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“One leg was gone, the other was just mashed up bone held together with nerves and veins,” he says.
“When the first guy got to me I said, ‘Just shoot me. You can’t leave me like this’.
“He told me to f*** off and thank God he did. He fetched a paramedic for me, put on tourniquets and saved my life.”That was 17 years ago on the streets of Northern Ireland. Today Alistair is the British National Freestyle Skydiving Champion and in August will make a bid for the world title, *competing on an equal basis with the able-bodied.
And his tale of triumph against the harshest of adversity is one he hopes will inspire those young men returning limbless from Afghanistan, who find themselves in the same position he was in – driven men who are left with nothing to aim for.
Alistair, 39, says: “I see news footage of guys coming back from war just as mashed up as me. Everyone says, ‘Oh, that’s dreadful, but then they forget all about them.
“Those guys are left to get on with the rest of their lives, often with hardly any compensation and living on benefits, pretty much on the breadline and without any kind of career.
“They’ve fought to look after their country and, just when they need it, their country doesn’t do much to look after them. They were once fit and strong, but it’s all been taken away.
“It’s so hard. But you have to rehabilitate yourself, find a focus…something to hold on to. If I can inspire just one other person to lift themselves out of that same dark place I was in – train for the Paralympics in 2012 or something, then it’s worth it.
“There was a time I thought my life was over and I still have very dark times when it’s difficult to deal with. Sometimes people poke fun at me or I catch sight of myself in a mirror and think, ‘You’re in a hell of a mess’.
"But when I’m in the air it’s like it never happened. I can compete at a world level – alongside people who have all their limbs – and have found a way to fly.”
It’s not what Alistair expected to be doing with his life. At 19 he dropped out of college and joined the Army to become a member of the elite Parachute Regiment.
He had been stationed in Northern Ireland for just eight weeks when he came across an IRA booby trap while searching for a weapons cache.
The 21-year-old private took the full force of the blast. His list of injuries were horrific – indeed each of them would have been enough to kill him if it hadn’t been for the doctors who battled to keep him alive.
His left leg was blown off below the knee and his right was so badly damaged it later had to be amputated just under his hip.
His belly had been torn open, an arm broken, tendons severed on his left arm, and his pelvis shattered in 18 places. He needed 52 pints of blood to be kept alive, had to have his gall blader removed and contracted bacterial meningitis through an open wound in his spine.
The once strapping six-footer, capable of running 33 miles carrying a 50lb pack and a grenade launcher, woke up in hospital to find he was disabled.
After a series of life-saving operations and skin grafts he was sent to Headley Court in Surrey – the Services rehabilitation centre – where over four months he was taught how to use prosthetic limbs and deal with the daily tasks the rest of us take for granted. Understandably, he couldn’t wait to leave.
“There was I – someone who’d been a tough, strong paratrooper – being taught how to basket weave or varnish a box. I couldn’t wait to get out and see what I could still do.
“Once I left there was no-one to stop me so I bought myself a kayak and went into the Lake District with it.
“I went fell-walking, running, climbing, jet-skiing, skiing, anything I could. I spent a year or so struggling with full-size prosthetic legs, but they’re not much use when you want to do sport so I changed to ‘stubbies’, a kind of plastic tube with rubber soles which attach to my stumps and let me get around pretty well, like I was walking on my knees. I can even get up a climbing wall with these on.”
In 2000 Alistair did his first skydive, strapped to an instructor, to raise money for the British Limbless Ex- Servicemen’s Association.
During his 40 seconds of freefall he well and truly caught the skydiving bug, and in 2001 landed in the record books by becoming Britain’s first double amputee to freefall with the Army’s Red Devils display team. He entered his first competition in 2003 and won gold.
In 2005 he qualified as a coach to teach others and a year later married fellow skydiver Pixie in a hot-air balloon over a drop zone in Arizona, leaping out of the basket with her at 5,500ft – after exchanging rings, of course.
He and Pixie, 40, now compete together, with Alistair flipping twists while using a video camera to record his wife as she performs aerobatic dance routines they choreograph together. They have now won two gold medals and a silver between them.
Despite his bravery and achievements Alistair is still stared at in public, pointed at and discussed by people who think that losing his legs made him deaf to mockery.
He says: “It’s very frustrating because they don’t know anything about me. That’s when I remember what happened and see myself how others must do.
"I think disabled people are more obviously discriminated against than any other minority group – no-one points and stares at someone because of their race.
"But skydiving’s not like that – it’s a small world. Everyone knows you and people have never asked about what happened to me. They’re more interested in what I can teach them.”
But Alistair’s new lease of life doesn’t come cheap. He and Pixie each complete about 700 jumps a year, practicing routines and forcing their bodies into bizarre new shapes.
This costs £40,000 every year on travelling and training expenses, including trips to drop zones around the world with weather good enough for them to train for months at a time.
To earn enough, Alistair coaches in Langar, Notts, but when the weather is too bad to jump, the pair train at the Airkix indoor wind tunnel in Milton Keynes.
In between they live in a specially adapted house in Hale, Cumbria. However, a lack of funding means Alistair can’t train as much as he would like to achieve his dream of clinching the world championship.
In spite of this, the couple’s dedication has paid off, with them winning the British National Freestyle Skydiving Championships two years running and earning a place in the British Parachute Association’s GB team.
In August they’ll travel with Team GB to Tartarstan in Russia to take part in the world freestyle championships. That trip will cost another £25,000.
They would be obvious candidates for the 2012 Olympics, except their sport is not recognised by the organisers and Alistair and Pixie, because of his injuries, would have to compete separately.
He said: “I can compete with able-bodied people and beat them too. If it weren’t for the bomb my life would be very different.
“I might not have found skydiving or married Pixie, or maybe I would have been killed.
“But if I’m honest I’m still doing what I always wanted to do, travelling the world competing in sports. I just do it without my legs.
“I see what happened to me as just a bit of a hurdle I had to get over first, and I’m damn glad to still be here.”
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