Heaven knows that every one of the 38,500 official entrants (and even the 10,000 “bandits”) in today’s Boston Marathon should get some kind of a medal just for getting out there and doing what the rest of us can’t – or won’t.
But for many on the sidelines, it’s the athletes with handicaps – 106 in wheelchairs, 31 who are visually impaired and three with organ transplants this year – who elicit the biggest lumps in the throat.
We cheer them on with all our hearts, as well we should. But along with the cheers, there’s often a sense of surprise, maybe even shock.
There shouldn’t be, at least not anymore.
In recent years, athletes with disabilities have been competing ever more visibly in both mainstream and special events, burning up the track and the basketball courts, the ski slopes and the cycling paths, often pushing well beyond the limit of what many able-bodied folks would attempt.
This summer, for instance, after the traditional Olympic Games in Atlanta, 3,500 people from 127 countries will compete in the Paralympic Games for elite athletes with physical disabilities, including paraplegics and quadriplegics, people with cerebral palsy, amputees, blind athletes, and others.
And that’s just the beginning. There are games galore for people with all kinds of disabilities, including competitions for people who have had life-saving organ transplants.
So on this day when all hats are off to the raw power of mind and body, here are the stories of a few people who have become star athletes, despite the most overwhelming obstacles.
Mary Pierce, 49, cyclist, lung transplant recipient
Like 100,000 other Americans, Pierce was born with alpha-1 trypsin deficiency, which causes potentially fatal liver problems in infants and lung disease – emphysema – in adults.
“I was 30, just out of college. . .when I began to notice changes in lung function,” says Pierce, of St. Joseph, Mich. “I had shortness of breath with minimal exertion, I got frequent colds and lung infections.”
A smoker since age 16, she said she “watched little bits of my life disappear around me. I stopped skiing. I couldn’t play tennis. The last thing to go was my motorcycle . . I couldn’t close the face shield because I got so claustrophic.”
By her 40th birthday, her breathing problems had made eating so difficult that she had lost 50 pounds. She had only 17 percent of her lung function. When her genetic defect was finally diagnosed, Pierce began taking medication to replace the missing enzyme and supplemental, intravenous nutrition.
But by 46, she was in a wheelchair, tethered to an oxygen tank and so near death that she could no longer avoid the “scary” decision to have a double lung transplant.
Within hours of surgery, Pierce recalls with delight, her husband told her she looked “pink and rosy.” Two days later, she began working out on a stationary bike in her room.
She quickly gained weight and began spending all her time at the gym, lifting weights and working out. “For the first time in my life,” she exults, “I lived in a body that worked.”
She bought a fancy bike, and a year after her transplant she began cycling competitively. She hasn’t stopped since. Last year, Pierce was one of 700 athletes with transplants at the World Transplant Games in England. She won a gold medal.
This spring, if the Michigan snow ever melts, she’ll be back on the roads, training 25 miles a day for the US transplant games this summer in Salt Lake City.
“You have to be resilient,” she says. “Nobody has any promises in life. You have to be ready for everything. Just know life is going to change, and that you’re going to survive.”
Rene Kirby, 41, skier, gymnast, skateboarder born with spina bifida
Kirby, 41, skis on his hands because of a birth defect in which the spine doesn’t close completely around the cord, causing weakness or paralysis.
Kirby, a retired IBM “failure analyst” from Burlington, Vt., was born with such a severe defect that he never walked.
But he’s “done just about everything,” he says cheerfully – skateboarding, roller-blading, ice skating, canoeing, kayaking, tricycle riding, downhill skiing, gymnastics and handball.
“I’ve been an athlete all my life. It’s nothing new to me,” says Kirby. “I walk on my hands and if people don’t like it, it’s their problem. I just get around the way I want to.”
The only problem, he says, roaring with laughter, “is going to a place with a lot of miniskirts.” Women are disconcerted, he laughes, to see a guy looking up at them from ground level.
Until an injured shoulder forced his retirement, he rode a tricycle at work: “I’d fly down the corridors, I’d get that baby really whipping. I used to see people jump out of my way.” In high school, he was state gymnastics champ. Then he took up skiing, his hands jammed into size 12 boots and his legs either stuck out in front, dragging behind or up in the air.
He gets onto the chair lift by “standing” on the tails of his extra-long skis and falling back onto the chair. To get off, he says, “I just jump forward and land on my hands.”
Asked if he’s felt he’s had a disability, he scoffs, “Nah. . ..
