Dual Paralympian Jones wins first Summer Games medal

The big story in Paralympic sports this summer has been the efforts of two South Africans trying to earn the right to compete against able-bodied athletes at the Beijing Olympics. Natalie du Toit was successful in the open-water swim, and track athlete Oscar Pistorius will continue his quest toward 2012. In their shadow are athletes who push the limits of versatility by excelling in two sports in different seasons. This year, the lone American doing the summer/winter Paralympics double is cyclist-alpine skier Allison Jones.At the 2006 Torino Winter Paralympics, Jones won a gold medal in the slalom, and at the 2002 Salt Lake Games, she earned silver medals in giant slalom and super-G at age 17. In between, she made her summer Paralympics debut at the 2004 Athens Games, competing in the one-kilometer sprint on a track bike and the 21-kilometer time trial on the road. In Beijing earlier this week, Jones competed in the 500-meter time trial, finishing sixth and the three-kilometer individual pursuit, finishing eighth. On Friday, Jones captured her first Paralympics Summer Games medal, winning a silver medal in the 24-kilometer time trial on the road.On Friday, Jones was able to pass three competitors that started before her and did not get passed by Germany’s Natalie Simanowski, who started behind her. “I just rode my heart out,” she said after the race.Jones was born without a femur in her right leg, a non-hereditary birth defect called proximal femoral focal deficiency. Her tibia and fibula were located where the femur should have been, and when Allison was seven months old, doctors amputated her foot and fused the hip socket. Four months later, she received her first prosthetic leg, but Jones does not wear it when she competes in either sport. Jones had been a skier all her life, but she didn’t start cycling seriously until 1999. “I live a stone’s throw from the velodrome [at the Olympic Training Center] in Colorado Springs,” she said by phone from Beijing earlier this week. “At night you can see the lights from our house. Whenever they were on, my mom would take me to see the races. One night, we saw the lights and assumed it was a local race, but it turned out to be the 1998 IPC Disabled World Championships. When I got there I saw a bunch of gimpy people riding around the track and thought, ‘Well, I can do this, too.’“I had never ridden more than a kids’ bike,” she said. “My mom grabbed the first American we could see, and it happened to be Chris Carmichael [who went on to coach Lance Armstrong to seven Tour de France victories]. Chris was just starting his coaching business, and he pointed me to a local coach.”So in early 1999, while waiting for the snow to thaw on the velodrome, the local coach taught Jones to ride a track bike on a grassy field. She was hooked. Jones competes with minor modifications to her bike. There is no pedal on the right side. Until 2005, she rode with her right side unsupported and unprotected, except for a little piece of tape on the bike that would let her know where the rear wheel was.“Some of the male riders [with one leg] would use devices for stability,” she said. “But I ruled it off because I have good balance from ski racing. I said, ‘I don’t need it.’Jones has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and her father, Jay, builds Formula 1 racing airplanes. The two started tinkering and came up with a useful device Jones calls a “stump cup,” a carbon fiber attachment on which she can rest her right side. “It doesn’t turn the crank arm, but it grounds my stump so I can get more leverage on my sound [left] side,” she said. “I can stand on the climbs and sprints now. It allows me to get full extension on my leg and lets me put full weight on the pedal without having to stand up and sit down all the time. I changed the design two months ago, and it’s 90 percent to my satisfaction.” Jones used her updated version on her track bike and the older one on her road bike.In the three-kilometer individual pursuit in Beijing, Jones placed eighth and broke her personal record by six seconds -- a margin so large, she said, “It’s nuts! And it’s the event that I hate the most. It’s four minutes of pure and agonizing pain, and you might realize at the end that you [made a mistake] at the beginning but it’s too late. Whereas in the 500, if you screw up, it’s over so quickly there’s nothing you can do.”Jones’ times are calculated without modification, unlike some of the other competitors in her class who receive time deductions because they are have less functionality. Each sport has different classifications, and in cycling, Jones is considered to be an LC3 (one lower limb disability and pedaling only on one side). She competes for medals in the same category as LC4 athletes (a more severe disability, usually affecting both lower limbs) and CP3 (cerebral palsy). Heading into Beijing, Jones felt her medal chances were best in road racing’s time trial, but wasn’t sure why. “I do well in it, but I train with the sprint athletes,” she said. “I wouldn’t even race it in the [United] States, but I’d get to an international race and pull a good result. No one could explain it. They don’t know where it comes from because I never train with the distance guys. But this year, we actually focused on [the road more] so I could get a little more out of it.”It paid off. On Friday, the 24-year-old Jones won a silver medal with the fastest time of the day on the 24-kilometer -- mostly uphill -- time trial course. She was edged out of the gold medal by her teammate Barbara Buchan because Buchan, a CP3, received a 5.081-percent time deduction, which translated to a two minute, 14.15 second advantage.Members of the U.S. Ski Team have been watching Jones compete online from their dry-land training camp in Colorado Springs. Fellow skier Brad Washburn, for one, is eager to have her back. Washburn grew up racing with Jones at Winter Park, Colo. At the 2006 Torino Winter Paralympics, he was in the start house for the second run of the slalom and when he saw Jones’ gold-medal [slalom] time on a scoreboard, he said he was “so stoked” that he skied a solid run and moved up five places, into 10th -- “but she knocked that course out of the water.”“I can’t believe she’s doing two sports,” Washburn said. “It’s amazing she can pull it off. Skiing is tough enough.”