A CT rower survived a tubing accident and became a Paralympic participant

It was a hot August day in 2015, a normal day on the Connecticut River for Saige Harper and her family, who lived and spent a lot of time near the river in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

But that day was to change her life. Harper, then 13, was riding on an inner tube towed by a boat. The tube was the kind that spun the faster she went. Saige fell off. Her mother, Joanne Corbeil-Harper, was on the towboat and knew immediately something was wrong when her daughter, who had been a swimmer since she was four, didn’t surface. She dove into the water to rescue her.

Saige had fallen between the boat and the tube. The tow rope had cut deep into her leg and the carabiner that connected the tube to the rope anchored her under the tube. After she was brought to shore, she was taken to hospital.

In the hospital after the accident, Saige wondered if she would ever walk again. But her life took some unexpected turns. Nine years later, Harper, who rowed at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield before graduating this spring, will travel to France to compete as a Paralympic rower.

“It almost feels like I have imposter syndrome,” Harper, 22, said Tuesday at the Harry Parker Boathouse in Boston, where the Paralympic team was training. “This is the first day we’ve put this (USA) gear on – I put it on today and I was like, ‘This is impossible. This is impossible. My 14-year-old self in a wheelchair would be pretty shocked right now.’

“I remember thinking I would never walk again, and now I’m going to the Paralympics.”

For Harper, who competed in swimming and rowing in high school and was recruited to row for Sacred Heart, it has been a long and difficult road back to competitive swimming.

“She’s struggled every day physically and certainly mentally, but this is an incredible achievement for her and for us,” said Corbeil-Harper. “Just to see that she was able to turn it around and make something positive out of a really traumatic event…”

“A long recovery”

Harper swam because her older sister Jessica did. When her sister went to college, she wanted to try another sport, and since the Harpers lived near the river and there was a rowing club there, why shouldn’t she give it a try?

She was 12. The following summer she was injured in the accident.

The doctor who operated on her told her parents that the rope that cut into her leg stopped three millimeters from an artery. Harper’s tibial nerve was severed; she suffers from neuropathy in the lower leg, which means she has lost feeling in her lower leg and the sole of her foot. She can no longer move her ankle. Her body does not regulate its temperature well.

She finds it difficult to walk and stand for long periods of time. She can’t run. The heat during a competition is hard.

“It took a long time to recover,” Harper said. “The whole timeline is a blur for me. But I think by this time the following year, I was back in the pool and working on being competitive again. I needed a lot of aids. I still couldn’t walk. I was using crutches or a cane.

“Rowing – it took me longer to get back into it because not only do I need knee and ankle mobility, which I still can’t really get right, but because I had my accident at the place where we were training.”

That’s why two summers after the accident, Harper and her sister went on another rafting trip. Her father was in the boat, her mother stood on the shore, trying to be brave for her daughter.

“It was more like, ‘If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it again,'” Harper said. “I don’t want to experience something I can never do again. My sister and I rode the subway together. She was there to give us moral support.”

“We did a somersault at the end on purpose so we wouldn’t think, ‘I must never fall off this tube again.’ After that, I felt really good. I thought, ‘If I can do this, I can do anything.'”

Further obstacles

Some things were harder to overcome, though. Sometimes when Harper was pushing herself to the limit in a rowing or swimming event, her nervous system would rebel and her body would sometimes shut down at the end. She would slump in the boat and sometimes get cramps, she said, or when she was in the pool, the same thing would happen after a competition ended and her teammates and coaches would pull her out.

It was just one more thing to learn to live with for Harper, who was a three-time MVP of her swim team at Easthampton High School and helped set school records on the 200- and 400-meter relay teams.

“I was always able to get back up and get help from my teammates and friends,” Harper said. “My dad was a referee, my coach was a nurse at the hospital who was there when I had the accident. All of these people knew me very well and knew I was OK.”

“My nervous system basically shuts down; there’s almost a break in the circuit. My body says something’s wrong and shuts down and I kind of reboot.”

However, when it happened while rowing, some people were not so accommodating, her mother said.

“We got confirmation from a doctor that she was OK to compete and we would never put her at risk,” Corbeil-Harper said. “People would think of it as a seizure because that’s what it looked like. But all our doctors told us it was some kind of neurological problem where the brain shuts down so the body doesn’t go beyond a certain level of pain. People didn’t know that. She had coaches who called her a burden. That was a word that stuck with her.

“As soon as the boat crossed the line, her body started doing it. Parents thought it was unsafe, they didn’t want their children in the same boat as her. It was an emotionally challenging time.”

But Corbeil-Harper remembered that one of her daughter’s teammates had offered her support.

“One of her teammates told her that if she could put herself in a position to run a race knowing what would happen to her body after the race, she would run with her because she was the strongest person she knew,” she said.

The Paralympics

When Harper was recruited to row in college, she told the coaches what had happened and what help she needed. The coaches asked her if she had ever heard of para-rowing and the Paralympics.

She didn’t.

Jackie Smith, an assistant coach at Sacred Heart, was a Paralympic rower in 2016, and Harper landed there as a rower and sports science student. This spring, the Pioneers took second place at the MAAC Championships, their best finish to date, with Harper also taking second place in the varsity eight.

She tried out for her first national para-rowing team in 2022 and made it. At the World Championships, she finished fifth in the PR3 mixed coxed four and won a silver medal in the same discipline in 2023. The PR3 classification means that the rower has residual function of his legs, torso and arms.

This year, she tried out for the team in January and made the cut. She will compete in the mixed PR3 double sculls with Todd Vogt of Portland, Oregon, who has Parkinson’s disease. Their boat finished fourth at a World Cup in Poland in June.

“When she was ranked and rowing with the para-athletes, she was still rowing in college,” her mother said. “She said it was the first time she really felt like she could be herself. She didn’t have to hide anything. She felt understood.”

“Since she has always been an athlete among able-bodied people, it was an eye-opening experience for her when she joined the team for the first time.”

And now the Harper family will travel to Paris to see Saige on the world stage. The Paralympics begin on August 28 and run through September 8. Rowing begins on August 30.

“I’ve met so many people that I would never have met if I hadn’t had this accident,” Harper said. “This is very special to me. I’ve learned so much from so many people and I think if they can do it, I can do it too.”

“I tried to find as much normality as possible. Many people from outside asked me whether I could do it or not. So I thought to myself: ‘If you don’t believe in me, I’ll believe in myself.'”