Disabled vets regain confidence on slopes

Disabled vets regain confidence on slopes

By Steve Lipsher

A year later, Deutsch is back, intent on instilling that attitude in a new batch of wounded veterans – many of whom have barely learned to walk and run, much less ski.

On Monday, Deutsch and about 600 skiers and snowboarders with disabilities hit the slopes for the 17th annual event.

With wheelchairs and abandoned prosthetic legs littering the base area, bucket-shaped monoskis and crutchlike outriggers offered people with disabilities the chance to move gracefully, precisely – and fast.

“We believe that this is one of the most important parts of early rehab,” said Kirk Bauer, executive director of Disabled Sports USA and an amputee himself. “These are very, very active guys and gals. And now, all of a sudden, they have hit the wall, and they not only can’t run anymore, but they don’t know if they can walk anymore.”

That, Deutsch says, was how he felt.

“When it first happened, you go through a lot of depression. You’re just thinking you’re not going to be able to do stuff.”

At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., however, there’s little room for sympathy.

“They didn’t really give me a choice,” Deutsch said of his expenses-paid trip to Colorado last year. “When I first got there, I didn’t want to do anything.”

Now a student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he hopes to become a full-fledged snowboarding instructor.

“I want everyone to see that they can do this kind of thing,” Deutsch said. “You can show them that if you can do it, they can do it.”

Through sports, many like Deutsch find success, Bauer said. And on Monday, Deutsch got to help others discover what he did last year.

Like Ken Subido, who carved a perfect toe-side turn on his snowboard and then just kept on carving – until he pancaked face-first into the snow.

“Dude, that was awesome!” Deutsch said as Subido – who lost his right foot in a rocket attack near Tikrit, Iraq, in March – looked up in astonishment through the fluff covering his sunglasses.

“It was depressing,” Subido, 23, said of his injury. “But after a while, it becomes clear that life goes on, and you learn how to respond and adapt. And look, I’m snowboarding already,” said the Garland, Texas, resident.

Theirs were among the hundreds of inspiring stories echoing off the slopes Monday, the first day of the week-long event.

“Every report has been positive,” beamed Bauer. “Everyone coming off the hill has been saying folks are linking turns and riding the lifts, on the first day! It’s incredible.”

Bauer, who lost his lower left leg to a land mine in Vietnam, founded the organization in the 1970s to help other wounded vets regain their self-esteem and sense of excitement. Today, Disabled Sports USA has more than 80 local chapters – such as the host, Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center – that offer more than 60,000 people with disabilities the chance to participate in dozens of hard-core outdoor activities annually.

Each year, the Ski Spectacular attracts skeptical newcomers – this year, the two dozen featured guests were wounded in the fighting in Iraq – as well as many of the nation’s top instructors for the disabled, who participate in clinics and bring the lessons home to their local ski hills.

With members of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team and stars such as big-wall rock climber Mark Wellman in attendance to provide the inspiration of the elite, newcomers with disabilities such as Matt Profitt had no problem accepting the fact that nothing is physically impossible.

The 36-year-old from Middletown, Del., lost his lower right leg to a rare soft-tissue sarcoma but decided to take up snowboarding because “I don’t want to be 80 years old and think I wish I had done this.”

Profitt, a training coordinator for a chemical company, struggled initially with deciding which foot to put forward in his snowboard bindings and suffered an assortment of falls on his initial runs, often flopping on his back in exhaustion.

“Basically, I’m learning what my leg can and can’t do,” he said. “I have all week.”