As the 2016 Paralympic Games take place in Rio de Janeiro from Sept. 7 through 18, U.S. News & World Report is looking at the challenges facing disabled people worldwide.
Like most world-class competitors, Jennifer Schuble was a star athlete growing up. The Houston native found inspiration in the American sports stars who dominated international competitions at the time, like world record sprinter Carl Lewis, who trained at her own hometown facility, and Michelle Akers, who helped the women’s national soccer team earn gold at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
Schuble matriculated to West Point in 1996 where she found an elite forum for her athletic career on the track and soccer teams and excelled at her studies. By her junior year she had made a formal commitment to the Army and, motivated by close family members serving in the military, decided she wanted to fly helicopters as close to the front lines as possible.
All of that was ripped away from her that year, when she suffered one traumatic brain injury, or TBI, during training at West Point and another in a car crash that crushed her right arm. A few years later she would be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which severely impaired her stamina, motor functions and memory. Schuble was eventually medically discharged from the military and told her diminished mental and physical faculties would forever change her life and prevent her from participating in competitive sports.
“I feel like I’m the girl who missed the team bus,” Schuble says, noting that most of her classmates became the first young officers to deploy to America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I was trying to figure out, what can I do now? I was lost.”
A decade and a half later, Schuble is a veteran member of the U.S. Paralympic road and track cyclist racing team. Having competed in the Paralympic Games in Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012, she will go on to her third in Rio this September. She hopes to improve upon her current title as most decorated active U.S. cyclist, and to earn the two medals she needs to become one of the most decorated U.S. Paralympic athletes ever.
Her remarkable journey of recovery represents a marked shift at the Department of Veterans Affairs during the past decade, from relying exclusively on its own facilities to now leaning on nonprofit and private sports organizations to help disabled veterans. This partnership allows combat veterans to get back on their feet — at times literally — through specially designed versions of sports known as “adaptive athletics.” Those identified as particularly talented athletes get singled out to train at the elite level, for events like the Invictus Games, or even the Paralympics.
These congressionally funded programs are among the latest initiatives from the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs aimed at helping a new generation of wounded warriors, many of whom have been suffering from debilitating wounds since the outbreak of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan over a decade and a half ago. Insurgents’ preference for improvised bombs, combined with significant advancements in battlefield medicine created a generation of veterans that lived to return home, but with lost limbs, genitals, unseen scars to their brains, and a government bureaucracy ill-equipped to help them.
The programs have produced positive results for disabled veterans, and through them, for the U.S. Paralympics team.
But serious shortfalls remain in the programs, and some advocates are concerned the efforts haven’t gone far enough.
From ‘Man Down’ to Medal Ceremonies
Schuble rediscovered athletics in the mid 2000s at the Lakeshore Foundation in Birmingham, Alabama, close to her university and the VA facility where she received medical treatment. It’s among dozens of organizations that receive $8 million in grant money from the Department of Veterans Affairs, authorized by the 2008 Veterans Benefits Improvement Act to train disabled veterans in sports.
Her success has done more for her than simply restore her ability to represent her country abroad — a responsibility most service members-turned-Paralympians cite as their principal motivation. Schuble, like most others, credits her return to sports with granting her a renewed sense of purpose. She’s since been able to complete her undergraduate work and earn full-time positions in project management and engineering at a series of car companies, and now at Mercedes-Benz.
“I’ve made it,” she says. “I’ve won the gold medal. I’ve graduated from college. I got a full-time job and I’m not dependent on the VA.”
The VA’s grant money hasn’t only given a boost to veterans, but perhaps even the entire U.S. Paralympic Team.
Of the roughly 290 total team members going to Rio this year, 12 percent are military veterans, up from 8.8 percent in the London games and 7.5 percent in Beijing, representing a steady and significant increase in wounded warriors’ ability to compete at the top level. The total this year is twice as many as the 17 veterans who participated in the Olympic Games this past August.
The Paralympics have helped the VA raise awareness for other veterans whose plight is too often unnoticed or underserved. Widespread focus on veterans has, in turn, brought greater attention to Paralympic sports in general.
“The public’s interest in the Paralympic Games is growing,” says Julie O’Neil, managing director of U.S. Paralympics, citing NBC’s decision to air live events from this year’s Paralympics for the first time, having only shown the games through its online platforms previously.
O’Neil has also noticed a marked shift in news stories about the games from a humanitarian angle to more straight sports coverage. “I think it’s a trend we’re going to continue to see in the future, that public awareness and public support is going to continue to grow.”
The image of successful disabled athletes may be changing, as are their opportunities, but wounded veterans still face massive obstacles in their path to recovery, both in their state of mind and in a government bureaucracy that sometimes fall short of its pledge to care for its service members.
High Bars
The process for getting access to the Veterans Affairs money is hard. Participating organizations must first prove that 95 percent of their funding will go straight to the veterans they serve. Any administrative or fundraising budgets that exceed the remaining 5 percent must come from the organizations’ coffers.
