John Whitney, a captain of Ithaca College’s ski club, tore 60 percent of the cartilege in his shoulder in a nasty fall while skiing this past August. But after more than a dozen years of skiing with a prosthetic lower left leg, there’s not much that can keep the senior off the slopes.

The injury required surgery and months of recuperation in which the senior was told not to ski. But that’s not likely for someone who schedules his classes around ski practices and calls the sport his life.

It wasn’t long before Whitney found himself serving as a forerunner during the ski team’s meets the past few weekends. After all, Whitney knows more than most people that his injured shoulder, like his prosthetic lower left leg, is a long way from the heart.

Whitney, a 21-year-old physical therapy major from Towson, Md., was born with a condition called proximal focal femoral disorder (his left femur was shorter than his right because of malfunctioning growth plates). At 7 months old, his left foot was amputated at the ankle, and he’s worn a prosthesis ever since. As the rest of his body grew, his left leg became comparatively shorter than his right, requiring a prosthesis that now comes up to his knee.

“It wasn’t hard to adjust to the prosthesis because I learned to walk with it,” Whitney said. “It felt natural.”

As a child, new prostheses were fitted for his leg to keep up with his growth, but he now only needs to replace them every few years. Despite his slight limp, Whitney said his prosthetic leg does not cause him pain. However, it wasn’t always a painless experience.

At 14, Whitney was forced to trade his prosthesis for crutches while he underwent a leg-lengthening procedure. He was on crutches for more than a year.

“The procedure stretched my left leg about three and a half inches,” he said. “It corrected some of the body mechanics in my left leg. The lengthening made it closer to normal.”

During those months, he went to physical therapy four days a week to help the muscles lengthen with the bone. In essence, Whitney had to learn how to walk again.

Whitney’s personal experience with physical therapy influenced his choice of major. He aspires to open his own physical therapy practice.

“You get to interact with people a lot,” he said. “You see people when they need help, and you bring them back to where they want to be or as close as you can to where they were before.”   

Whitney also loves sports. He’s drawn to them because of the camaraderie, but also enjoys individual performance. While he’s been a sailing instructor every summer for 10 years, his true passion is skiing.

“I am naturally competitive, but I like how competitive sports push you,” he said. “You can’t settle for mediocrity. As long as you want to win you have to keep taking it to the next level.”

Whitney’s been in the Ithaca College ski club since he was a freshman, but he started skiing at age five, when his parents took him on vacation to Jack Frost Mountain in the Poconos. There, Whitney took lessons from the 52 Association for the Handicapped Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides skiing lessons to physically disabled individuals to promote confidence through sports. Whitney’s love for skiing continued to blossom during subsequent family vacations in Colorado.

In 1996, he was recruited for the Winter Park Disabled Ski Team in Colorado. He took lessons from Danny Pufpaf, the coach of the Winter Park Disabled Ski Team. Pufpaf saw potential in Whitney and approached his parents about having him join the team.

Since then, he has participated in many races for the disabled across the U.S. and Canada. This February, Whitney placed fourth in the Meridian Cup in Winter Park, Colo. Two weeks later, he found out that he had qualified for the Turin Paralympics in March 2006. However, he decided not to miss a year at Ithaca because of his
demanding major.

“There was a lot of pressure from my parents and professors,” he said. “The other concern was if I took a whole year off, I would forget all of the material.”

Disappointed that he couldn’t attend Turin, Whitney plans to participate in the 2010 Paralympics in Vancouver, B.C. After graduation, he wants to move to Colorado and stay there through 2014 in order to train for the next two Paralympics while working part time as a physical therapist.

Philip Zell, Ithaca’s ski club coach, has worked with Whitney for the past three seasons. He said Whitney is competitive by nature and passionate about skiing.

“When he gets on the hill, he morphs a little,” he said. “If I had to sum him up in one word, it would be ‘tenacious.’ He’s very intense about what he does.”

Whitney is a captain on the ski club with seniors Lisa Devenuto and Dave Simoni. Devenuto has been skiing with Whitney since her freshman year.

“He never gives up,” she said. “If he can’t make it through a course, he won’t stop until he gets through it … . He’s very motivated.”

Whitney’s housemate, senior Steven Garfinkel, met him during their sophomore year when they were both on men’s crew. Whitney loves skiing and sailing, he said, but is very modest about his accomplishments, choosing not to tell Garfinkel or Devenuto about the outcome of the qualifying games.

“He doesn’t like it when someone asks him if he’s good,” Devenuto said. “He’s just like ‘Eh, I’m all right.’ He doesn’t like the whole hype around it.”

All the same, Devenuto said that Whitney stands out on the slopes.

“He skis with one leg so everyone notices him,” she said. “He skis with everyday kids, and he’s still coming in the top 20.”

 Zell said Whitney has brought much to the team.

“It’s refreshing having John around because he brings a lot of good out of people,” he said. “When people see John out there and they see him skiing and how hard he works, it kind of opens their eyes a little bit. It makes them realize some of their problems aren’t huge. He’s brought something really positive to the sport.”

Sports Editor Jeff Morganteen contributed reporting for this story.