If you’re old enough to remember Chernobyl, you’ll remember that it was a major nuclear disaster. Although radiation levels seem to have returned to normal now, they were pretty high after it went off in April 1986. Alexi Salamone was born in June 1987. His development was affected, and he was born with twisted legs that were later amputated.

Salamone was left by his birth parents. He describes the orphanage that he lives in as an “alley”. His birth parents, Joe and Sue Salamone, adopted him at age 6. He has an adoptive sister, Tatiana, that came from the same orphanage.

At age 10, he was introduced to sledge hockey. He looks forward to returning to the country of his birth, but he is unsure of whether he will look up his birth parents. More information about Alexi Salamone can be found in this Yahoo article.

Andy Soule is a bronze-medal winning Paralympic athlete. He won his bronze in the sitting category of the 2×2.4 km pursuit in the biathlon.

Prior to being a Paralympic athlete, he was a warrior in the US Army. In 2005, he was in Afghanistan when a roadside bomb blew up and forced his legs to be amputated. While he once dreamed of being a soldier, he was forced to rethink his identity.

During rehabilitation, he had the chance to try out several sports, including hand cycling. He was asked to try out skiing, and he took to it. After four years of training, he was able to win the Paralympic biathlon world cup. Five years after his accident, he won a bronze medal. Although he could no longer be a soldier, he could be one of the best Paralympic athletes in the world.

Andy Soule is featured in a recent USA Today story.

Sales and viewership of the Paralympics have been stronger than was originally expected. The Paralympics will have a total of 60 hours of broadcast coverage in Canada.

United States viewers will still have to watch the Paralympics on the Internet.

Nichols became disabled in 2000 when she was out snowboarding with her friends. She decided to try a back flip. It would be her last attempt. She landed on her back, on a rock, and had to be transported to the hospital. Alana found out that she was paralyzed from the waist down.

She earned a basketball scholarship to the University of Arizona, and from there ended up on the US Paralympic team. She ended up with a gold medal from the 2008 Beijing Paralympics.

Just 16 months ago, she started training as a Paralympic Skier. When she told her coach that she wanted to make it to Vancouver, they told her to forget about it, and to just concentrate on getting better. One gold medal later, she proved them wrong.

Congratulations, Alana, on winning the first gold medal for the United States in the 2010 Vancouver Paralympics; and for winning gold medals in both summer and winter sports.

The United States is currently in eighth place, with one silver medal and one bronze medal. The US bronze medalist, in the men’s sitting 2.4 km biathlon pursuit, is Andy Soule, who is a war veteran who lost both of his legs in the War in Afghanistan (appropriate that a soldier would do well in biathlon). Stephani Victor (an appropriate name) is the US silver medalist in the sitting women’s slalom.

In sledge hockey, Canada, the United States, Norway, and Japan have won their games so far. It would be interesting if the United States and Canada would meet again in the sledge hockey finale. Maybe the US would win this time.

If you watched the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics, you may remember the torchbearer who arrived in the stadium in a wheelchair, Rick Hansen. I didn’t know anything about him prior to the games, but it turns out, he has a pretty interesting story.

He became a paraplegic at the age of 15 when he ended up getting involved in a car accident. Hansen didn’t let that stop him. He earned a degree from the University of British Columbia, and became a paraplegic athlete, winning three gold medals, two silvers, and a bronze at the Paralympics in 1980 and 1984.

In 1985, he took a trek around the world in a wheelchair, visiting four different continents and travelling 40,000 miles over a period of 26 months. This “Man in Motion” tour raised more than $26 million for spinal cord research, and inspired John Parr’s song “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)”. That song reached number on on the Billboard Hot 100 in September. I remember the song, but I just thought it was a song at the time. Hansen’s journey will be the subject of a new movie, Heart of a Dragon, which is expected to be released later on this year. It looks pretty good:

A comment from a reader got me to thinking… most of us really don’t know about Paralympic skiing. I didn’t until I started reading about it. Since Thursday is Sports Day on this blog, I thought I’d write about adaptive skiing. How is it different than regular skiing?

Since there are several different kinds of disability, the Paralympic games allow people with different kinds of disabilities to compete. Currently, the Paralympic games have skiing races for visually impaired racers, sitting racers, and standing racers.

Visually impaired racers, of course have trouble seeing. You might have heard about Canada’s Brian McKeever, who was supposed to ski for Canada in the regular Vancouver Olympics. Turns out that some of Canada’s other skiers did so well in the earlier events that he was excluded from the final race selection. Had he competed in the Vancouver Olympics, he would have had to ski alone. In the Paralympics, he will be able to ski with a sighted guide. So will all the other racers.

Standing racers often use regular skis, although their poles are sometimes a little bit different than regular ski poles. Some of these skiers have lost a leg in a war zone, others are disabled in other ways, but can skill ski while standing. Downhill skiers can use prosthetic arms and legs.

Racers that can’t stand use what is called a sit-ski. This is a kind of chair attached to skis. These racers are often paraplegic for one reason or another.

Hopefully that explains some of the terms that I’ve been using, or that you might hear if you decide to watch some of the Paralympic broadcasts over the next couple of weeks. :-)

Klebl was born in Düsseldorf, Germany as a US citizen, and grew up in Austria, where he enjoyed skiing and snowboarding. In 1995, a snowboarding accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. He initially took up handcycling, but then was introduced to Nordic skiing. He uses a sitski during skiing events.

Klebl has a degree in economics from Syracuse University, but currently trains full time as a Paralympic athlete. He lives in Heber City, Colorado. We wish him luck. Sit-ski events begin on Sunday, March 14th, with the men’s 15 km race.

I personally never thought much about the Paralympics until 2008, when Natalie du Toit entered the Open Water Swim, becoming one of the few people to participate in both the Olympics and Paralympics. I’m not even sure that I had heard about them prior to that. I was impressed by her story, and I’m sure that there are a couple hundred other great stories like hers in the Paralympics. With a potential treasure-trove of human interest stories in the Paralympics, I wonder why they are not more popular. Here are some of my ideas:

• The Paralympics, which are competitive, are confused with the Special Olympics, which encourage trying and feeling good about participation
• People are uncomfortable with seeing disabled people because they are reminded of their own fragility
• Most disabled people that the average person comes in contact with is old and perhaps a little slow. Perhaps they get the impression that the events will not be that exciting.
• The most popular events, like short track speed skating, figure skating, and snowboarding, are not Paralympic events (yet).
• The Paralympics do not have the same kind of advertisement
• The Paralympics are not broadcast on television.

What are your thoughts?

With the 2010 Vancouver Paralympics starting this week, I thought that I’d take a look back at the previous Paralympic games in Torino.

Although the United States was second in the Olympic rankings in the able-bodied Torino Olympics, it placed fifth in the rankings for the Paralympics, with 7 gold medals and 12 total. Russia blew away the competition, with 13 gold medals and 33 total medals. 39 nations and 486 athletes participated. There were 20 events.

Torino was the first year that the Paralympics were broadcast over the Internet (as they will be in Vancouver). Out of all the drug tests that were given, there were no doping violations (I’d like to see that one in the regular Olympics).

Here’s a video that recaps the 2006 Paralympic experience from the point of view of the Polish team: