What do you do when one of your dreams is seemingly ripped away in a mere moment?
Ask George Hammel and you’ll get the answer: Keep fighting until you reach that dream anyway.
In 1998, Hammel was an up-and-coming Supercross and motocross racer with aspirations of stardom on two wheels. But in a split second, his life and career were turned on their heads by a crash — seemingly ending his racing story before it ever had a chance to truly begin.
Hammel was competing in his first professional national at California’s Glen Helen Raceway when he hit a large jump coming down a high-speed hill, all while carrying too much speed.
The sheer force ejected him from the bike and he landed on his feet, compressing his body and causing a myriad of injuries, including shattering his L1 vertebrae, breaking both lower portions of his legs, breaking both his arms, breaking his pelvis and fracturing his skull.
Years later, Hammel calls the crash “impossible to forget.”
“We were coming down the hill on the course called Mount St. Helen’s — it’s one of the biggest hills on a motocross track in the United States — and it gets what’s called braking bumps at the bottom of the hill … these big whoop-de-doos,” Hammel recalled.
“I came down the hill and was in fourth gear, which was wide open on the dirt bikes at the time … and I ended up just kind of falling off the back of the bike, giving it full throttle and hitting a jump at the bottom of the hill way too fast. It bucked me off like a bucking bronco, threw me up in the air and I flew through the air for 70 or 80 feet and landed on my legs. It broke both my legs, my tailbone, my back, both of my arms and fractured a little piece of my skull just because it was such a hard impact, flying through the air and landing on your feet like I did.”
Hammel was paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the accident and told he would never walk — or race — again.
But that’s where Hammel’s inspiring journey truly began.
Refusing to take no for an answer, Hammel poured his passion and energy into finding a way back from his horrific crash, vowing to prove a throng of medical experts wrong and by racing again.
“I used to be a professional dirt bike racer,” Hammel said. “I grew up in Arizona, out in the dirt, so it was just natural (to end up in motorcycle racing). Everybody out there liked riding dirt bikes, quads and those types of things, and it ended up being a profession for me.
“I tell people all the time — it’s the nature of the beast when you’re riding dirt bikes, to break bones,” Hammel continued. “To date, I’ve broken 58 bones. I’ve broken my back three times and the second time I broke my back was what ended up paralyzing me from the waist down. But I wasn’t about to let it beat me. I’ve been able to work really hard … and start walking around again. I got out of the wheelchair after five years, man. I wasn’t going to let that part of my story be the end.”
Over the span of those five years, Hammel found a path back to mobility, learning to walk again with the assistance of forearm crutches. Putting two more years under his belt, he was able to walk on his own despite a limp, and with the support of AFO lower leg braces he was eventually he was able to ride a bicycle and return to competition.
“There were a lot of trials and tribulations, that’s for sure,” said Hammel. “The emotional roller coaster was one of the hardest parts about it, but the journey itself … when you’re sitting in a wheelchair, you just think, ‘Man, what can I do not to have this? What can I do to make my life better?’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, I’m just never going to give up. These doctors told me that I’m never going to walk again. I’m going to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.’ And I just basically cursed them and said: ‘That’s not going to happen.”
