Paralympic Games

The sports pages are daily exercises in tributes to courage, where stories gush over the heroics of head-on tackles and nerve-wrenching 20-foot putts. There is courage, and then there is Nick Scandone. The day after New Year's, Scandone died. He was 42. In the Beijing Paralympics four months ago, Scandone and his sailing crew, Maureen McKinnon-Tucker, won the gold medal in the SKUD-18 Class. Neither Bob Costas nor NBC was there.

World-class athletes. Visitors from the White House. Computer glitches. Sound familiar? Less than two weeks after the Olympic caravan pulled out of town, competition began Friday--before considerably smaller crowds--for the 1996 Summer Paralympic Games. About 3,500 disabled athletes from 127 countries are competing in the same venues as the Olympians for 10 days in what organizers call the second-largest sporting event in the world.

Sailing has been a big part of Dr. John Ross-Duggan's life since he was 7. By the time he was a teenager, he was doing well in California regattas, and at 15 he was seventh in the 1970 Hobie Nationals in Honolulu. After three years at Newport Harbor High, he entered premed studies at UC Irvine, where he also sailed for the university team. But an automobile accident in 1978, after he had completed his third year of medical school, left him a quadriplegic.

The boat trembled slightly as it crept toward a steep drop in the dark, giving the earthquake survivors a familiar, queasy feeling of dread. At the end of this tunnel, though, there were no crumbling buildings, no cries for help from trapped loved ones. Instead, the four Armenian teenagers splashed down at the end of the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios, a world away from the Armenian earthquake of 1988 that left three of them amputees.

It wasn't an entirely new experience, this adulation, this hero worship, that greeted Marla Runyan as she finished first in the women's 800-meter run of the Paralympic heptathlon Thursday night. But it was new enough that she was overwhelmed. At nearly midnight on a weeknight, the stadium was almost empty.

The Land Sharks, Long Beach's quadriplegic rugby team, may be taking their game to Atlanta in August. The Sharks are one of eight quad rugby teams in the state in this weekend's regional competition at Long Beach City College. Quad rugby, in which all participants have some degree of paralysis in all four limbs, sprang from wheelchair basketball and ice hockey. Once called "murderball," it's an aggressive, fast-moving game introduced in the United States from Canada in 1981.

In the inner-city Indianapolis school in which she teaches, Trischa Zorn hands out hope. Zorn, a national swimming champion who grew up in Mission Viejo, tells the disabled students she teaches that they shouldn't let their disabilities stop them from setting and reaching their goals. Zorn should know. Legally blind since birth, she won 10 gold and two silver medals at the 1992 Paralympic Games and was chosen one of the top 10 female athletes of the year in 1994 by the U.S. Olympic Committee.

For a time after Andy Fleming lost both legs in a train accident in 1977, it seemed that his life was over--or at least the parts of it that mattered most. Before the accident he had been a robust man of 24, active in sports, with a bright future. But afterward, he said, "I started going down a slippery slope--self-abuse, really." He questioned what he would do with the rest of his life. Then he rediscovered sports.