Rudy Garcia-Tolson was born with several rare birth defects from popliteal pterygium syndrome, and by age 5 had already endured 15 surgeries trying to straighten his legs. Facing a lifetime in a wheelchair, he made the choice, young as he was, to amputate both legs above the knee. He says that's when his life really began.
Rudy began swimming at 6, and quickly set his sights on beating an able-bodied kid to the wall. "That moment is when I knew that's what I wanted to do," he says. "When I was swimming, I was able to adjust fully with my arms." He joined an able-bodied swim team in his hometown of Riverside, California, and by 8 was already aiming for Paralympic gold. At 9 he became the youngest athlete with a disability to ever qualify and medal at the Disabled Swim Nationals; by 11 he held a national record in his division.
Swimming wasn't enough to satisfy his competitive streak. At 8, Rudy raced his first triathlon as the swim leg of a relay team alongside Robin Williams and marathon champion Scott Tinley — the start of a 15-year friendship with Williams, who became a driving force behind the challenged-athlete movement. Together with Tinley, the three formed "Team Braveheart" for the Challenged Athletes Foundation triathlon for 11 straight years. At 10, Rudy completed his first solo triathlon on a standard mountain bike, the youngest bilateral amputee ever to do so.
In 2004, at 16, Rudy won gold in the 200m Individual Medley at the Athens Paralympics, breaking the world record for his SM7 class — still, he says, his proudest moment. Four years later in Beijing he won gold again in the same event, breaking his own world record twice, plus bronze in the 100m breaststroke. In 2012 in London, he became the first athlete to compete in both swimming and track and field at a single Paralympic Games, taking silver in the 200m IM and debuting in long jump and the 200m sprint.
Watching the Hawaii Ironman on television as a kid, Rudy decided he wanted to finish one himself. In October 2009, at Ironman Arizona, he became the first double above-knee amputee to complete a full Ironman — 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 on the bike, and a 26.2-mile marathon — in 16 hours and 6 minutes, six weeks after missing the bike cutoff at the Ironman World Championship in Kona by just 8 minutes. "There's no better challenge than competing in an Ironman," he says. "It's a great way to show people that having a disability is just a challenge, and that the real disability in life is a negative attitude."
In 2014, with only two months of training and no bike riding in five years, Rudy took on Germany's Challenge Roth, swimming the canal in 57 minutes and posting a personal-best 8:25 bike split before back spasms forced him out at the 15K mark of the run — a 14-hour effort he still counts among his proudest. The attempt was filmed for the documentary Challenge Roth, alongside professional racers including Mirinda Carfrae and Luke McKenzie.
Rudy has served as a Challenged Athletes Foundation spokesperson since he was 9 — its first young athlete — and has watched the organization grow to support thousands of athletes with grants for running blades and adaptive gear. "All of my life, I've had people tell me I'm an inspiration," he says. "Never let people tell you that you can't do something. Prove them wrong." Learn more at www.challengedathletes.org.