WARM SPRINGS, Ga. — It happened every few miles during Josh George’s
45-minute workout through the hills of middle Georgia. A car or truck driver
would slow to a tentative crawl, spend 10 to 20 seconds deciding whether it
was rude to pass, and after creeping over the double-yellow would rubberneck
at the young man stuffed into a racing wheelchair huffing and puffing his
way across the asphalt.
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Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
Josh George is a top medal contender in the
Paralympics and could draw the public’s attention to his sport.
Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
George’s strength — he can bench-press 220
pounds although he weighs 98 pounds — helps him power his
wheelchair to 23 miles per hour.
They saw. But if they had heard.
“Heinz Frei!” George’s training partner implored over her own gasps for
breath.
““Heinz Frei!” More gasps.
“Heinz Frei!”
Heinz Frei of Switzerland has been considered the world’s premier
wheelchair racer — but won’t be much longer if George completes his climb.
Still a baby of 24 by the standards of his sport, George has established
himself as one of his sport’s best, having held two sprinting world records
and won several major marathons. He will head to the 2008
Paralympic Games — held in Beijing two weeks after the Olympics — with
the ability to win not just a slew of medals, but perhaps the attention of
an American public that barely knows the sport.
With a Huck Finn grin atop a weight lifter’s shoulders, and sweaty curls
straight out of a Mountain Dew ad, George is equal parts oh-boy Virginian
and oh-man athlete. Because he already is so good, so young — wheelchair
racers typically reach their competitive peak as late as their mid-30s —
George is a budding star in wheelchair racing, and easily the United States’
top Paralympic medal contender in races from 100 meters up through the
marathon.
But as he travels around the world for competitions, rolling through
airports pushing his three-wheeled, state-of-the-art racing chair, the
quizzical looks and saccharine comments remind him of the distance still to
be traveled.
“You tell them, ‘I’m a wheelchair racer,’ and they’ll say, ‘Good for
you!’ like, ‘Good for you, you’re getting out of the house and doing
something,’ ” said George, who graduated with honors from the
University of Illinois last year and still trains primarily in
Champaign. “It’s not, ‘How’d you do at the last race?’ You don’t get taken
as a serious athlete a lot of the time. People don’t quite understand
exactly what goes into it.”
Wheelchair racing is far from a glorified soap-box derby, but rather an
intricate test of athletic strength, endurance and strategy among athletes
whose propulsion comes from arms atop wheels rather than legs atop sneakers.
And although his sport immediately advertises physical limitations, George
excels partly because some of his physical restrictions have led to some
spectacular physical gifts.
GGeorge has been paralyzed from the midchest down since he fell out of a
12th-story window when he was 4. The accident — which shattered his legs,
dislocated his hips and damaged his spinal cord — required surgeons to
insert pins in George’s hips, impeding his leg development, and later led to
a fusion of his spine, which stopped his slow growth altogether at 14. He
now weighs 98 pounds with legs the size of a 6-year-old’s. “I got hit kind
of hard in the growth department,” he said proudly.
Determined to be an athlete while growing up in Herndon, Va., George
developed his upper body to the point where today his shoulders ripple out
of his shirts, he can bench-press 220 pounds, and he can do dips (forms of
pull-ups on parallel bars) with 100 pounds strapped to his back. That sheer
strength, as well as the pushing motion that is so ingrained in his joints —
many competitors weren’t hurt until their teens or later — leaves George
with an off-the-charts power-to-weight ratio that is crucial to
acceleration. Add to that the dexterity to hit his wheel rims at maximum
power up to 140 times a minute during sprints, lungs strong enough to handle
marathons on consecutive weekends and an eat-my-dust competitive verve, and
George could soon dominate wheelchair racing.
“He’s doing everything right at the moment,” said David Weir, 28, one of
George’s top rivals from Britain and the winner of last month’s London
Marathon. “He’s a very talented young athlete that’s going to go far in his
sport. If it all comes together at once, he’s going to be outstanding.”
George’s stroke is honed with the help of sophisticated analysis. At a
recent training camp, slow-motion software mapped every split-second of the
cycloid technique: the impact of gloved hand to rubber rim at about 2
o’clock on the wheel face; the .083 seconds of contact during which hundreds
of pounds of force push down; the release of the hand at approximately 5:30,
just as the arms are almost stretched to maximum length; the rising up to
ready-to-push position with actions and breaths similar to a butterfly
swimmer’s; and then impact all over again.