Enabling the Disabled

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Paradox Sports empowers people in the outdoors.

DJ Skelton woke up in a hospital room, blinded by walls as white as a snowy slope on a sunny day, with his mother and father anxiously looking down at him.

“DJ, you are safe now,” he recalls his doctor telling him. “You are in America. Everything is going to be alright.’” Alright? Skelton says he asked himself, confused. “I lost my left eye … the roof of my mouth… there is a hole through my right leg the size of a fist. Are you serious? Can you not see I am disabled?”

On November 6, 2004, during the ferocious 2nd Battle of Fallujah, a rocket-propelled grenade hit Skelton’s chest. A platoon leader with Charlie Company, 1/5BN, 1-25ID Stryker Brigade, he had been deployed only since September.

Though a huge setback, Skelton bounced back quickly. Soon after leaving the Walter Reed Military Hospital and returning to Tacoma, Wash., he began running and rock climbing (with prosthetic limbs) as he tried to put the pieces of his life back together. When the Army decided he was medically unfit to serve, he balked.

“I said, ‘wait a minute!’” he recalls. “I’m running marathons, I’m climbing, I speak Chinese fluently, and I have other skills, and you’re saying that I cannot contribute to this society?” The messages the military was giving disabled vets were all wrong, and they were being imparted when people were at their most vulnerable, Skelton says. So he decided to promote a more positive message—one that he had learned through his reintegration into the outdoor community.

“It’s called post-traumatic growth,” he explains. “Take the trauma and grow from it.” Skelton wanted disabled vets to realize that they didn’t have to give up their dreams. Ultimately, he won a post as the military adviser to the Secretary of Defense, where he could affect positive change on a policy level. Skelton also organized a Wounded Warriors Project and Disabled Sports USA climbing event at Sport Rock in Washington, DC. He invited Boulder-based professional climber, Timmy O’Neill, who had climbed the 3,000-foot monolith El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, with his paraplegic brother, Sean. The February 2007 event, attended by three double-leg amputees, two single-leg amputees, and one soldier blinded during combat, was a huge success.

“Our common bond was not only surviving while others around us had died,” says O’Neill, who had just witnessed the death of a climbing partner days before the event, “but also the satisfaction and exhilaration afforded through climbing. DJ’s enthusiasm and empathy for the injured—being a disabled vet himself—impressed me profoundly, and I knew this man’s mission was my own.”

O’Neill and Skelton decided that day to found Paradox Sports, a nonprofit that would provide adaptive technologies and opportunities to the physically challenged.

Summer 2007, the newly-formed Team Paradox Sports, made up of both abled and disabled athletes, iparticipated in their first events. They raised funds for ovarian cancer at the HERA Climb4Life event in Boulder, and brought their energy and skills to the No Barriers Festival in Squaw Valley, California. It was at these events that Paradox found its eventual executive director, Malcolm Daly—an amputee and the founder of Boulder-based Great Trango Holdings—and its director of marketing, Devaki Murch.

Both Murch and Daly watched with amazement at how the lives of participants transformed as they tried climbing, kayaking, cycling and other outdoor sports. For example, amputee, Iraqi vet and Climb4Life attendee Chad Jukes says, “The event helped me realize even more that I really have no limits. I can do whatever I want with my life.”

“The true light that radiated from deep inside of Chad and the other climbers when they reached the top [of the rock climbing routes] was indescribable,” says Murch. Watching the disabled athletes changed her life. She saw that Paradox Sports was “about living in a shared environment in which we can see beyond disabilities, limitations, personal issues, stigmas, fears and the daily problems that we allow to cloud our lives…it’s about working together to experience life to its fullest.”

Daly, whose involvement was a natural progression of his passion for engaging in the communities that he’s participated in, adds that he was drawn to the “accepting, challenging, intelligent and supportive” attitudes of all involved. Though he sometimes feels overwhelmed by learning the ins and outs of running a nonprofit, he’s constantly motivated by the “massive energy that is generated around Paradox.”

Paradox Sports, says Skelton, is about encouraging others to “pursue dreams and follow our hearts in this life.” On the day that the organization was created, Skelton says, he came to terms with his own life, realizing everything was going to be okay. “It does take risk and courage,” he says, “but the last time I checked, heart and intellect are never found in an appendage.”

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