“All these people who walk around on legs – how many times did they fall to learn it? So what? Yeah, you’re gonna fall. You’ve got to take the first step and get out there.”
Jean Driscoll, 29, wheelchair marathoner with spina bifida
Driscoll, who lives in Champagne, Ill. was born with spina bifida, though she was able to walk until she was 14. That year, she had five hip surgeries in an attempt to keep her hips aligned properly and spent the entire year in a body cast.
For a while afterwards, she walked with crutches, but began spending more time in a wheelchair. By the time she was 23, her knees gave out and she gave up walking for good.
It hardly slowed her down. In fact, she’d been recruited at 21 to play wheelchair basketball at the University of Illinois and soon began wheelchair racing as well.
She now trains 100 to 120 miles a week in her special, 17-pound aluminum wheelchair. Her shoulders are so powerful that, though she weighs just 110 pounds, she can bench press 200.
She’s won the Boston Marathon six times, and today is racing for her seventh straight victory.
“I am not a disabled athlete,” she says. “When you are actually competing, it’s not a disability thing, it’s an athletic event.”
Her motto is, “Dream big and work hard. . . .You have just as good a chance of doing what you want as anybody else.”
Joe Quintanilla, 19, marathon runner, visually impaired
“Being blind really hasn’t caused any real problems,” says Joe Quintanilla of Cambridge, who has been nearly blind since birth. “I’ve lived this way for a long time, so it’s nothing new.”
At Boston College where he is a sophomore, Quintanilla’s poor vision means he must study with books on tapes or have classmates read to him. He tape records his classes and takes his exams orally.
When he’s training, he runs with other athletes who give him verbal cues or guide hime with their elbows. He’s running today’s marathon, his fourth, with a friend, Stacey Clements, and hopes to run in the Paralympics as well.
“If you really want to do something, nothing should stop you,” he says. “Even if you can’t achieve it, you should give it everything you have and be proud of yourself.”
Linda Bolle, 33, marathoner, visually impaired
Linda Bolle of Reading was born with a genetic defect that left her partially blind since birth.
“My parents were protective because I was a girl, but not because I didn’t see as well as other kids,” says Bolle, a supervisor at Lotus Development Corp.
“They permitted me to go out and do what my friends were doing. They never treated me as though I had an impairment. That had a lot to do with how I thought of myself.”
Although Bolle has been running for 10 years, this is her first marathon, and she’ll be running with her husband Ned to give her verbal cues.
She rarely thinks of her disability. “It’s just part of who I am,” she says. “I don’t really know life any other way. . . You can achieve anything you set your mind to do.”
Larz Neilson, 49, skier, biker, amputee
Thirty-two years ago, Larz Neilson lost his left leg below the knee in a motor scooter accident when he was 18.
“I’ve been to college, I’ve done a lot of things,” says Neilson, who has indeed – including editing a newspaper in Wilmington, Mass., publishing a real estate magazine and managing a gift shop in Boothbay, Maine.
But skiing is “the most energizing thing I’ve ever done,” says Neilson, except, as his wife points out, for getting married three and a half years ago.
Through skiing, softball, bicycling and canoeing, Neilson has also met other athletes who “put demands on their prostheses and limb makers. Handicapped athletics has been driving a lot of wonderful improvements in prosthetics in the last dozen years.”
He speaks with pride of his new leg with its fancy suspension system. “I step in and it goes click, click, click,” he says. “I can actually run with this thing. For years and years, I was having to run like step-and-hop. I can now run step over step.”
Beyond good prosthetics, he says, the key is “to believe in yourself and try. Attitude is everything.”
To learn more
For more information about athletic programs for people with disabilities, call:
– US Sports and Fitness Center for the Disabled, 617-581-7775.
– US Association for Blind Athletes, 719-630-0422.
– Handicapped Athletics Program of the MDC (Metropolitan District Commission), 617-727-9547 X450.
– Wheelchair Sports USA, 719-574-1150.
– Paralyzed Veterans of America, 1-800-424-8200 X752 or 508-660-1181.
– Wheelchair Sports and Recreation Association, 617-773-7251. – 1996 Paralympic Games, 404-588-1996.
– Massachusetts Association for the Blind, 1-800-682-9200 or 617-738-5110.
– Boston Self-Help Center 277-0080
– New England Handicapped Sports Association, 1-800-628-4484
– Transplant games and organ donation, 1-800-622-9010, organized by the National Kidney Foundation.
– Alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency, 1-800-4-alpha-1.
– Community Boating on the Charles River, 617-523-1038.