Olympic gold medalist Amy Van Dyken makes a great comeback for first time since being paralyzed

                                                             

It's been almost 20 years since Amy Van Dyken-Rouen swam in her second Olympics. And five years since her spinal cord injury from an ATV accident in Show Low that left her paralyzed from the waist down.

Time passages, the kind that can be tricky since the new normal, as she calls it, is so life altering that it overshadows even her six Olympic gold medals in a way that once never seemed possible.

Competitive Amy still exists, though, and she now has found the right outlet as an adaptive athlete.

Van Dyken-Rouen, of Scottsdale, will compete next week in Canada in the WheelWOD Games, an adaptive CrossFit competition that requires making a cut to the top 12 in the world to earn an invitation. In a sense, she's already won, since a year ago when starting down this road fitness was her only objective.

"It's going to be awesome just to get out there and get the competitive juices flowing," she said. "It's cool adaptive sports are being recognized and hopefully I will have a little part in that. I've said before I want to change the world."

                                                                

That might entail the improbable — finding a way to walk again even given her severe T11 paraplegia — or something that seems impossible but shouldn't be, like a parking system allowing for handicap parking in the front and wheelchair parking with sufficient access further back.

Through her foundation, Van Dyken-Rouen is changing the world for others by funding custom wheelchairs for those in need referred by hospitals around the country. Like a 3-year-old named Savannah from St. Louis who had trouble deciding between pink or purple and whether she wanted sparkles on her power wheelchair.

"I'm trying to teach the world not to be afraid of us," Van Dyken-Rouen said. "We just got a boo boo. I make them interested."

There is a time to be fearful of Van Dyken-Rouen at 46, same as when she was 23 and spitting water into an opponent's lane on her way to becoming the first U.S. women to win four gold medals at a single Olympics (Atlanta 1996).

She began doing adaptive CrossFit last summer while in her native Colorado working out at a gym owned by Kevin Ogar, also paralyzed from the waist down due to a freak weight-lifting accident in 2014. 

"I just fell in love with it," Van Dyken-Rouen said. "This is the way I trained (for swimming) at the Olympic Training Center. It's throwing Olympic weights around. I've done it my whole life. 

"Wheelchair racing is more of an endurance sport, and we all know I had a hard time finishing 100 meters. This is more power, effort, sprinting."