Paratriathlete Melissa Stockwell hopes to inspire at Rio Paralympic Games

On July 9, the members of Team USA’s first-ever paratriathlon team will be announced. It will be the first time the paratriathlon is a registered event in the Paralympic games, and the opportunity to take part in the inaugural event in Rio de Janeiro made three-time paratriathlon World Champion, Melissa Stockwell, giddy.

“When it was announced that paratriathlon will debut as a paralympic sport this year in Rio, it was a quick decision to try to make that a reality,” Stockwell said, “And to go once again represent a country I defended over in Iraq on the world’s biggest athletic stage, while wearing a USA uniform.”

Before she was a Paralympic hopeful, Stockwell was an Army Second Lieutenant on a tour of duty in Baghdad back in 2004. Her convoy was struck by an IED and Stockwell remembers waking up in the broken wreckage of her bombed Humvee to realize that her left leg was gone. She now wears a prosthetic that attaches to the top of her hip, and calls it her “good leg,” the one she wears around the house.

Athletes of all abilities face their trials tactically. They prepare for it for years, honing their bodies with training regimens on a timeline leading up to a once-every-four-years event. Triathletes in particular expand their focus to refining performance in three different sports, paying attention to everything, down to the the vital transitions from sport to sport.

For amputee athletes such as Stockwell who are competing in a para- or adaptive sport, the hidden “fourth” part of the triathlon involves working with the limb technology necessary to make each portion of the event physically possible.

Stockwell is well-equipped for this challenge. “I have three prosthetic legs,” Stockwell says. “When I swim, I don’t wear a leg. It’s actually illegal to do so. So I get in the water, I swim, I get out of the water, I put on my running leg, that I kind of slide into. I run to the transition area, where I take off my running leg, put on a sports-specific cycling leg that I’m able to bike with, so I bike with that leg. I come back, switch off from my bike to my run leg, and then run and finish the race.”

None of these transitions between sports, including the application or removal of the prosthesis, happens off-the-clock. “You can win or lose a race depending upon how slow or how fast you put your leg on and off,” Stockwell says. “We train that, we train to take our legs on and off quickly. We try to make the best [equipment] set-up for each person, it’s very individual about what type of prosthetic they wear, so we try to make it as quick as possible.”

Stockwell first turned to the three triathlon sports to rehab from her injury. Initially, she says, she thought triathletes were overzealous, “because who would want to swim, bike, and run, like, all at the same time?” So Stockwell focused on her strongest sport, swimming, and became the first Iraqi War veteran to qualify for the Beijing Paralympics and competed in three events: the 100m and 400m freestyle and the 100m butterfly in 2008. She failed to medal in any of the three.

After Beijing, Stockwell began to focus on triathlon. Despite the challenge, she fell in love with the event because she liked being tested and feeling the joy of competing on the same course as able-bodied athletes, especially crossing the same finish line. She was invited to take part in her first triathlon in 2009 and went on to become a three-time world champion and to complete for the U.S. National Paratriathlon team. Her efforts have even garnered attention from Team Budweiser, who is sponsoring her as the only woman para-athlete in their team of six Olympic hopefuls. A Paralympic berth would be the culmination of seven years of Stockwell’s training.

She’s helping to train other paratriathletes, too, work she feels is an important way to give back to the people who have supported her during her own recovery and training. To that end Stockwell co-founded Dare2Tri, a group that helps athletes with physical disabilities participate in triathlons, in 2011. “I really wanted to give back to the next generation,” Stockwell says. “Just being able to give back and show a young girl in a wheelchair that she still has the ability to get to the starting line and finish line of a triathlon, and just seeing the self-worth, the self-confidence that she gets, it’s pretty remarkable, the impact that it can make in somebody’s life.”

Losing at the Beijing Paralympics gave Stockwell perspective and an opportunity to challenge herself to compete in a sport that is her calling. That’s a message that she is eager to pass on to other adaptive athletes. “Have high goals and go for them, and if you don’t reach them, you’ll learn something about yourself, and find another goal, and move forward.”