[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: All images courtesy Cathleen Dixon except Regas Woods at World Championship. That photo courtesy Never Say Never Foundation.”][/title]
Battle With the Blades 2016
The surface of the earth covers about 197 million miles. Seventy-one percent of that is water, the other twenty-nine percent land. And on that twenty-nine percent of solid ground, 7.3 billion people make their homes. The numbers bulge when you fight to hold them in your head.
Narrow it down and try to calculate the likelihood of the right people finding each other to do something miraculous, and the math will overwhelm you. But it does happen, and here’s an example.
Nick Stilwell is thirty-two years old. He lives in Ocala, Florida, where he’s been since he was two. In high school, he was a top athlete and imagined he’d go to college on a football scholarship. And then in his senior year, he ruptured a disk in his lower back and that dream ended.
At twenty-five, in a car accident in Orlando, Nick severed his right leg and injured his left one. For a year, he and his doctors did what they could to save his remaining leg, but the damage was too great. Pain roared through that limb, and finally, after getting used to the prosthetic leg he already had, he agreed to the second amputation.
Twenty-five miles away, in Dunnellon, Florida, Regas Woods, now thirty-four years old, was growing up in different circumstances. He was born with a congenital anomaly which did not allow his tibia and fibula to develop properly. Both his legs were amputated, above the knee, at the age of two.
By the time Nick and Regas were born, Francois Van Der Watt, now forty-five years old, was a happy kid in Pretoria, South Africa, more than 8,000 miles away. He liked to play rugby. He liked to play cricket, and he participated in track and field events.
In college, Francois studied prosthetics. After graduating, he worked at a clinic, and one day, a woman brought her fourteen-year-old grandson to see Francois. The boy’s legs had been amputated below the knee before he’d reached his first birthday, and he’d been fitted with walking prosthetics. He’d recently broken them by jumping over hurdles. His name was Oscar Pistorius. “I said, ‘We need to get you something more appropriate for what you’re trying to do,'” Francois says. And even then, at that young age, Francois saw something in Oscar’s talent that was extraordinary.
Francois designed Oscar’s running blades, those long pieces of carbon fiber that look like curved L’s, without feet. The prosthetics earned Oscar the moniker “Blade Runner,” and he gained fame after becoming the first amputee to compete in track events at the Olympics in 2012. The following year, though, he became infamous after being arrested for the shooting death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.
By the time of this devastating news, Francois was living in the United States. He’d moved in 2002, working first in Georgia and then in Texas, and finally in Fort Smith, Arkansas, at Total Rehabilitation, Inc. By that time, he’d earned an international reputation as one of the top prosthetists in the sports field. In 2008, he’d gone to Japan with the Paralympics team for their training camp. In 2011, he held the same position for the World Championships, and last October he was with the team in Doha, Qatar.
While Francois was gaining acclaim, Nick and Regas were finding their way to each other. On their first visit, seven years ago, Nick was still in a wheelchair, about as low as he’d ever been. But that meeting changed everything. “Regas was the technician at the time, and he was making my legs. He showed me that my life wasn’t over because he was doing a bunch of fun stuff. He was riding four-wheelers, running track, playing music with his church. So we became friends, and we started volunteering at camps for kids with limb loss, and that’s when we decided to start a foundation.”
That foundation is called Never Say Never. Their mission is to help youth and young adult disabled athletes attend camps, sporting events, and get specialized prosthetics that allow them to compete since Nick says those are not covered by insurance. (The cost for a running leg can run between ten and fifteen thousand dollars.)
Nick’s work consumes much of his life. He’s found he’s pretty good at public speaking, and even better at organizing events. In his spare time, he plays on a softball team, and power lifts. “You know,” Nick says, “when I lost my legs I thought my life was over, but really it was just beginning.”
This is where Francois enters their story. As a major player in the field of specialized prosthetics, he was bound to cross paths with Regas and Nick. And so he did. Nick says, “He had the same goals as Regas and me. He was into the Paralympic movement and spreading the word that anything’s possible after an amputation.”
Last year, Francois devised a plan with Regas and Nick. They wanted to bring world-class Paralympic athletes to Fort Smith and have them compete with local high school teams. Francois met with those in charge of the McDonald Relay at Southside High School, and the Battle with the Blades was born.
Approximately twenty area schools competed against the Paralympic athletes last spring, and for most of the events, the local athletes lost. New friendships formed, and people who would have never met otherwise came together. Spectators showed up and had the chance to see something no other state has to offer.
So Francois and Regas and Nick decided to bring the event back this year. On April 21, Battle with the Blades 2016 will be in full swing. And again, Paralympic athletes will participate, including Regas, and Sam Grewe, who’s nineteen, lost a leg to cancer, and holds the world record for the high jump. “It’s the only meet of its kind in the United States,” Francois says. “It’s also a sanctioned event by the IPC, the International Paralympic Committee, so if an athlete runs a qualifying time here, they can get on the world rankings. In the Olympic world, that’s a big deal.” Especially so, since the Summer Olympic Games will be held in Rio de Janeiro this August. Francois will be there as well, working with the world’s top athletes.
But that’s only part of the magic of this event. Some of the money raised will be used for a sports prosthetic for someone in Arkansas. Last year, they gave a running leg to a little boy named Jake, who was seven, and from Fayetteville. He wanted to play baseball and football with his friends, and Francois worked with him to make it happen. This year, there will be another donation, again to someone in Arkansas.
Nick says, “Francois is the best. Prosthetics is an art form. There’s a lot of hand modifications that need to be done. What separates him from all the other guys is that he has no ego. He does it because he loves to help people and he enjoys seeing people have a higher quality of life.”
Nick feels lucky to have Francois as a friend and lucky to have found his purpose when he met Regas at such a hard time in his life. The world, when you think about it, is not as big as we think. More than 7 billion people, and still, three men who needed to get together to do something incredible were able to cross paths, even though they started out more than 8,000 miles apart. There’s so much hope in that story, but then hope is the thing that forged all three of their lives.
Battle with the Blades 2016
neversayneverfoundation.org
April 21, 3pm
Southside High School, Fort Smith
Events: 100m, 200m, 4x100m, 4x400m, Long Jump
Paralympic Athletes Competing at the Battle with the Blades
David Prince, Florida
Nicholas Rogers, Maine
Hunter Woodhall, Utah
Jarryd Wallace, Georgia
Regas Woods, Florida
Vanessa Low, Oklahoma
Sam Grewe, Indiana
