Aucklander Liam Keenan has not let a broken back stop him from doing what he loves.
Suffering a severe injury is enough to put most people off whatever activity that lead to the injury in the first place.
Auckland's Liam Keenan can be described as someone who goes against the grain. An avid mountain biker, his life changed forever on April 10, 2017.
The 21-year-old was left paralysed after he fell from his bike at the top of the Skyline mountain bike track in Queenstown - but that life-changing event was not enough to stop him from competing in the sport he loved.
"I just enjoy the freedom of mountain biking, getting out there and doing your own thing. I used to ride freestyle BMX a lot, then I started a bike mechanics course in 2013 because I wanted to leave school. They took us out mountain biking and I was hooked basically from the start, just getting out among the trees with nothing to worry about," Keenan said.
Aucklander Liam Keenan has not let a broken back stop him from doing what he loves. Photo / Stephen Parker
This week, for the the first time since his crash, he's back at Crankworx Rotorua - a competition he was a regular at previously - and yesterday, he raced in the Crankworx Rotorua Air DH.
Prior to the crash Keenan would ride the Queenstown track at least five times a week after he finished work as a bike mechanic. On this occasion in 2017 he fell near the luge - before even reaching the track.
"My front wheel washed out going round a corner, I went over the bike and head butted a wooden post. It fully split my helmet and I had a neck brace on thankfully. It still compressed my spine enough to fully snap and dislocate it at T5-6, leaving me T4 paraplegic, which is basically nothing from the chest down," he said.
He knew "fairly quickly" after the accident that something was not right.
"I've got a friend who has been in a wheelchair for six or seven years, so every time I crashed I would wiggle my toes. This time I couldn't do that.
"I was lying on my stomach for a bit and couldn't move, couldn't get up. Having known my friend for so long I was pretty lucky, I was able to basically accept it while I was still lying on the ground. It was scary at first, people could pinch my legs and I couldn't tell, but it could've been a lot worse."
Aucklander Liam Keenan has not let a broken back stop him from doing what he loves. Photo / Todd Wallace
In terms of pain, Keenan said the broken back was more uncomfortable than anything, it was the other injuries that hurt more at the time.
"I did four ribs and punctured both lungs at the same time. It was getting hard to breathe and they had to drain blood from my lungs."
Despite all of that, even while in hospital, he was trying to figure out how he could get back on a bike.
"It wasn't so much a question of if I was going to ride, but more when for me."
Now he has a specially made bike with an electric motor and a special seat which he straps into.
"I was really excited, I got back on the bike 13 months after my injury. I've got the big bucket seat which holds me in and the battery mounted just underneath with a 1500w electric motor which gets me up and down the hills.
He was excited to be back racing at Crankworx Rotorua.
"It's awesome just being around a whole bunch of like-minded people, they're all super into bikes. Everyone stops and looks at the bike, they all interested in it because there's not many of them around. This is the only one in the country at this stage, it's a fairly new thing.
He does need a bit of help getting on and off the bike, but said that was never an issue with his fellow mountain bikers.
"Everyone that mountain bikes is generally pretty nice and helpful, it's a really cool community."
Keenan said the result of his crash would have been a lot worse had he not been wearing the safety equipment he was - something he advocates for whenever possible.
"Without the neck brace, if I was lucky I would've been a high level tetraplegic, but more than likely with the force it was I would've been dead.
"I had a very nice helmet on when I crashed which was lucky, it fully split but I didn't even have a headache afterwards. I'm a big advocate for spending as much as you can on good safety gear, especially a helmet and neck brace."