“It’s just been an overwhelming process making sure we’re compliant,” says Matt Colvin, who coaches Paralympic snowboarding as development director at Colorado-based Adaptive Action Sports, which is applying for a VA grant. He’s buoyed, however, by the service he believes organizations like his can provide to veterans.
Sports-related therapies at the VA had previously been limited to activities like cycling or rowing. Now that the department is working more closely with nonprofit and private sports organizations, it can offer veterans something more aligned with the kind of intensity they found previously in sports, or in their old way of life.
“When you think about the fact these individuals, many of them have experienced real deal combat,” says Colvin, a six-year Air Force veteran who served in Afghanistan and worked previously at the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “How do you go back to something that isn’t filled with adrenaline or really pushes your body?”
Disabled Sports USA has been one of the most prolific participants of the VA program, receiving more than $627,000 in grant money on their own and partnering with other organizations that receive an additional $300,000. The Rockville, Maryland-based organization provides access to a myriad of sports, from skiing and sled hockey to archery, Taekwondo, rock climbing and cycling.
What the VA can offer, however, doesn’t meet the demand, particularly for those seeking to represent American athletics in an international competition.
“It’s better, but it’s not enough to really fully cover their expenses, and corporate sponsorships are fewer and farther between than Olympic athletes. That’s just a fact,” says Kirk Bauer, Disabled Sports USA’s executive director, who lost a leg in Vietnam in 1969 and has spent the last 40 years providing alternative therapies for wounded veterans. “We would certainly like to see it higher, but that has to come from Congress. The VA can only operate under the designated funds that the Congress gives.”
An Unfunded Mission
For all of the benefits associated with the VA grant programs, some still fear whether they will last.
Veterans themselves worry that public attention, and thus public dollars, will wane as the average American pays less attention to the war overseas and, as they have before, ultimately forget about them. The congressional funding for the VA grant program is up for renewal in 2018, and some have expressed concern there won’t be as many dollars to go around.
“We need more resources, and we need to always make sure the resources we’re giving are being used in the right manner,” says Sen. John Boozman, a member of the Congressional Olympic and Paralympic Caucus and Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. The Arkansas Republican has worked on previous oversight legislation to ensure transparency at the VA and to secure funding for sports programs for veterans. He is already beginning to canvass for continued support when the Veterans Benefits Improvement Act expires in 2018.
[READ: Report: Post-Sept. 11 Wars Have Cost $4.79 Trillion.]
The program has been successful, he says. It accomplished the goals it set out to achieve of allowing any wounded veteran to pursue some kind of athletic endeavor, and for those who excelled to have an opportunity to, as Boozman says, “go all the way.”
“One of the things we want to continue to do a good job on is making sure we have uniformity, that not just one VA center or one VA region is excelling, but that we get participation throughout the U.S.,” he says.
For many, however, there just isn’t enough support.
Dugie Denton competed in archery in the 2012 London Olympics, and, like Schuble, trains and coaches at the Lakeshore Foundation in Alabama. He’s frustrated that the VA’s funding for sports as a form of therapy and training for the Paralympics come from the same pot.
“I’ve coached there for three years in a row, and it’s not really even coaching. You just sit in a room and wait for guys to show up and swing from sport to sport to sport,” says the Gulf War veteran, who also suffers from TBI among other injuries. “Ninety-four percent of them can’t shoot. They’re just there for a vacation. And it’s really upsetting to see your funding disappear that way.”
A sport like archery requires weeks to learn the basics, Denton says, unlike a game of wheelchair basketball, for example, that he and other trainers say can be taught in as little as a day. Denton appreciates the support recreational athletics offers to veterans, and to their families, along with the five-day paid trips to facilities like his for those just starting out in adaptive sports that the VA grant money supports.
He just wishes those pursuing the sport for international competition could get more resources, too.
“That’s common across all of our athletes, Olympic or Paralympic, veteran or non-veteran,” says O’Neil with the U.S. Paralympics, adding that most athletes at these games have to train on limited budgets. “Generally speaking, athletes are willing to do whatever it takes to get to the podium.”
These concerns are not lost on those in charge of overseeing governmental and public support for wounded veteran athletes. The U.S. Olympic Committee is one of the few worldwide that isn’t fully funded by its own government.
It’s now a matter of time to determine whether these programs are here to stay, or whether a dwindling number of new war veterans will chip away at public support.
“Everybody would agree this country is in a better place than we were in the 1970s coming out of Vietnam with regard to how we respond to and appreciate and support our veterans,” says Jeff Underwood, president of the Lakeshore Foundation. “We’re constantly having those conversations about how much better it is.”
He adds, “But there comes a point in time where society moves on to becoming concerned about other things.”
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With the Help of Disabled U.S. Veterans, the U.S. Paralympics Team Gets a Boost originally appeared on usnews.com
