Please read below artical which I have cut and paste from Sailing Anarchy which was written by Geoff Chambers in support of Jeff Milligan and the Australian Paralympics sailing team.
Send you letter of disgust to (
ifds@isaf.co.uk )
Asked them if the article (with link) was true (I don't expect a response)
I, along with many others have already sent a letter. Get behind Jeff and show your support.
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AnAble
Yachting gets even more exclusive. Call me old fashioned, but I think if I had my foot ripped off I’d be entitled to regard myself disabled. Incredibly, the International Foundation for Disabled Sailing (IFDS) sees it differently. No, it didn’t happen to me, but it happened to someone close, one of us in fact. Promise of a glorious day ahead as his motorbike purred through the crisp morning air when the blur of an oncoming truck veered across the centerline. There was no time to react and it was sheer luck that it didn’t wipe him out completely. The slab side of the truck rushed passed inches from his handlebars and it felt like a near miss, but it also felt not like a near miss. The pain didn’t come on straight away – the adrenaline stopped that – but something wasn’t right. A glance down and his mind froze – his foot was gone!
So had the truck. Sorry folks, but behind every one of our disabled sailors is an equally gruesome horror story: - the car crash, the diving accident, thalidomide, a fire, a building collapse, add in bomb blasts and war injuries, cancer. The list is endless. Each has their own story, fascinating but terrible. An American flying instructor who’s wealthy student tinkered illegally with the engine of his plane and installed a fuel valve backwards causing engine failure – the student walked away unharmed, the instructor now a paraplegic. Often there have been hours of suffering before any medical help arrives and then the slow dawn, the trauma of a lost of limb or impaired function that will drag on for life. It is difficult enough being in a wheel chair, or having false legs or missing a hand, but by far the most profound loss is the right to participate in society with fundamental equality of opportunity that we hitherto took for granted.
The cause of disabled sport confronts this outrageous exclusion that becomes the daily experience of normal people when bad luck happens. Somewhere deep within our biological make-up we are driven to search out the familiar and shun the peculiar. But the mark of civilised society is that we look past the obvious to recognize individual value. Nelson Mandela captured it well; - sustainable communities will never be founded on policies of exclusion. We applaud this wisdom in the global picture, yet are prone to being oblivious to it on our own doorstep. Our motorcycling friend rides on for over a kilometre chaotic thoughts whirring around his mind. “Can I make it to a hospital?” “Should I just stop on the verge and gracefully fall off the bike?” Soon the pain forces the decision and he is writhing in agony by the time a Samaritan pulls over. Later at the hospital, still in shock, he is required to sign off on the completion of the amputation. Half his foot has been ripped off – stuck in some truck steps never to be recovered – the recommendation is a “Symes amputation”; - to remove the rest of the foot and try to position the meat pad of the heel over the leg bone to provide some load bearing ability notwithstanding the leg will be 4cm shorter. A prosthesis will be worn for life to provide balance of gait, to share the weight on the calf, and provide a plastic foot for appearances.
Meet Jeff. He was always Jeff. But now you meet him with a fake leg. He walks funny, around the pool he hops funny. Children point and stare, adults admonish them sternly (to mask their own discomfort). He can’t walk up stairs normally, is gingerly on a ladder, and can’t dance like us. Jeff no longer rides a motorbike. He discovers sailing provides much of the freedom he knew from motorbikes but allows him control over who he is with, who will stare, and is an activity that can be done a bit slower by someone missing a foot. He’ll never be invited to be a bowman on a flash racing yacht – has to accept that. He cannot move as swiftly across the boat when tacking compared to people with both feet and his balance understandably is shot to pieces. But it’s mostly a sit down sport and that’s good. Jeff enjoys his sailing and gets involved as a helper for “Sail into Life” which is an initiative of his local Rotary Club. He also gets involved with Sailability and two years later he places 5th at the Athens Paralympics trimming mainsheet for quadriplegic skipper Jamie Dunross. He has a solid friendship with his wheelchair-bound skipper and travels the world providing invaluable support.
Jeff is well established in Sailability as a sailor and also helping out those more disabled. He is a valued part of the fraternity and he’s training hard for the Beijing Paralympics. Suddenly he is excluded. On the eve of the 2006 IFDS Worlds in Perth Jeff is deemed ineligible to take part. It is suddenly decided by the International Foundation for Disabled Sailing that if you are missing a foot, you are not disabled if the heel pad covers the stump. Like I say, call me old fashioned, but like, hey, I am missing a foot you know! Half of my walking was done on it – you know walking! And if you think I’m not disabled then lets cut yours off and see how “not disabled” you feel – try the stairs, feel the stares, try swimming without a foot, try walking, try balancing on a sail boat, or pulling a rope or leaning out. Tonight try showering on one leg, or drying yourself on the hop afterwards. Now fair enough, there is a wide range of disabilities, some worse than others. But let’s look at some of the other disabilities and how much or how little they impede sailing ability. A one handed sailor is at virtually no disadvantage whatsoever if they are steering or trimming a jib without winches. A paraplegic is at virtually no disadvantage steering if he uses one of the tacking chairs now commonly in use. Consider Noel Robins, Sydney Paralympics gold medallist, a quadriplegic who over many years regained partial leg and arm function (a tetraplegic) but still had the most “spastic” gait and walked only with calipers or an electric scooter.
Now get this, Noel skippered the 12m Australia for Alan Bond in the 1980 America’s Cup! Like Noel and all the disabled sailors, Jeff has developed techniques to minimize the effect of his missing foot and by those efforts he is a capable racing sailor. He is testament to the possible. He is testament to inspiration of disabled sport. But unlike other disabled sailors Jeff races without a prosthesis or any especially adapted equipment to overcome his physical limitations. Many others use special equipment: - “bionic” legs at $40,000US that have computerized function that memorize and anticipate tasks, the tacking chairs and carbon fibre benches to assist crossing from side to side of the boat. The disabled sailing classification system has simply got it wrong in Jeff’s case. How can you possibly be missing a foot and not be eligible to participate in disabled sport? The disabled sailing system works by scaling the various disabilities and then aggregating the ability on the boat so that a less disabled sailor will have to team up with the more disabled in order to qualify. Jeff crewing for a quadriplegic is just such an example. But implicit in such a system is that the boat, its equipment, or the task is held reasonably constant. However this is obviously no longer the case given the specialist equipment being used.
The result at this stage is ludicrous: - the system treats the paraplegic sailors that whiz across the boat on sliding chairs as equal to those who steer sitting to leeward half the race. The aggregating process is inherently imperfect but is accepted in the grander cause of inclusion. But excluding someone missing an entire foot in the context of such a loose system is totally unjustifiable. The IFDS has failed. By every conceivable measure, from the children that snicker on the beach, to the skipper who won’t have him on the crew, the surgeon who completed the amputation, the truck driver living with a ghastly secret, and every right minded person, Jeff has a significant disability. The IFDS has failed at the most profound level. It has committed the vulgar act of exclusion that it exists to overcome. It has excluded a person with a disability and left him adrift – not able to participate fairly with able bodied sailors and now denied that great relief that disabled sport seeks to bring those abandoned by the mainstream. It may be a long bow to stretch, comparing the rebuilding of the African nation from the tyranny of apartheid to Jeff’s exclusion from disabled sailing, but principles must withstand context for our values to survive. In this case Jeff has been excluded by the very organization that exists to protect him. The IFDS has abandoned its core value, “inclusion”, and it is a tragedy.
Written by Geoff Chambers in support of Jeff Milligan and the Australian Paralympics sailing team
