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“Victoria Feige was 18 and snowboarding during spring break in 2004 when she overshot a jump and landed so hard that shards of bone in her spine were crushed and exploded. Everything went tingly and numb from the waist down.

At first she thought she had broken a leg and then broken a pelvis. Then she realized it was her back.

In the crash, Feige fractured vertebrae along her lower spine. That left her partially paralyzed and able to feel only a bit of sensation below where the injury occurred.

“I come from a medical family and I was like, ‘Oh dear, I really screwed up,’” Feige, now 38, says in a video call from Vancouver. “But I didn’t expect to have a permanent injury.

“My feet are adorable but useless,” she adds with a laugh.

Feige is the best woman in the world at paralympic surfing. She has won four consecutive world championships on the International Surfing Association and is currently top-ranked in her division on the Association of Adaptive Surfing Professionals World Tour.

At events she abandons her wheelchair and crawls from the edge of the sand to the ocean while pushing her five-foot-plus surfboard alongside her. Once in the water she is a strong paddler and swimmer and through exhaustive rehab learned to climb onto her knees and kneels as she chases a wave.

“Often times for people that are in wheelchairs it is isolating,” Feige says. “You go to a concert and there is a special place to sit. But when I am in the water it is where I feel the most free. I can go anywhere I want. I’m equal.”

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