Hearts of athletes, group are “in the right place”
Participants say they got edge from Adaptive Spirit fundraising
VAIL» Four years after breaking his back in a downhill training crash at the Sochi Paralympic Games, sit-skier Andrew Kurka went to the Pyeongchang Paralympics last month with something to prove.
He succeeded in resounding fashion, winning the downhill by 1.64 seconds — a blowout margin in ski racing.
Kurka and 43 other Paralympians came to Vail last week to share stories of athletic achievement they say was helped along by financial help from Adaptive Spirit.
Over 23 years, the Littleton-based not-for-profit telecommunications trade group has raised millions of dollars during annual networking events, helping to give American Paralympic skiers and snowboarders an edge. Athletes in those sports accounted for 35 of the 36 Paralympics medals the U.S. won in Pyeongchang.
“Without Adaptive Spirit, I don’t think any of this would be possible,” said Jamie Stanton, a University of Denver graduate who claimed a bronze medal in slalom in Pyeongchang. His lower right leg was amputated in infancy because of a birth defect. “Government funding is nonexistent in the United States. With the budgets we get, we manage and make things work, but Adaptive Spirit really allows us to (excel).”
Money from Adaptive Spirit augments the funding Paralympic athletes get from the U.S. Olympic Committee. Julie Dussliere, vice president of Paralympics for the USOC, declined to divulge the budget for Winter Paralympians but said support from Adaptive
Spirit is a substantial addition.
“Not only it is significant financially, but the intangible here is the connections that the athletes get with all of these companies and the potential sponsorships the individual athletes take on with some of these companies,” Dussliere said. “Some of the direct support that comes from Adaptive Spirit goes to specific technology or research-related ski and snowboard design. That’s key.”
After U.S. Paralympic nordic director John Farra watched a Ukrainian skier run away with a cross country race in a carbon fiber sit-ski frame at the Sochi Paralympics in 2014, he made it his mission to develop some for his athletes.
“It was like looking at a stealth jet,” Farra said of the Ukrainian sit-ski he saw in Sochi. “It was beautiful, shiny, black carbon fiber. Clearly someone had gone to great lengths to build her this incredible frame.”
At the Adaptive Spirit event a month later, Farra asked the organization to fund the sit-ski project. More than $90,000 poured in from Adaptive Spirit participants in the next three years, and by the time the Pyeongchang Games began, all of the top U.S. cross country skiers had carbon fiber sit-ski frames that weighed about half the aluminum setups they had been using.
American nordic skiers accounted for 16 medals in the Pyeongchang Paralympics and 15 were claimed by sit-skiers, all of whom used carbon fiber frames.
“My carbon sit-ski is phenomenal, and I know the other athletes on the team who are on them also really liked them,” said Dan Cnossen, who competed in six nordic races in Pyeongchang and claimed medals in every one — one gold, four silvers and a bronze. He’s a former Navy SEAL who stepped on an IED in Afghanistan and lost both legs above the knees.
“There are many variables in a ski race,” Cnossen said, “but if I look at the results list from my races and I had my other sit-ski, which was a few pounds heavier, I don’t think I would have the exact results that I had. I might be two or three spots back.
“We’re really lucky to be in a country that can spend this kind of money on equipment and to have organizations like Adaptive Spirit who have such generosity,” he said. “Their heart’s in the right place.”
By the time Adaptive Spirit’s annual event wraps Sunday morning, founder Steve Raymond hopes to have raised more than $1 million.
A semi-retired television executive who spent 25 years working for ESPN and Disney, Raymond spent his first year out of college as a Vail ski bum. Not long after he moved to Colorado, a friend, Bob Meserve, was paralyzed in a skiing accident.
Meserve relearned skiing at Winter Park’s National Sports Center for the Disabled and raced on the U.S. Disabled Team. Raymond was working for ESPN when Meserve shared his frustration with the fundraising challenges faced by disabled athletes.
Out of that meeting came the idea for Adaptive Spirit, which draws high-level telecom executives, from companies such as Centurylink, Comcast, Cox, Layer3 TV, Nest Labs and Tmobile, to annual networking events anchored by fundraising for the U.S. Paralympics Ski and Snowboard Team.
For the first one in 1995, Raymond recruited filmmaker Warren Miller to give the keynote speech.
“It brought tears to people’s eyes,” Raymond said. “We knew we were on to something. We raised like $200,000. Fast forward 23 years later, now we have 1,300 people showing up and we’re raising significant funding. A lot of times they will ‘adopt’ an athlete.”
Kurka, the downhill sit-skier, credits the fundraising for allowing the team to dominate the medal count at Pyeongchang.
“It helps us to be the best in the world,” said Kurka, who is from Palmer, Alaska. “Adaptive Spirit showcases the will of the human spirit and helps us to inspire and change lives around the world by showing people what they are truly capable of.”
Kurka, who is a partial paraplegic — he can walk, but with great difficulty — said his gold medal in Pyeongchang was about redemption.
“I went into this event not wanting to win, but wanting to prove to myself that I was a better person than I was four years ago,” Kurka said. “It was a dream come true. It wasn’t about the gold medal, but I ended up winning and crushing the competition in the process.”