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Athletes Will Show Off Ability

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By BILL WARD, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 8, 2008

TAMPA - They're chilling, almost unthinkable statistics. But in a quest to raise awareness of the rights and needs of physically challenged individuals, Scot Hollonbeck refuses to sugarcoat the studies undertaken by such institutions as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Essentially, people who suffer a catastrophic injury at a young age - such as the road cycling accident that left him paralyzed as a teenager - have a high risk of drug addiction, unemployment and, in far too many cases, suicide.

"If you're a male and you break your back as a teenager, the statistics say you'll be dead in 26 years," said Hollonbeck, whose injury resulted in the paralysis of his legs. "The numbers are not good."

But when the physically challenged become involved in sports, Hollonbeck has seen first-hand the numbers improve dramatically. He's in Tampa to coordinate the wheelchair division of Saturday's Gasparilla Distance Classic 15-kilometer race presented by Publix Super Markets. And what better way to show how important sport is to the physically challenged than with an event showcasing world-class athletes in wheelchairs.

About 40 of these athletes will line up at 7:25 a.m. Saturday near the Publix on Bayshore Boulevard and race for a purse worth $10,000. The event marks the first elite wheelchair racing at Gasparilla in nearly a decade. The first-place male and female earn $1,500, money that will help some of them continue to train for this summer's Paralympic Games in Beijing.

A former elite wheelchair racer himself, Hollonbeck is the type to stand on top of a mountain and plead the case of his fellow challenged athletes. And as director of partnerships and outreach for the American Association of Adapted Sports Programs in Atlanta, he is intent on making sports available for kids of all disability levels in all schools.

Comparing it in many ways to the struggles of blacks before the integration of public schools and female athletes before the advent of Title IX, Hollonbeck envisions a day when every child who has a physical disability has the opportunity to play a sport for his or her school or school district.

Hollonbeck says it is already happening across Georgia, where more and more high schools are offering sports for physically challenged athletes.

Two-time Paralympian Jessica Galli, a native of Hillsborough, N.J., was paralyzed as the result of a car accident when she was 7 years old. In some ways, she says, it was better becoming a paraplegic at that age instead of later in life because she was "more adaptive" and her peers were "more accepting."

When she got to high school, she trained with her track team and was allowed to compete in her racing wheelchair in the same track meets as everyone else. And although her results did not count toward her team's score, she competed in the state championships in a separate event for challenged athletes.

"I was lucky, because a generation before me paved the way for challenged athletes," said Galli, who was named the U.S. Olympic Committee's Paralympian of the Year for 2007 after setting world records in the 200, 400 and 800 meters. "I'm just so grateful for what those athletes did for people like me."

Challenged athletes such as Adam Bleakney, who already has competed and medaled in the Paralympic Games, attack the issues facing challenged athletes in their own way. For Bleakney, it's coaching the University of Illinois' wheelchair track and road racing team, as well as competing on a national and world stage.

But as a former college wrestler who was paralyzed in a mountain bike accident in 1995, he remembers how, as an able-bodied athlete, no one questioned how hard he trained, what his sport was all about or whether it was worth a school or sponsor funding.

"Scot Hollonbeck likes to call it 'the beat-dog syndrome,'" Bleakney said. "That is, if you get table scraps, you're happy. It takes people like Scot to say, 'This is wrong. These challenged athletes deserve the same treatment as everyone else.'

"To me, the frustrating thing is having to constantly struggle to prove your value and your worth, to legitimize your sport."

Reporter Bill Ward can be reached at (813) 259-7456 or wward@tampatrib.com.

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