Disabled vets redeploy — to Beijing Paralympics

A challenge, not a competition
“You’re talking about the difference between someone who is an elite athlete … and one who is trying to stand up for a few minutes on a ski,” Baker said. “The sole purpose is for the participants to challenge themselves — to build physical, mental and emotional strength. … Anything that would subvert that by introducing competitiveness between these people would go against what they were designed to do.”

The USOC points to the Paralympic Military program, which has introduced some 3,900 newly disabled veterans to adaptive sports at the community level in 2008 alone, as evidence that it can provide broader services to help veterans resume an active life, not merely cultivate a few stars. It also has provided coaches and facilities for major events, such as VA sports clinics. It also has sought to assure opponents that it has no designs on existing veterans’ events.

“Several (groups) thought we wanted to run the National Wheelchair Games,” says USOC’s Huebner, who believes the debate over the organization’s proposal has been based on misunderstanding. “We don’t. We want to expand on what (other groups) are doing back into the community.”

Filner, who sponsored the House bill to fund the USOC program, is more critical of the services the VA and its longtime partner organizations have provided.

“The (veterans service organizations) and the VA have not really adapted to this new generation,” said Filner, who is chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. He says some of their rehabilitation offerings, such as horseshoes, billiards and bowling, “are not real sports.”

“These younger kids, people who may have been active (in sports) in their high school or college — their whole mental attitude is that they will never be human again,” he said. “... So this is aimed at a younger audience.”

From Walter Reed to Beijing
Stockwell, 28, personifies what he is talking about. She was a competitive athlete — a gymnast, diver and pole vaulter — before joining the Army. After the May 2004 blast took her lower leg, she spent more than a year at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., enduring 15 surgeries to address infection, which took six inches more off the limb. As soon as she could resume exercising, she discovered swimming was a great way to get a workout.

Melissa Stockwell file Army 2nd Lt. Melissa Stockwell in Iraq in 2004, before she was wounded by a roadside bomb blast.

“I knew I wouldn’t really be myself again until I got back into some sort of athletics,” she said. When a USOC representative gave a presentation on the Paralympics at the medical center, she knew it was something she wanted to pursue.

Stockwell continued swimming after moving back to Minnesota for school, and began to travel to Paralympics swim meets around the country. In January, she moved to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs to work full time with specialized coaches. In April time trials, she posted times fast enough to qualify for the U.S. team in three events — the 100-meter butterfly, 100-meter freestyle and 400-meter freestyle.

In the first two of her events, with one remaining, Stockwell has not reached the finals, but her main goal was getting to Beijing. She expects more of her fellow disabled soldiers to follow suit.

“You have a group of young individuals (who are) athletic by nature, with a love for their country,” she says. “So absolutely there will be a lot of new (Paralympic) athletes in the coming years from the wars.”

But the main thing is to be able to get them involved in some sort of athletics, she said.

“The elite level is not for everyone,” Stockwell says. “But to get out and do something is extremely beneficial. After you try it, I think you’re very excited about what you can still do when you might not have realized it before.”

Group hopes Senate will let bill expire
Baker, of the Disabled American Veterans, remains skeptical. He said his organization is hoping that the Senate version of the bill authorizing VA money for the USOC program will die when Congress adjourns in early October.

But some critics have been won over by the USOC pitch. The nonprofit Paralyzed Veterans of America initially called the bill “deeply troubling” but later withdrew its objections. Officials of the group said they were mollified when their organization was explicitly included in the bill as a potential partner for USOC’s community programs and given a seat on the review board that would approve grants under the bill.

“Basically there’s an opportunity to take a leadership role in terms of sports and recreation,” said Andy Krieger, director of sports and recreation for the Paralyzed Veterans of America, which offers sports programs for veterans with spinal cord injuries. “A lot of people are doing a lot of things on a lot of different levels. … I think one thing going on is that USOC Paralympics is taking the opportunity to kind of connect the dots.”

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