He Almost Walked Out of His First Wheelchair Games. Now He’s a Two-Time Paralympian.

Orlando Perez made his family a deal before his first National Veterans Wheelchair Games. He would go. But if he did not like it, he was leaving.

“I’ll go, but if I don’t like it, I’m just going to leave,” he told them, according to a profile published this week by VA News.

That was nearly thirty years ago. He never left.

Today Perez is a two-time Paralympian, a fixture on Puerto Rico’s national wheelchair basketball team, and a mentor to a new generation of wounded veterans. When people ask him whether he would trade all of it to walk again, he does not hesitate.

“I love my life, and I love all my accomplished friends,” he said. “My journey… it’s just been so amazing.”

Getting there took a fall, a surgery, three hard years, and one poster on a hospital wall.

The Fall

In 1995, Orlando Perez was a young soldier in the U.S. Army, following a path set by a grandfather who had served before him. During physical training, he was rappelling down a climbing wall when he lost his grip and fell. He landed hard, and his spine struck the rucksack on his back.

At first it did not seem like much. He got up. He kept training. But in the weeks that followed, he kept stumbling on his runs, and something was clearly wrong. When he finally went to get checked out, doctors found that the injury had caused a tumor to develop on his spinal cord.

The tumor was benign, but it had to come out. When Perez woke up from the surgery, he could not walk. He was paralyzed at the T-6 level, a high injury in the middle of the back, according to the National Ability Center, where he later trained. The Army gave him a medical discharge.

Anyone who has worn the uniform knows what that does to a person. You go from being part of a unit, with a mission and a purpose and people who depend on you, to sitting alone in a room trying to figure out who you are now. For Perez, the next three years were dark. He was paralyzed from the waist down, and he was depressed.

A Poster at the San Juan VA

He was not looking for another program. He had done therapy. He was tired of it.

But during an appointment at the San Juan VA Medical Center, his family noticed a poster for the National Veterans Wheelchair Games, an annual competition run by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Paralyzed Veterans of America. It is open to veterans with spinal cord injuries, amputations, multiple sclerosis and other neurological conditions who use a wheelchair for sport.

His wife and his mother pushed him to give it a try. He agreed, with that one condition: if he did not like it, he was gone.

“There Was No Pity Party”

Perez’s first moments at the Games nearly proved him right. He showed up at a wheelchair basketball practice and was immediately overwhelmed. It was not what he expected, and that was the point.

“There was no pity party,” he told VA News. “They were crashing chairs, they were talking smack to each other… they were playing so well.”

These were not people sitting around waiting for sympathy. They were competitors. They were loud. They were funny. They hit each other hard and got back up. They were, in other words, exactly the kind of people a soldier is used to being around.

The moment that sealed it came later, away from the court. Perez was looking down on the hotel courtyard where the athletes were gathering.

“All you could see were wheelchair users hugging each other, smiling,” he said. “I looked down at a sea of love.”

At that first Games, he won gold in the 100-meter race and in powerlifting. More importantly, he found what he had lost when he left the Army: a team, and a reason to get up in the morning.

From the Basketball Court to the Paralympic Slopes

What came next reads like something a Hollywood writer would cut for being too much.

Perez went back to school and earned a degree in adaptive leisure programming from Oklahoma State University. He played wheelchair basketball at the college and national team level and became a fixture on Puerto Rico’s national squad.

Then he found the mountains. With help from VA recreation therapists, Perez took up adaptive alpine skiing on a mono-ski, a single ski with a molded seat that the athlete steers using upper body strength and short outrigger poles. For someone paralyzed as high as T-6, it is brutally hard. Racers have to hold a tucked position facing downhill with their knees pointed another direction, and he has limited core muscle to do it.

He did it anyway. In 2022, Orlando Perez became the first athlete from Puerto Rico ever to compete in the Winter Paralympic Games, racing in Beijing. This year, he was selected again and raced in Milan Cortina.

He did not approach it like a man happy just to be there. “I’m not going to become just the first Paralympian,” he told the National Ability Center before his first Games. “My goal is to go all out.”

His wife, Marcy Vogler, serves as his trainer and conditioning coach. Between them, they have six children.

Why He Keeps Coming Back

Nearly three decades after that first practice, Perez still returns to the Wheelchair Games every year. He says the reason is simple: the people.

He is also quick to share credit. He points to the recreation therapists and other staff at VA Augusta and VA Salt Lake City who helped him get the equipment, training and camps he needed to ski, and who showed up to his races, even after work hours.

“They would literally show up and say, ‘Hey, do you need anything? Let me know!'” he said. He notes the Games would not be possible without the caregivers, volunteers and therapists who encourage veterans every step of the way.

That is a part of the veteran story we do not tell enough. For every headline about a VA failure, and there are plenty of legitimate ones, there are therapists and nurses quietly going above and beyond for the veterans in front of them. Perez is living proof of what happens when that system works.

The Mentor

These days, Perez is not just competing. He is paying it forward.

One of the veterans he has taken under his wing is Army veteran Centra “CeCe” Mazyck. A retired sergeant first class with the 82nd Airborne Division, Mazyck was paralyzed on November 26, 2003, when her parachute collided with another jumper’s during a routine jump at Fort Bragg, according to Paralyzed Veterans of America. She went on to compete in javelin at the 2012 London Paralympics.

This year, Mazyck received the Spirit of the Games Award, a peer-nominated honor for leadership, commitment and encouragement of other veteran athletes. She credits Perez as her inspiration and supporter. Fittingly, he won the same award back in 2005.

That is how this works. A man who almost walked out of his first Games becomes the guy who talks the next veteran into staying.

“A Blessing”

There is a quote from Perez that stops people when they hear it.

“Being disabled is actually a blessing,” he told the National Ability Center, “because I think I achieved more in life being in a wheelchair than I ever would have being able to walk.”

That is not a sentence anyone can say for someone else. It is not the kind of thing you tell a newly injured veteran lying in a hospital bed, and Perez would probably be the first to say so. Those three dark years were real. But it is the honest conclusion of a man who has lived both sides of it, and it is worth hearing.

We have told a lot of stories like this on Stucci Media lately, from Glenn Baker’s mission to put paralyzed veterans back on their feet to Marc Fucarile’s work helping people who lose their mobility. The common thread is never the injury. It is always the community that shows up afterward.

How to Get Involved

If you are a veteran who uses a wheelchair, or you know one, the National Veterans Wheelchair Games are open to veterans with spinal cord injuries, amputations, multiple sclerosis or other central neurological conditions who require a wheelchair for competition and are eligible for VA health care. Registration and details are at wheelchairgames.org.

The Games also rely on thousands of volunteers every year, from greeting athletes at the airport to working events. Your local VA recreation therapy office and Paralyzed Veterans of America chapter are good places to start.

And if you are a veteran who is struggling the way Perez was in those first three years, you do not have to wait for a poster on a wall. The Veterans Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day by dialing 988 and pressing 1.