Nieto walks down aisle with his wife
Two-time Olympian fulfills vow
EL CAJON, Calif, July 23, (AP): Step by halting step, former Olympic high jumper Jamie Nieto made good on his vow to walk wife Shevon down the aisle after their wedding and out the door to a waiting limousine.
It was roughly 130 steps, with a stop halfway down the aisle of the small church to kiss his bride for a gaggle of photographers.
No cane, no walker. Just Nieto holding onto his wife’s left hand for support.
The two-time Olympian fulfilled his vow Saturday, 15 months after suffering a spinal cord injury on a misjudged backflip that left him partially paralyzed, with no feeling in his hands or feet. Doctors didn’t know if he’d walk again.
Nieto, 40, was determined to defy his doctors and make it all the way down the aisle.
“It’s a monumental day so I think I need to do monumental things,” Nieto said before the ceremony while sitting with his groomsman in the office of Bishop Donnie McGriff just off the sanctuary of the Greater Christ Temple Apostolic Church in this city just east of San Diego.
“I’m definitely blessed and super happy to be here. I’ve worked really hard to get to this point and I think it’s just the first step to many more in my recovery.”
Nieto proposed to the former Shevon Stoddart, a hurdler, while in a wheelchair six months after The Backflip. It used to be his signature move after big events.
On April 23, 2016, the maneuver went seriously wrong for Nieto, who cleared 7 feet, 8 inches to finish fourth at the 2004 Olympics. He was coaching some jumpers in the Los Angeles area when he showed them his backflip expertise. His first attempt was a little off so he asked for another try. He pushed off with one foot on the artificial turf and it slipped, forcing him straight back instead of into a somersault. The full weight of his body crashed on his neck.
He was flown by helicopter to a hospital and had surgery to fuse a disk in his neck. When he awoke, he could only shrug his shoulders and flex his quadriceps muscles.
The high jumper who finished sixth at the 2012 London Games spent 12 days in intensive care and two months at an inpatient rehab facility before returning home.
He’s been rehabbing hard for several months, determined to be able to walk his new wife out of the church.
“I promised myself I’d come back to Budapest another way,” the 19-year-old told reporters Sunday after finishing her 100m butterfly heat.
Now based in Berlin, Mardini gained international attention after surviving near-drowning trying to reach Greece in 2015. A year later she won her heat in the Rio Olympics as part of the Games’ first ever refugee team.
During a 25-day journey from her war-ravaged homeland, Mardini used her swimming skills to help drag a leaking dinghy carrying 16 people to the Greek shore, after the engine broke down.
“My sister (Sara) jumped into the water first, then I jumped in after her, (with two men) we had one hand each on the boat and tried to swim and kick to shore,” she said.
Afer more than three hours in the water they arrived on the island of Lesbos, and trekked northwards before getting stuck in Budapest for a week.
Hungary became a hotspot of the migration crisis in mid-2015, after the authorities temporarily blocked onward travel to neighbouring Austria and Germany, which transformed Budapest’s railway stations into vast makeshift refugee camps.
“I slept on the floor, in the train stations, it was really horrible,” she said.
The country’s fiercely anti-immigration Prime Minister Viktor Orban later erected razor-wire fences along the southern borders to keep out migrants altogether.
“Then, I thought that people were really rude, my coach was afraid, when I said I was going to go back (to Budapest) again, but now it’s completely different, so I changed my point of view about the people of Hungary, it’s really cool this week,” she said.