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Refusing to quit Amputees playing exhibitions despite handicap
Posted: Friday December 17, 1999 03:12 PM
LOWELL, Mass. (AP) -- Sergei Bestoujev turns a wobbly pirouette as the puck goes by, using his stick for balance as he struggles to stay upright. When he realizes he's not going to fall, he breaks into a broad smile that - even more than his shaky skating -- reveals him to be a novice. Bestoujev, you see, has all of his teeth. It's his left leg that he's missing. The United States has its "Miracle on Ice" -- a victory over the dominant Soviets that led to the gold medal at the 1980 Olympics. And now, thanks to the Americans, the Russians have a miracle of their own: Using U.S. technology and Russian labor, five amputees are learning to skate. "It's the crowning achievement of the rehabilitation process," said Dr. Mark Pitkin, a Tufts University prosthetic researcher who brought the players to Boston this month. "Only a person with a good stump and a good prosthetic and good fitness can play hockey." The victims of three landmines, a gunshot and a train, the St. Petersburg Elks won't remind anyone of the Soviet hockey machine that dominated international play into the 1980s. For now, though, their proficiency on prosthetics is unmatched. In fact, they are the only team of the sort, and one reason for their trip is to find an opponent for an exhibition at the hockey World Championships in St. Petersburg next spring. The ultimate goal, Pitkin said, is to establish teams on three continents and have amputee hockey declared an official sport at the Paralympics. "It's the first team in the world, because, scientifically, no one could say (before) that it's possible to skate," said Dr. Konstantin Scherbina, of the St. Petersburg Institute of Prosthetics. "I could prove it," said Nikolai Knyazev, who had not been able to skate since losing his leg to a landmine in Afghanistan 15 years ago. "The answer is: 'Yes. It's possible.'" Knyazev tightened his laces, stood on his skates and leaned on his foam, metal and carbon fiber right leg to give it one final test before he headed out of the locker room. Dressed in donated equipment -- with skates sometimes secured to prosthetics by duct tape -- the Elks played a 10-minute exhibition between periods of a college game at Lowell's Tsongas Arena. A team of able-bodied postmen graciously held back as the Russians - with an assist from their coach, a former Soviet junior star, and a borrowed goaltender -- stumbled up and down the ice. The few thousand fans who had come to see UMass-Lowell play New Hampshire were supportive, but they may not have understood what they were watching. "Go, Russian Dude!" 8-year-old Ethan Williams, of Dover, N.H., yelled at the players. Then, turning to his father, he asked, "How come they're going so slow?" The answer left both of them stunned. "You can't even tell," Willie Williams said. In fact, the players have only been skating since September, and most of them had only been wearing their new, high-tech legs -- with an artificial ankle that makes skating possible -- for two days. "A month ago, people were falling down," said Pitkin, who developed the "rolling joint foot" at New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center. Nikolai Maslov, who toured with a Soviet junior team in the mid-1970s and carries with him a puck signed by Bobby Hull and Maurice Richard, was coaching the professional team CKA in St. Petersburg when he heard the amputees could use a little help. "I found from day one fantastic attitudes and willingness to do the work," said Maslov -- the "Security Service Tornado," according to a button he likes to show. "When I came the first day for the first practice, some of them couldn't skate at all. They were holding the boards." Maslov leads the team in practice three times a week, and the players skate for three hours on their own the other days - more for rehabilitation than to learn the neutral zone trap. Maslov's biggest problem may be keeping his players from checking too hard. "They want not only to skate," he said. "They want to fight -- full-contact hockey." Previously, the only hockey available for an amputees had been sled hockey, where a player sits on a platform above double-runners while propelling himself with two small hockey sticks that double as oars. Sled hockey is already in the Paralympics. But these players, who were fortunate to be able to keep their knees even as they lost part of their legs, want the full hockey experience. And that means skating upright. "Athletics is a way of self-expression, especially for a disabled person," said Pavel Soltan, a quadruple amputee and a member of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly who has supported the team politically. "They can prove to themselves and everyone that despite a problem, they are persons with the same abilities, and they don't want to limit themselves." The players had few limits on this trip. Before their exhibition in Lowell, they took a six-hour tour of Boston -- the New England Aquarium, the Italian neighborhood known as the North End, Paul Revere's house. After the game, they invited everyone back to their hotel for a vodka party. "They're getting people out of their wheelchairs," said Mike Welsch, an amputee who has run in the Boston Marathon but said it never occurred to him that he might be able to skate before he came to see the exhibition. "Seeing these guys, it's just amazing." In 1985, Andrei Vlasov was advancing over a hill with the Soviet peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan when he stepped on an antipersonnel landmine that blew apart his right leg. He had only two weeks left to go in the service. "You can imagine what I was thinking,' he said. 'I was lying in the hospital for two months. When I realized all the challenges facing me, that was the lowest point." Vlasov said he is playing as a tribute to all of the medics over the past 15 years who literally helped him get back on his feet. One question remained, after the exhilaration of the sightseeing and the exhibition and the vodka party: Why, if the players had one leg made of carbon fiber and metal and foam, do they wear two shinguards? "Because they feel like able-bodied people," Pitkin said. "They don't want to be thought of as disabled."
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