Everyone has their reasons for doing Leadville. They want to be fast. They just want to get an official finish. Some to get a message out. Kenyan Ibrahim Wafula wants to send the message that disabled people can do tough things. He’s not just trying to finish in 12 hours to get an official finish. He’s trying to finish in under 10 hours. Let’s all wish him luck with that.
He has been riding and racing in Kenya with one leg. He recently got a brand new prosthetic leg. Earlier this year gwadzilla saw him and took some pictures and wrote about him.
There’s another one legged mountain bike racer, Brett Wolfe although I haven’t seen anything about him the last couple of years. According at an article I found, he’s had a kid and isn’t able to race as much. I have 2 and it certainly makes it hard to juggle everything.
In 1999 I was racing the 24 Hours of Moab solo. I passed Brett during one of the night laps just before what we call nose dive hill. The course drops really steep into a rocky gully and then it’s steep up the other size. It’s something I could ride but I feel the chance of crashing is fairly high during the middle of the night when I’m tired and can’t see as well.
I had gotten off and was walking down when Brett came flying down on his bike. He doesn’t use a prosthetic and just hops on one leg when he’s off the bike. It probably would have been hard to hop down. I was really curious to see how he’d get back up the other side. To get up out of the gully there are a couple rock ledges. I’d through my bike over one shoulder and use my other hand to help pull me up. Brett threw his bike up on the first ledge and then used it to pull himself up. He did the same for the next ledge. I was very impressed.
I did 11 laps. I actually could have gone out for a 12th lap because I finished my 11th lap just before noon. I couldn’t see how doing another lap would change my placing so I just waited a couple minutes to roll across the line right at noon. I finished 9th. Brett did 10 laps a and finished 14th out of 23 racers in the solo category. Very impressive!
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