Meet the Paralympic Iron Cowboy: ‘A bull broke my jaw, a bus ran me over – and I got struck by lightning’

As Fernando Rufino recounts the dizzying list of setbacks and injuries that have shaped his life, there comes a point when you begin to wonder if you’ve entered another dimension.

Rufino is one of Brazil’s most famous Paralympic athletes, thanks to his canoeing experience. He is also known as the “Iron Cowboy,” a reference to his past as a rodeo rider and to the metal plates that reinforce his spinal cord, which he was injured by when he fell from a moving bus at age 21, the wheels crushing his body.

That alone would make a great story. But you haven’t heard the half of it.

There was the time he was trampled by an 800kg bull and dragged across the ground by a galloping horse. There have also been car, motorcycle and horse riding accidents.

“I broke this thumb,” Rufino says The Athletics. “I cut off the top of my finger, a small saw blade fell on my face and went right under my eye. My brother and I used to try to act out fight scenes from movies. One time he hit me with a wooden plank and cut my head open.

“When I was a teenager, a bull broke my jaw. Then the bus ran me over. I rode my motorcycle into a tree at 60 mph. I was lifting weights at the gym and a metal bar fell on me, breaking my nose. I broke two ribs from overtraining, I trained for two weeks with a broken leg, thinking it was just a muscle problem…

“Then I was struck by lightning.”

Lightning?

“Yes! On my front door. I felt the energy of it go through me. It threw me up in the air. I landed on my neck, cut my elbow open. I writhed on the floor for about 15 minutes with my muscles all cramped up. I could smell the burning smell for three days afterward.

“I love it when accidents happen to me. It just gives me more stories to tell. I’m a backcountry guy, a warrior who wants to win in life, a cowboy who won gold at the Paralympics.”

And today, the reigning Va’a 200m VL2 Paralympic champion and three-time world champion will take to the water to defend his title.

Rufino grew up on a traditional farm in Mato Grosso do Sul, central-west Brazil. He and his parents still live there with the horses and bulls, the money Rufino earns from canoeing he invests in the estate they run according to his grandparents’ way of life.

Rufino became a rodeo rider because he dreamed of traveling the world, but after his spinal cord injury, he knew that career was over.

With his father’s help, he learned to walk again on the farm and did most of his years of rehabilitation at home, riding horses and swimming in the reservoir. “Animals are part of my story and who I am,” he says. “They helped me walk again.”

Rufino still wanted to travel the world, and sports was one way to do it. A friend found a center that trained disabled athletes. He tried a few sports and then, on August 7, 2012 at 8 a.m. — he remembers the date vividly — he tried para-canoeing.

“I forget my disability on the water,” he says. “I feel like everyone else. If you saw me paddling next to someone without a disability, they wouldn’t know which one of us was disabled. That’s liberating.”

The 39-year-old missed the Rio 2016 Paralympics due to high blood pressure and cardiac hypertrophy, but his technique improved as the training load was reduced. When he made his Paralympic debut at Tokyo 2020, delayed 12 months by the global pandemic, he made a statement with his tufted silver hair and became the first Brazilian to win a gold medal at the Paralympic Games.

Fernando Rufino made his big breakthrough in Tokyo (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images)

Cheered on by his family from the farm back home, Rufino will compete against his good friend and compatriot Igor Tofalini, also a former rodeo cowboy, who was his best man at his wedding in 2018. They live, eat and train together at the national canoe center in Ilha Comprida, Brazil. Rivals on the water, but good friends off it, they share everything.

“If he wins, we’ll have a barbecue to celebrate, and it’ll be the same if I win. But the gold and silver medals are ours.”

The bald, bushy Rufino, who hangs his cowboy hat in his room in the Paralympic village and irritates everyone with the “saddest country music” on race day, is mentally and physically ready for Friday’s heats and Sunday’s finals, should he qualify.

“Without wanting to sound magnanimous, I have already won everything there is to win in my sport. I believe I can leave here as a two-time Paralympic champion.”

Rufino says the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, when he will be 43, will likely be his last Paralympic Games, but all that matters to him is that he is remembered as the “real Iron Cowboy.”

“I will definitely die old. I have tried to die young, but I have never succeeded.”

(Top photo: Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images))