Wheelchair athlete Xie Junwu builds China’s first wheelchair skateboarding training centre

NANCHANG: This rolling inspiration is Xie Junwu, an iron-willed wheelchair-bound athlete who has climbed mountains, completed marathons, and now spends his days skateboarding.

Xie has been breaking records and barriers for years with his wheelchair capabilities, and now in middle age, he is helping others build confidence in their manoeuvring with what is almost certainly China’s first wheelchair skateboarding training centre.

Xie often says that if you carry on through the storm, you will surely see the rainbow, and a storm is exactly what he faced. At age 19, he fell from a tree during a geology internship field trip and damaged his thoracic vertebrae, leaving him paralysed from the waist down.

Seeing no future, he languished at home for 8 years without ever stepping outside alone. His mother had assumed full responsibility of caring for him. Though he had always promised her he would develop some form of independence, it was her death in 2000 that spurred him on, with the promise taking on a new urgency.

In 2004, he attended a spinal cord injury meetup and saw someone balance their wheelchair on its back wheels alone — a kind of ‘wheelchair wheelie.’ Xie began watching mostly foreign videos online of people performing advanced wheelchair manoeuvres, including going up and down stairs, and resolved to mimic them.

Plenty of nasty falls followed until 2012, when Xie shook hands with an observer from Guinness World Records after completing the longest-ever wheelchair wheelie at 25.8 kilometres.

Over the following decade, Xie summited the almost 6,000-foot Mount Huangshan four times and completed 32 marathons, including the New York City Marathon.

In 2014, he first tried skateboarding. He cleverly attached metal rails onto the board that would keep his wheelchair’s wheels from rolling off as he used them to press left and right on the board just as a skater would do with his feet.

Even for this wheelchair ace, it was difficult, and he put the interest on hold while he pursued marathoning.

Last November, Xie found a new training base in his home city of Nanchang that had the perfect courtyard, with a series of curves and gentle gradients, where he could get back to practising wheelchair skateboarding.

After getting the hang of it and making a name for himself through viral online videos, he opened a sports rehab clinic called the Nanchang City Hope House for the wheelchair-bound, explaining that these kinds of coordinated activities help build musculature, strengthen the heart and fortify the immune system.

One day he hopes to hold a wheelchair skateboard competition in China, which would be the first of its kind, admitting it is a “small goal I am pursuing.”