling career was both metaphoric and literal. In 2000, the Spaniard beat Lance Armstrong and the rest of the field the peak of the Hautacam, nearly 5,000 feet above sea level in the Pyrenees, to win a stage of the Tour de France and finish 13th overall.
Seven months later, while on a training ride along an expressway near the southern town of Cartama in the province of Malaga with his twin brother Ricardo, the pair were hit by a car. The accident killed his brother and left Javier seriously hurt with head and chest injuries as well as a broken tibia and fibula. In a coma on a respirator for nine weeks, his weight dropped to 108 pounds.
Returning home after five months in the hospital, his world was dramatically different. The accident and the coma left him unable to talk properly or solve simple arithmetic problems. He couldn’t walk without assistance but in October 2001, he told Spanish journalists that he hoped to be riding again within a year. He started to train, first on an Ergometer, then on rollers. In November 2002, 21 months after the accident, he got back on a bike for the first time.
At the end of July in 2003 he told the media that, “I would like to be Paralympic champion in Athens. I am going away to prepare for it. I do not know the level at which my rivals will be, with whom I am going to compete. I think that it will not be easy, but I will at least try to give the best possible level.”
In September 2003, he won seven medals, three gold, three silver, one bronze, in the Paralympic Open European Cycling Championships.
“One of the major differences is that we are not able to train as long and hard as other athletes. Six hours of training is quite arduous for us. We can only train two to three hours at a time.
In Athens, racing in the Cerebral Palsy 3 class, he won a gold in the road race/time trial event and a silver on the track in the individual pursuit. He defended the time trial gold last week racing around the Ming Tombs Reservoir in Beijing’s Changping district.
“To tell you the truth, I had no idea whatsoever about the time. It was after I crossed the finish line, maybe two to five minutes later that I realized I had won.”
In the road race two days later, Ochoa won silver, finishing second to Great Britain’s Darren Kenny by just two seconds.
He had been disqualified in the pursuit this year for following Kenny too closely.
“I faced a lot of difficulties, especially with all the rehabilitation I received. Of course, there are differences in terms of being a professional athlete but what I love to do more than anything is to participate in my sport and be part of the competition.”
And the chance to win again.
