Suppose they hadn’t left a winter dance at Berthoud High School on that icy January night in 2007 and driven down a dark country road. Suppose they’d just lingered there, talking about their favorite bands and local sports.

Where might 20-year-olds Nikko Landeros and Tyler Carron be today? Probably cramming for a college exam, working construction, or slogging through basic training at a Marine outpost like their former classmates. Instead, they are piling hockey gear and Team USA jerseys into suitcases, preparing to compete in March at the 2010 Vancouver Paralympics — the world’s marquee sporting event for amputees, the blind, and other disabled winter athletes.

Since a horrific car crash severed their legs, the one-time high school wrestlers have endured more than 20 combined surgeries, medical setbacks, and gawking children. They learned to walk, crawl, and sit up for a second time on legs of carbon fiber and plastic. But the thought of suiting up for the national sled hockey team — where players sit on metal frames with two blades on the undercarriage, propelling themselves with two short sticks with ice picks on the bottom — seemed impossible. Until they stepped onto the ice.

“Hockey is pretty much my life now,” says Landeros. “I don’t even like the [wheel]chair anymore.”

“Sometimes it seems like I’ve been this way my whole life,” says Carron, who is on the national junior team. But he adds, “Sometimes you wonder: ‘What if it hadn’t happened?’”

Long and Winding Road
Landeros, Carron, and three girls had turned onto a narrow country road in Carron’s red Isuzu Trooper that night. A flat tire forced them to stop where snow packs left little room on the shoulder. Landeros and Carron walked to the rear of the vehicle, opened the hatch, and rummaged for a jack.

Michelle Berra, a classmate who’d been watching a movie at her choir teacher’s home, came over a hill in her Toyota Land Cruiser. She crashed into Landeros and Carron, pinning them against the Trooper, which swung 180 degrees and came to stop 75 feet away. Landeros and Carron were tossed into the air and landed in the northbound lane.

“I remember being on the ground,” Landeros says. “I saw my right leg was gone. I was on top of the left one.”

Berthoud became a symbol of small-town compassion, with friends raising about $500,000 to pay medical bills and other expenses. Newspapers and TV chronicled their first steps on artificial limbs and Carron’s high school graduation. Many in the town of about 5,000 south of Loveland embraced Landeros and Carron. Some supported Berra. Still others were upset when her attorneys filed papers claiming medical records showed Landeros and Carron had been drinking before the accident and could have contributed to the tragedy.

On bad days, Landeros felt only rage and depression.

“At the very beginning, you don’t want to be around, and you’re pissed off. But [suicide] wasn’t an option for me. I’m not that kind of guy,” he says. “But I had a pretty hard time, missed out on a lot of things. After a while, I said, ‘Whoa, I’ve got to get back into sports.’”

When a group of U.S. Paralympians visited Berthoud High, Landeros hung around afterward to talk about sled hockey. “But the first time I tried it, I didn’t really like it. I was still pretty disabled,” he says. “A year after the accident, I really started getting into it. I knew I had some potential.”

Let People Know
On a recent weekday afternoon, Carron is sitting in Bruce’s Bar in Severance, owned by his father Bruce, eating a late lunch. Carron, who works at the bar, is more filled out now than a year ago with better color in his face. His casual attire — cargo shorts and T-shirt — seems to match his easy-going temperament. For several semesters, Carron attended Front Range Community College in Fort Collins, where he now lives with his brother, Will, who is also Berthoud’s assistant wrestling coach, the job their father held until the accident.

“I think it’s easier for us here,” Bruce says of Severance, about 30 miles from their old hometown. “The people of Berthoud were great. But it was a big thing to get out of there. You drive by the scene of the accident every day. I still think about it all the time; I probably always will. You never get it out of your mind.”

Landeros and Carron remain best friends united by common interests: video games, sports, and local hangouts,
as well as the accident that set their lives on parallel tracks. “We’re like brothers,” Carron says.

As a member of the national junior team, Carron trains primarily in Colorado. Landeros now lives in Buffalo. He moved there determined to make the national team and earned a spot as the only newcomer on the 18-man roster. “When you’re an Olympian, you have to work out every day; you’re supposed to be the best,” he says. “You’re playing for everybody in the country. You’re playing for the troops. It’s going to be pretty wild in Vancouver. We’re going to take the gold, and when I’m home, I’ll have the medal around my neck. I’m a pretty humble dude. But when you win a gold medal for the U.S., you want to let people know.”