Zur’s third Olympics, representing the United States for a second time after debuting in 2000 competing for Israel, is easily his most unlikely. And that has little to do with his advancing age.
Zur, in fact, said he is fortunate to have avoided a wheelchair as a quadriplegic, after sustaining a frightening spinal-cord injury soon after he finished competing in Athens.
“It was the afternoon after my last event [in 2004],” Zur recalled, “and I was trying to relax at a swimming pool in the Olympic Village.”
Instead, he slipped while jumping into the pool and accidentally struck the top of his head on the shallow bottom. He received a gash on his head, but otherwise felt OK, until he awoke the next morning and had trouble lifting his head off the pillow.
“I got some stiches and I thought I was fine,” he said. “But, three days later, I found out I had injured my spinal cord.”
Zur, at the urging of one of his friends, finally requested X-rays on his neck and results were as threatening as they were surprising.
“I had a herniated disc that had almost exploded into the spinal cord,” he said. “The doctor showed me the MRI and I saw that the disc was mashed into the spinal cord. The doctor said he had seen cases where the bone never even touched the spinal cord, but the patient wound up in a wheelchair for life.”
After weeks of restricted movement to allow the swelling to subside, Zur returned to Orange County to undergo surgery.
“It was really delicate carpentry,” Zur said of the procedure in which a cadaver bone, a titanium plate and some screws were used to fuse his C-5 and C-6 vertebrae.
