Sarah Doherty took up skiing just months after a terrible accident caused her disability, and went on to compete as a Paralympian, summit North America’s highest peak, and design specialized crutches allowing active people with disabilities to enjoy the outdoors
Sarah Doherty’s life was forever changed one evening in 1973 when a drunk driver slammed into her while she was cycling to a friend’s house in her hometown of Taunton, Mass. The near-fatal impact tore off her right leg and shattered her pelvis.
Ms. Doherty and her identical twin sister were born in Taunton to John and Jane Doherty on Dec. 21, 1959. They were the sixth and seventh children for the big Irish-Catholic family, with two more still to come. She started climbing mountains, summiting Washington’s Mt. Rainier in 1984, the first woman on one leg to achieve the climb. The following year, she became the first amputee without a prosthetic to summit North America’s highest peak, Alaska’s Denali.
“But you wouldn’t try to drive a nail in with the palm of your hand. Sarah understood mobility aids as tools that could expand how you live your life. She demonstrated that every day, just by being.” Setting out on prototype crutches that she had developed, Ms. Doherty walked from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, accompanied by a Canadian woman and a German man whose paces were similar to hers.
Fortunate coincidences have altered the course of Ms. Doherty’s life at various points over the years, starting with the police officer who happened to be parked on the block where Ms. Doherty was hit by the drunk driver. His decision to lift her into the back seat of the squad car to get her to hospital faster was a factor in saving her life.
Recalling that fateful encounter at the soccer field, Mr. Perreur-Lloyd says he was “in it from the start” with the woman he would one day marry. But Ms. Doherty’s trust had been badly shaken by the failure of her first marriage, and it took the long walk of the Camino in 2004 to clarify things for her.
For many years, Ms. Doherty wrote monthly online features of people whose own lives were changed by SideStix. Those powerful testimonials kept her going through years of business ups and downs, Ms. Gabriel says.The couple made a successful pitch on the sixth season of CBC’sin 2011. Plans went no further, however, after they realized that the Dragons envisaged a factory in China pumping out ready-made crutches, not the highly individualized product that Ms. Doherty had in mind.
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