Why paralysed BMX champ Sam Willoughby is chasing Olympic gold in Tokyo

“It was a freak accident and moreso what led to it was the headspace I was in, to be honest,” he says. “It wasn’t anything to do with the track or the danger of the sport. I remember right away on the track knowing it wasn’t a normal injury. I knew.”

The accident left Willoughby without feeling from the chest down. He’d fractured his C4, C5 and C6 vertebrae and was airlifted to hospital for surgery to ease the pressure on his spinal cord.

Willoughby and his family were told he would be a quadriplegic

. He would have the independence of a two-year-old, doctors warned.

Alise was immediately by Willoughby’s bedside but he tried to push her away. He didn’t want two lives to be ruined.

“I said to her I didn’t want her to marry me. I didn’t want her to marry a cripple,” Willoughby said.

“I referred to myself at that point like a vegetable and I was scared, and didn’t really know how I was going to look after myself, let alone drag someone else through it. But Alise never wavered. She grabbed my hand and said she wasn’t going anywhere.”

Willoughby had first crushed on Alise from half a world away after seeing her in one of those BMX magazines back in the day, when an ironically-nicknamed ‘the Beast’ (she was a 35 kilogram gymnast) had become a junior star in the States.

A few MySpace messages and a teen romance at the 2008 world titles later, Willoughby’s trip to the US saw him move to Alise’s home town soon after, and they’d barely been separated since. BMX’s power couple got engaged at the end of 2015 and had planned to wed in early 2017.

“I knew from the word go that I was going to have to be the rock, and I knew he would be how he was, that he would feel like a burden,” Alise says.

“I knew that he didn’t want to feel dependent on someone and I knew he would push me away. But I also knew it wouldn’t be what he really meant. It was obviously hard and shocking and all those things, but immediately all the focus shifts to ‘how do we move forward?‘.

“We were a bit naive and it probably played in our favour. We rode the rollercoaster of emotions together and slowly, eventually we came out the other side.”

For all the multitudes of awful that the accident dumped on their lives, Willoughby says it also highlighted something incredible. Alise.

“She never left my side. I fought it for many months but that was the strongest moment … now, when I look back, in understanding what true love is,” he said.

After surgery to replace one vertebra with a wire cage and fuse two others, and with lots of intensive rehab, Willoughby’s situation improved a little. Hard work, an athlete’s mindset and a devoted support network helped Willoughby regain use of his upper body. And using braces and a frame, he would later make good on his vow to walk down the aisle at the rescheduled wedding in January 2018.

“The best day of our lives,” says Alise.

But the prospect of riding again was gone. And with it, his purpose in life.

“A lot of people sent encouraging messages ‘you’ll get back on the bike champ’ and things like that, but for me it was never about that,” Willoughby said. “It was about getting comfortable being myself. Being Sam again, and being happy with myself, that was the big challenge.“

Which brings us back to that NASCAR semi-trailer, with ‘Bootie’ Barker interrogating Willoughby and his sibling Matt.

What now brother?

Willoughby remembers Matt answering for him, filling the silence with Sam’s goal of walking at the wedding.

“Bootie was like ‘cool man … then what?’,” he says, adopting Barker’s Virginian drawl.

“My brother asked Bootie when he stopped doing rehab after his accident.

“He goes: ‘Rehab? I didn’t do no rehab. They said I could try and put my shoes on and I did that in four weeks. I got the hell out of there and did my engineering degree and here I am brother. You gotta get on with it’.”

From the background, Alise shouts: “He is smiling telling you this.”

Here’s the deal: me and Sam, we are the same as you. We are just going to have to drag ourselves around a bit more.

Bootie Barker

Willoughby continues: “He looked at my brother and said: “Here’s the deal: me and Sam, we are the same as you. We are just going to have to drag ourselves around a bit more. And those are the words that I have lived by from that day. He lived in a normal house, drove a normal car, got married, worked full-time as a NASCAR engineer.

“It opened my eyes. By the end of the day I didn’t even see the wheelchair. I just saw a capable guy, getting on with life. It was just a real life example of the possibilities of what I could do with my life. I could have independence again.

“He was such a motivating person for me to speak to, because we hit it off right away. We had the same competitive mentality, both love sport, love the gym and for the want of a better term, have a bit of a f*** you mentality.

“From that day forward, that was a massive turning point for me.”

Alise describes it as the sun coming back out. Willoughby walked at the wedding as promised but otherwise stopped equating being upright with living a happy life.

A big part of their new normal was getting Alise back on her bike and back into racing, albeit with a new team dynamic. Instead of being her training partner, Willoughby became her coach in an official capacity.

Given all that happened, did he worry about her safety?

“My biggest safety concern was if she was out there doing it and not in a good place,” he said.

“It became clear to me, in the context of me and my injury, that it is so important to have goals in life and have something you are going after and I didn’t want Elise to just delay and be in no-man’s land. I definitely didn’t want her focus to be me and my recovery.“

Willoughby poured all he’d learned into coaching and with it came great success.

Alise won her first world championship title four months later in 2017 and then, carrying her new married name, won a second time in 2019.

“I would be lying if I gave him shit right now. He’s a very good coach,” Alise laughs.

“We had done things together for so long, side by side, so he’s not like a drill sergeant making me do things. We enjoy the same things about the sport and he kinda fills in the gaps where I am a bit lost at times. I execute well on his plan of what he wants to do and am open to try all his crazy new innovative ideas.

“I have been able to achieve my most successful years with Sam in this coaching role. It hasn’t just happened.“

Willoughby loves pumping iron in the gym, travels on his own and did a successful speaking tour of Australia pre-pandemic, telling his story to packed theatres and groups including the Adelaide Crows.

But BMX is still his love. You can almost hear Willoughby’s mind whirring when discussing the potential for Alise to improve further, physically and tactically. It’s still early days in the science of preparing BMX athletes, he reckons.

And it’s not just Alise in Team Willoughby. Australian BMX riders Anthony Dean and Lauren Reynolds also train under their former teammate at Chula Vista – yes, the same track – and all three won selection to compete in Tokyo.

Reynolds, who missed selection to race in Rio and was advised to forget Tokyo, said her dream of being an Olympian is due to Willoughby.

“Sam Willoughby, my coach, not a chance I’d be here today without you,” Reynolds said on selection day.

“Your patience and time and knowledge is something I’ll never forget. I am in the best shape I’ve ever been thanks to you.“

On the eve of the Olympics, Willoughby jokes he is like a father watching his kids go off to school, even though at 29 he’s the youngest of the four great mates.

Sam will this month travel with Alise and Team USA to Tokyo, where with the name Willoughby on her back ‘the Beast’ will try to finally add a gold to go with the two silvers at home.

But if she doesn’t, well, apply Bootie 101: you gotta get on with it.

“The gold medal, obviously both of us are super competitive and want to push the absolute envelope and see where we can go together. That’s the fun part of this journey, of us chasing the gold medal and us going one better,” Alise says.

Loading

“But our life doesn’t depend on it. It doesn’t define us and won’t define us.

“You throw everything out there and that way you don’t hold any regrets.

“We sure do love trying to go fast but you know, the sun will come up tomorrow.

“After everything we have been through, we are already winning.”

Click here to support the Road to Recovery Foundation.

ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue82erqxnp53GbrzAq5ilsaOasW6uzLFknKCRor1uv8CmZLChnKG8trPHm7BmoaNisKmt0qKloGWfocauvMicZKCnnJl6qrqMraaksZ9k