Mar 17, 2010 Posted in Fun and Inspiration, Random Thoughts

This is an Awesome Story

I’m blasting through a book by Mike Lipkin called “Luck Favours the Brave” and in it he shares a great story.  It is the amazing true story of Australian speed-skater, Steven Bradbury and it first appeared in the Globe and Mail on February 18th, 2002.

=======

The luckiest man at the Winter Olympics is an Australian speed-skater who once sliced his leg open and almost bled to death on the ice only to recover and break his neck.

In the men’s 1,000 metre short-track event, everybody fell down and Mr. Bradbury won. It happened in the quarter-final, in the semi-final, and it happened again, for the third time on the same night, on the last corner of the final.  Everybody fell down and Mr. Bradbury won.

Short-trackers have a habit of falling down and taking each other out like pins in a bowling alley. But what happened for Mr. Bradbury was beyond anything that anyone had ever seen before.  In the final, Mr. Bradbury was so far behind hit rivals, he could have stopped and asked for directions. He looked like a guy trying to hail a cab.  Then all of the sudden, China’s Li Jiajun went down. Then Korea’s Hyun-Soo Ahn went down and took out Mr. Ohno and Mr. Turcotte, and Mr. Bradbury cruised past thinking, “Hang on. This can’t be right. I think I won.”

Mr. Bradbury’s career has produced as many near-death experiences as accomplishments. At a 1994 World Cup event in Montreal, he slipped and impaled his right thigh on a skate blade. The gash was so severe he lost four litres of blood and required 111 stitches.  He said he would have died if it hadn’t been for the fast work of the paramedics who treated him.

Then in 2000, he fell while training in Australia and crashed headfirst into a barrier, breaking the C4 and C5 vertebrae in his neck. For six weeks he wore a metal halo.

But even after two horrific injuries, Mr. Bradbury refused to pass on a sport that had taken him to the 1992, 1994 and 1998 Winter Games. Instead, he wanted to one last go at the Olympics so he could, “walk away satisfied.”  Never in his wildest dreams did he expect to walk away as an Olympic champion, the guy who stayed on his feet when everyone else was skating on banana peels; Australia’s new Olympic hero, whose brilliant strategy was to stay behind the leaders in case they all fell down.

=================

The moral of the story?  In order to finish first, you first must finish.