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A Swiss Powerhouse Races Into an Uncertain Future
Switzerland dominates wheelchair racing through prodigious financial support and a long tradition of mentorship. Now its current champions are hoping to groom the next ones.
NOTTWIL, Switzerland — The 28-year-old institution responsible for grooming some of the best wheelchair athletes in the world sits on an expansive lakeside campus in this tiny Swiss town, where locals joke that the pigs outnumber the people.
At a training session one afternoon, a goat from the farm next door ambled up to a roadside fence, a bell clattering around its neck. A cow mooed across the way. And from the track, streaked with jagged shadows by an unseasonably potent sun, there came the low rumble of wheels in perpetual motion.
In this monastic setting, Marcel Hug and Manuela Schär were quietly engaged in the near-spiritual pursuit of speed. On Sunday, the two wheelchair racing champions will attempt to defend their titles at the New York City Marathon. If they do, it will extend a remarkable run of Swiss excellence in the sport: Schär has won three major marathons this year alone. Hug has won one and finished second in three others.
They, like almost every other Swiss wheelchair marathoner, have trained for years at the Swiss Paraplegic Center. The facility serves primarily as a hospital, but the campus houses a rehabilitation center, a life services office and an athletic training facility.
Here, racers’ ascendant athletic careers have been masterminded and refined. Here, officials fret about what the future holds for the country in the evolving landscape of wheelchair sports.
“Even for us it can be hard to explain, but this place has a big impact on everything we do,” Schär said. “You start here with a bad story … ” she added, trailing off.
Schär arrived at the hospital when she was 9, after an accident on a swing set at a neighbor’s birthday party took away her ability to use her legs. She had major surgery and began a life-altering rehabilitation process in six excruciating months in the hospital, which had been open for only a couple of years at that point.
Even then, though, patients and staff members mingled easily with the athletes in the facility, and within her first few weeks at the hospital, Schär met Heinz Frei, a champion wheelchair racer, who stopped by her room to offer encouragement.
Soon after Schär left the hospital, Frei and other marathoners of his generation — racers like Hugo Müller and Erwin Zemp — began swinging by her village in the middle of their long, road-training sessions. They would pick her up and lead her around the quiet side roads near her family’s house for half an hour or so. They joked around, but also sharing racing wisdom, before dropping her off back home and continuing their workouts. Soon, she was ready to start her own.
Schär’s first racing chair was made from spare parts, with yellow, solid rubber tires. It is still used by children at the center today, helping dozens of of them get their start in the sport.
“This little girl was so fast in that chair,” said Frei, who has won more than 100 marathons. “We knew she was a diamond.”
Schär, 33, and Frei, 60, still meet every week to train. She said that sort of continuity, the closeness within the community, has been central to building the successful lineage of Swiss wheelchair racers.
“It was just great to be included in a group of people who were in the same situation but seemed to be so happy and active and just, like, normal,” she said about those early years. “I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been that way.”
Hug, too, joined the community early. He grew up on a farm in Pfyn, the youngest of four boys. Born with spina bifida, a condition that left him paralyzed below the waist, Hug was 10 when he met Paul Odermatt, who still coaches him today. He was a quiet student, a perfectionist. Eight years later, he began training at the national center full time while attending school in nearby Lucerne. These days, Hug lives in a small flat in Nottwil and trains six times a week.
Like Schär, Hug recalled receiving guidance from veteran racers like Franz Nietlispach, and he said that is why it is important to him to be available to help the younger generation. He helps organize an international summer camp for wheelchair athletes, and every Wednesday, he and Schär train with a group of young racers.
“I had an opportunity as a junior athlete to learn from other people,” he said, “and it’s a great feeling to give my knowledge, my passion, to younger athletes.”
Hug, 32, said Switzerland’s success in wheelchair sports owed a lot to the financial health of the organizations that oversee them, and to the support of Swiss families with no connection to the center. The Swiss Paraplegic Foundation, established in 1975, counts 1.2 million Swiss households as yearly donation-paying members, according to Dr. Hans Peter Gmünder, the director of the center. (There are about 3.6 million total households in Switzerland, according to the federal statistical office.)
Last year, the foundation raised around 83.8 million Swiss francs (about $84.2 million). People here who sustain a serious spinal injury, if they are members of the foundation, receive 250,000 Swiss francs to use at their discretion, according to Gmünder. (He noted that nonmembers were essentially able to receive similar benefits if they applied for them.)
That culture of support for years created an environment to produce athletes like Frei and Edith Wolf-Hunkeler, a five-time winner in New York, and, later, Hug and Schär.
Despite this tradition of success, coaches and officials at the center this month expressed worries about the future of Swiss dominance, about whether the pipeline of champions might be starting to run dry. Odermatt said there were no athletes poised to fill the shoes of Hug and Schär once they finish their careers.
“Our problem — well, it’s a good problem — is that we don’t have a lot of new injured people,” said Andreas Heiniger, the head of the competitive division of Swiss Wheelchair Sports.
Advances in medicine and the high quality of care in the country, he said, had led to a shrinking number of participants in wheelchair sports. “That’s a plus,” he said. “But if you’re talking about professional sports, we don’t have a lot of athletes.”
They still have Schär and Hug, however, and neither one will be slowing down soon. Both will arrive in New York in top form. Schär already has won the Tokyo, Berlin and Chicago marathons this year. (Her time in Berlin, 1 hour 36 minutes 53 seconds, was a world record.) Hug took first this year in Boston, and was the runner-up in London, Berlin and Chicago.
Both said they also were focused on the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo, though Schär said those could be her last Games. After spending the early part of her career focusing on sprint events, a disappointing showing at the London Paralympics convinced Schär to shift her focus to marathons and to review her training habits.
“Twelve years ago, she was lazy, she smoked, things like that,” said Claudio Perret, a sports scientist who agreed to coach Schär after the London Paralympic Games. But today, he said, Schär is his most diligent athlete, someone who never misses a training session and is impatient about improving.
“She’s a volcano,” Perret said. “I’m a calculator.”
Schär, who is as outgoing and excitable as Hug is soft-spoken, gasped with excitement when asked to recall her experience in New York last year. “It’s New York!” she said. “It’s kind of a big deal!”
As always, she struggled in the early, uphill portion of the course. But she eventually caught and overtook the pack, finishing 2 minutes 53 seconds ahead of the American star Tatyana McFadden.
After navigating an obstacle course of news media interviews after her victory, Schär found a quiet spot to sit alone, she said, “to feel that feeling, to try to remember it, so I could make it come back, even years later.” Then she ate a hamburger.
She and Hug will have the chance to relive the feeling this week.
Andrew Keh is an international correspondent, covering sports from Berlin. He has previously covered Major League Baseball and the N.B.A. and has reported from the World Cup and the Olympics. More about Andrew Keh
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