There’s a moment as Fernando Rufino goes through the dizzying list of accidents and injuries that have defined his life that you start to wonder if you’ve been transported to some kind of alternate dimension.
One of Brazil’s most famous Paralympians, Rufino is nicknamed “Iron Cowboy” thanks to his canoeing efforts, which refers both to his past as a rodeo rider and to the metal plates that strengthen his spinal cord and which he later age injured. On September 21, he fell from a moving bus, the wheels crushing his body.
That alone would make a great story. But you haven’t heard the half of it yet.
There was a time when he was trampled by an 800kg bull and dragged across the ground by a galloping horse. Car, motorcycle and horse riding accidents have also occurred.
“I broke this thumb,” says Rufino The Athletics. “I cut off the top of this finger, a small saw blade fell on my face and went right under my eye. My brother and I tried to reenact fight scenes from movies. Once he hit me with a wooden plank and cut my head open.
“When I was a teenager, a bull broke my jaw. Then the bus ran me over. I rode my motorcycle into a tree at 100 km/h. I was lifting weights at the gym and a metal bar fell on me and broke my nose. I broke two ribs from overtraining, I trained for two weeks with a broken leg and thought it was just a muscle problem….
“Then I was struck by lightning.”
Lightning?
“Yes! On my front door. I felt its energy go through me. It threw me into the air. I landed on the back of my neck and cut my elbow open. I writhed on the ground for about 15 minutes as my muscles completely were stuck. For three days I could smell a burning odor.
“I like it when accidents happen to me. It just gives me more stories to tell. I am a backwoods man, a warrior who wants to win in life, a cowboy who won gold at the Paralympic Games.
And today the reigning Va’a 200m VL2 Paralympic and three-time world champion takes to the water in an attempt to defend his title.
Rufino grew up on a traditional farm in Mato Grosso do Sul, central-west Brazil. He and his parents still live there with the horses and bulls, and the money Rufino earns from canoeing is invested in the estate they run according to his grandparents’ way of life.
Rufino became a rodeo rider because he dreamed of traveling the world. But after his spinal cord injury, he knew his career was over.
With the help of his father, he learned to walk again on the farm and did almost all of his years of rehabilitation at home, riding horses and swimming in the reservoir. “Animals are part of my story and who I am,” he says. “They helped me walk again.”
However, Rufino still wanted to travel the world, and sports was one way to do that. A friend found a center that trained disabled athletes. He tried a few sports and on August 7, 2012 at 8 a.m. – he remembers the date clearly – he tried paracanoeing.
“I forget my handicap on the water,” he says. “I feel like everyone else. If you saw me paddling next to someone without a disability, they wouldn’t know which of us is disabled. It’s liberating.”
The 39-year-old missed the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games due to high blood pressure and hypertrophy in his heart, but his technique improved as the training load was lower. When he made his Paralympic debut at Tokyo 2020, which was postponed for 12 months due to the global pandemic, he made a statement with his tufted silver hair and became the first Brazilian to win a gold medal at the Paralympic Games.
Fernando Rufino had his big break in Tokyo (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images)
Encouraged by his family from the farm back home, Rufino will compete against his good friend and compatriot Igor Tofalini, also a former rodeo cowboy, who was his best man at his wedding in 2018. They live, eat and train together at the national canoeing hub in Ilha Comprida, Brazil. Rivals on the water, but good friends off it, they share everything.
“If he wins, we’ll have a barbecue to celebrate, and if I win, it will be the same. But the gold and silver medals will be ours.”
The bald, bushy-bearded Rufino, who keeps his cowboy hat in his room in the Paralympic Village and annoys everyone on race day with the “saddest country music,” is mentally and physically ready for Friday’s heats and Sunday’s final if he were eligible.
“Without wanting to sound great, I have already won everything there is to win in my sport. I believe I can leave here as a two-time Paralympic champion.”
Rufino says the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, when he turns 43, will likely be his last Paralympic Games, but all that matters to him is that he will be remembered as the “real Iron Cowboy.”
‘I’m definitely going to die old. I tried to die young, but I never succeeded.”
(Top photo: Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images))