Tribulations
don't stop man from racing
May 26, 2003
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Events
for disabled
The first organized competition for people with
disabilities – World War II veterans with spinal
injuries – took place in England in 1948.
The National Wheelchair Athletic Association,
today called Wheelchair Sports USA, was founded
in 1956, in conjunction with the inaugural National
Wheelchair Games at Adelphi University in Garden
City.
Since 1988, the Paralympic Games have been in
the same venues as the Olympics and the same organizing
committee hosts both events.
The next Paralympic Games will take place in Athens
in September 2004. About 4,000 athletes from 130
countries are expected to take part.
Sources:
Wheelchair Sports USA, International Olympic Committee
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By
MORGAN LYLE
Special to the Observer-Dispatch
Climbing the hills of the Utica Boilermaker Road Race
is tough enough for an able-bodied runner. Imagine doing
it in a wheelchair – and not in a low-riding, lightweight
racing chair, but in a taller, heavier, standard chair.
Now imagine going down the same hills in the same chair
at more than 30 miles an hour, when a small pothole
could mean disaster.
The Boilermaker is 9.3 miles. Wheelchair athlete Mark
Taylor rolled 15 miles one day this spring, from his
home in Deansboro to the Sitrin Medical Rehabilitation
Center on Tilden Avenue in New Hartford. The course
included the grueling, three-mile Higby Road hill.
“The
worst beating I took all the way there was a sunburn,”
he chuckled.
His athletic achievements are barely half the story.
Taylor, this year’s Boilermaker Wheelchair Challenge
athlete, has endured an astonishing series of injuries
and illnesses for nearly 30 years.
Run over by a tractor on his family farm at age 16.
A year in the hospital, three body casts. Nine – yes,
nine – hip-replacement operations, including one that
implanted the hip of a cadaver. Open-heart surgery to
replace a diseased valve. More open-heart surgery for
a rare fungal infection. Two strokes. Six months of
chemotherapy (for the fungus) that kills half the people
who take it. Finally, the removal of his artificial
right hip, because of damage from the infection.
“After
they did that I actually started feeling a lot better,”
Taylor said, “so much so that I decided to go for a
ride on a four-wheeler. I ended up going over this 20-foot
cliff. I crushed my L-1 vertebra. ... Ever since then
I’ve pretty much settled into this chair.”
That was in March 2002. Six months later, he won the
wheelchair division of the 5K Falling Leaves Road Race
in Utica.
The 43-year-old father of three likes to offer encouragement
to other wheelchair users in Sitrin’s RecNet program,
which organizes sports and social activities for people
with disabilities.
“I’m
playing basketball, I play football, I play ice hockey,
I play soccer, I’ve done curling, I’ve won a couple
of road races,” Taylor said. “I enjoy talking with people
who have just gotten into wheelchairs and are pretty
devastated, because I like to show them what they can
do.”
This is the sixth year of the Boilermaker’s Wheelchair
Challenge program, which provides a new racing wheelchair
to a participant who finishes the race in less than
two hours and 15 minutes in an ordinary wheelchair.
Racing wheelchairs are sleek, ultralight, three-wheel
models custom-fitted for the athletes who use them,
said Gary Roback, director of the wheelchair division
of the Boilermaker.
They’re the kind used by the elite wheelchair road-racers
who come to the Boilermaker from as far away as South
Africa and New Zealand to compete for up to $10,000
in prize money for the top finishers. The best finish
the course in a little over half an hour, Roback said.
“These
aren’t people to be felt sorry for,” he said. “These
aren’t people with handicaps. These are people who do
things in a chair, for whatever reason.”
The reason Chad Brian “Bones” Johnson uses a wheelchair
is that he fell out of a tree when he was 10 years old.
Johnson finished third in the 2002 Boilermaker, but
he was suffering from arthritis and a pulled muscle.
“The
Boilermaker, as an event, is awesome,” the Palmyra,
Ind.-based racer said. “I came last year and it was
the best event of my racing career so far.
“They
treat wheelchair athletes like athletes, and that’s
the thing that impresses me most,” added Johnson, who
this spring competed in races in Indianapolis, Cincinnati,
Louisville, Ky., and Cleveland.
Taylor isn’t worried about clocking a good time in the
Boilermaker. The Deansboro-to-Sitrin run took about
three hours, including Higby Hill, and he has finished
nine miles in about one hour and 20 minutes, well under
the two hour and 15 minutes limit for Wheelchair Challenge
participants in standard chairs.
But Taylor said he would like to break some new ground
in the Boilermaker.
“I’m
just looking to do something in the standard chair that
maybe no one else has done, timewise,” he said.
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