This Utahn lost his leg 7 years ago. Now he’s fencing in the Paralympics

Garrett Schoonover was losing a lot of blood when he called his parents from the 405 in Los Angeles seven years ago.

Holding a tourniquet on his leg, he told them they needed to come to California — and soon. Schoonover, who was pursuing a master’s in vocal performance at UCLA, had been driving his motorcycle to the final dress rehearsal of an opera he was performing in when he was involved in a crash.

“When I was on the freeway and I saw my leg, I was like, ‘I’m never walking on that again,’” he told the Deseret News. “When I woke up that next morning, actually, I couldn’t feel my leg, and I thought they had amputated it. But really, I had just done such great nerve damage, and there was a bunch of ice packed around it, so I couldn’t really see (it).”

He underwent 13 limb-salvage surgeries over the course of the next two months. Doctors ultimately amputated his left leg, altering his life forever.

Schoonover, an Army sergeant, had hoped to continue his military service with the California National Guard’s 225th Expeditionary Intelligence Unit as a Farsi linguist and interrogator while finishing his degree. He then planned to move to Germany or Vienna, Austria, to pursue an opera career.

“It was like everything came to a halt. I was in the military. I was in the middle of my graduate school program. I was bodybuilding and getting ready for a show. I had plans to go participate in America Ninja Warriors. So I had all these plans,” he said.

After the accident, his focus shifted to learning how to complete simple tasks without his leg.

“You’re in this unknown circumstance. You don’t know how long it’s going to take you to accomplish even the simplest of tasks, like getting to and from the bathroom. The energy capital that it would cost to shower was so much during my recovery that I was only showering every other day because I had other things I had to do, and if I showered, I’d have to go back and take a two hour nap just to feel like I had any gas in the tank to do anything else. It went on for months like that,” he said.

Paralympian Garrett Schoonover’s resilience

To survive the accident mentally, Schoonover had to go through what he described as an “ego death” as he turned his focus to the immediate tasks he had to complete in front of him — such as eating and going to therapy — rather than worrying about what the accident meant for his future.

“I had to divorce myself from my expectations about what my life was going to be moving forward, and that was hard,” he said. “It felt like blinders were on, and it was just that task right in front of me all the time, but it’s what I had to do to get through it.”

Fast forward seven years from the accident, Schoonover has since moved back to his home state of Utah to work for a prosthetic provider and has inherited an educational program from his employer for new amputees, answering any questions they might have about their amputation.

While the road forward has been difficult for Schoonover, he’s grateful for what has come as a result of the accident: the things he’s been able to do, the people he has helped and his career as a clinician in the orthotist and prosthetist field.

And now, he is on the verge of making his Paralympic debut, where he will compete in five wheelchair fencing events at the 2024 Paris Paralympics: individual men’s saber A, individual men’s foil A, individual men’s epee A, men’s foil team and men’s epee team.

“It’s a mixed bag, for sure. It was a very rough time in my life, very central to it. Looking back on it now, it feels kind of like a blip in the timeline, or, I always thought of this analogy: the path of a bullet. It ricochets, and the trajectory is forever altered, and that’s kind of what that event was like for me. I had all of these plans, all of these designs for what I wanted from my life, at least in the five to 10 years sense,” he said.

He added, “I’ve been grateful for the experience that not a lot of people get to have. ... I really don’t know what my life would be like now if the wreck hadn’t happened. I have a great life, so I can’t complain.”

Garrett Schoonover’s journey to the 2024 Paralympics

Schoonover will compete in his first Paralympics event in Paris on Wednesday, less than three years after his friend introduced him to wheelchair fencing — a sport fitting for the veteran.

“It’s so special because this sport was started by veterans, for veterans. So to be a veteran competing in this sport, representing the United States, it’s hard to put into words. But I feel very honored that I’ve been selected for this opportunity, and I just want to make sure I go out and put my best foot forward and represent the country well,” he said.

In November 2021, Schoonover started working with the Utah Fencing Foundation , a local program geared to coaching parafencers. Within two months of coaching, he competed in the North American Cup — and won two bronze medals.

“After that, I was like, ‘All right, this is something I want to keep doing, keep putting time and energy into,’” he said.

He then went on to sweep bronze at nationals after some close semifinal competitions and earned an invitation to a national team camp in Colorado Springs, Colorado. From that camp, he was invited to compete at the World Cup in Warsaw, Poland.

“It all just moved so quickly,” he said.

Later that year, he earned his first points toward qualifying for Paris by winning silver in foil at an America Zonal event. But the Paris Paralympics still weren’t on Schoonover’s mind.

“For me, in terms of looking at the Paralympics, I was really looking more towards Los Angeles. I was thinking that’s a realistic time frame to get up to speed so I can be competitive with the international field. As things moved along, Paris became a little bit more real of a possibility, so I started shifting my focus a little bit more towards the near time frame,” he said.

An injury during qualifying season almost jeopardized his Paris opportunity, but Schoonover recovered in time to sweep gold in all three weapons — foil, epee and saber — in front of friends and family at the 2024 nationals held in Salt Lake City.

“Getting to have the nationals at home and win the title of national champion in all three weapons in front of my friends, my family, it was very special,” he said.

He built on that special performance with a gold in epee and a bronze in foil at the America Zonal Championship, tying him for first in the zone, which he needed to qualify for Paris.

When Team USA needed another fencer to fill out the men’s foil and epee teams, they picked Schoonover.

He will have the opportunity to compete in front of a nearly sold-out crowd in Paris. Two million tickets have been sold for the games, and wheelchair fencing is one of 11 sports where 90% of the general public tickets have been sold, according to the International Paralympic Committee .

Schoonover hopes viewers can learn from his story.

“I want people to know that life doesn’t go as the way we planned, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth living. Things are going to happen that are outside of our control, outside of our ability to influence, but we do have the ability to decide how we work through that. I understand that there are limitations when it comes to resources — what people know — and that can vary from place to place, but at its core, I just want people to know that there is a path forward, even when it seems like there isn’t one,” he said.