It’s a pity that Alexis de Tocqueville won’t be on the slopes at Beaver Run Resort in Breckenridge, Colo., this week. The French thinker, who wrote perceptively about America in the 1830s, noted that he “often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely”—that is, without a government directive. One of the most inspiring modern manifestations of that “infinite art” can be found in the Hartford Ski Spectacular hosted by Disabled Sports USA.
The annual event, which this year runs from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6, attracts nearly 800 participants, many of them military veterans, with disabilities ranging from missing limbs and severe spinal-cord injuries to blindness and traumatic brain injury. The Ski Spectacular has snowballed since it was first held in 1987. Each year hundreds of people with disabilities take part in alpine and Nordic skiing, snowboarding, biathlon, sled hockey and curling. Members of the U.S. National Paralympic Ski and Snowboard Team are among the volunteer instructors.
Disabled Sports USA grew out of an initiative in the late 1960s by World War II veteran Jim Winthers, who pioneered “three-track” skiing—carving down the slopes on one leg with the help of an outrigger ski in each hand. Winthers and some of his comrades from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division realized that skiing could be therapeutic for wounded vets returning home from the Vietnam War.
One such veteran, an Army sergeant named Kirk Bauer who had lost his left leg to a grenade in the Mekong Delta, was lying in his hospital bed thinking about “a list of things I could no longer do,” he told me recently, when Winthers offered to teach him how to ski. It sounded crazy at first, but he agreed. The confidence he gained from skiing, he says, helped “turn my life around and unlock the keys to success.”
Mr. Bauer went on to summit Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro and complete both the Boston Marathon and the Bataan Memorial Death March (a marathon through the New Mexico desert). Along the way he earned a law degree from Boston University and went to work on Capitol Hill.
In 1982 Mr. Bauer signed on as executive director—and the first paid staff member—of the organization that eventually became Disabled Sports USA. Today the nonprofit group has more than 100 chapters in dozens of states, serving some 60,000 disabled athletes. It has also expanded beyond skiing to include programs in 40 different sports, including cycling, golf, kayaking, water skiing, fishing, rock climbing and scuba diving.
Athletic participation improves physical and psychological health. But it also helps individuals build self-confidence and support networks, with positive results for the athletes’ employment, their communities, and most important their families. Disabled Sports USA offers testimonials on its website, any of which show the depth of its impact. In the words of Mollie Borders on the participation of her husband John: “The hospital healed John’s physical injury, but Disabled Sports USA healed the family.”
The organization’s Warfighter Sports program has given nearly 10,000 wounded veterans and their family members the opportunity to participate free of charge in dozens of winter and summer sports at more than 100 events across the country each year. But it’s important to point out that many of Disabled Sports USA’s programs—including the Hartford Ski Spectacular—are open to civilians as well.
In recent years Disabled Sports USA has received some limited government funding. But true to its original spirit, the organization runs mostly on private donations and thousands of volunteered hours from some of the most qualified adaptive-sports instructors in the country. Although Mr. Bauer is no longer the only paid employee, just 12% of the group’s budget goes to administrative and fundraising expenses. Tocqueville would certainly applaud.
Mr. Wolfowitz, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is a former deputy secretary of defense.
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