How a Trip to Sochi Changed My Mind about Sports

I hated gym class as a kid. I hated it like I hate cancer, fascism, and most of the current crop of superhero movies. I hated it mostly because my participation in that nightmare school period boiled down to me sitting on the sidelines flipping those plastic score cards. Believe me, that wasn’t where I wanted to be, but I had little choice back then. See, I was born with spina bifida, which is a neurological condition that affects fetuses in-utero, leaving their spines malformed and usually resulting in some form of paralysis. The painter Frida Kahlo had it. The singer John Mellencamp has it. Theirs was not so severe. My spina bifida left me paralyzed from the knees down, forcing me to use crutches to walk. No leg power meant no kickball. No running from balls aimed at my head or from other students trying to tackle me. The kids would either pick me last, or the teacher would simply nod and point gravely toward the dreaded score cards.

I went through grammar school on the sidelines and in high school I started writing, an experience that taught me how to walk through life by engaging my mind and my heart. I wrote articles for the school paper, scrawled bad poetry into marble notebooks for imaginary girlfriends, and dreamed up movie scripts. (Movies: my first and truest love. Even as my physical challenges made me an outsider, movies were my connection to the larger world.) But it was also a sport-centric school and the specter of my athletic shortcomings would always snipe at my leg-braced heels, despite a brief stint on the freshman swim team. While I love the water and have a great deal of upper body strength, I hated placing last.

It was with this ambivalent sports history in mind that this gym-allergic movie nerd found himself on a Turkish Air plane that seemed straight out of 1973, flying from Los Angeles to Sochi, Russia, to attend and reflect on the 2014 Sochi Paralympics. I went there as a cultural blogger for the Wheelchair Sports Federation after responding to a Facebook post from a brilliant photographer friend to join her media team. My super-easy assignment: reconciling the Paralympics in a country that had no disability culture. No, that’s underselling it. Russia has disability culture like North Carolina has trans-friendly public bathrooms. It just isn’t a thing.

If I had been born there in 1979, I probably would have been ripped from my parents and sent abroad or to an institution, never to be seen or heard from again. That was the prevailing attitude about folks like me. We needed to be hidden from view because we represented the worst parts of humanity. From the Russian Revolution of 1917 (whose Council of Minsters of the USSR, sweet teddy bears one and all, developed an ideology against “defectives”) until 1993, when provisions were established to protect children from institutionalization, Russia’s prevailing viewpoint was to keep what was weak hidden from the world. And even as those provisions were enacted, the air around disability was thick and noxious.

So, here I was, this Irish New York movie punk blessed with spina bifida, come to pick a fight with an entire nation over what I perceived as backwards attitudes. I spent hours poring over Russian history as it related to disability as well as the history of the Paralympic Games themselves. I was angry at the Russians for ignoring us and I was angry that my voice might not be heard, however loud I screamed. I thought I would come away from my time in the bustling Olympic Village with an overheated laptop and self-righteous rage.