There are athletes amongst the visually impaired too!

One hand on a waist-high rail on the edge of the lane and bowling ball in the other, Mario Eiland glides to the foul line, hurls the ball and -- wham!! -- eight of the 10 pins fly.

"That was a lucky throw," said Eiland, 34, a member of 16 FunMakers, a league at Louisville's Ten Pin Lanes. "To tell you the truth, I'm not very good at it."

Asked his average, Eiland demurred: "I don't like to talk too much about it. I'm too embarrassed to say, but it ranges between 60 and 70. Once in a while, I get lucky with a strike. Other than that, I just go to have fun."

Eiland is blind, a computer programmer at American Printing House for the Blind, and 16 FunMakers is a blind bowlers' league.

Though sightless since a shotgun accident when he was 7 years old, Eiland is like thousands of athletes here and across America who don't let their disability sideline their game.

There are blind swimmers, skiers, wrestlers, golfers -- name an individual sport, and visually impaired athletes are competing.

Henry Wanyoike, a totally blind Kenyan runner, beat 500 competitors, mostly sighted, in a 5-kilometer race here last year, the Texas Roadhouse Stampede for VIPS. It benefits Visually Impaired Preschool Services, a private nonprofit agency serving visually impaired children in the Louisville area.

Blind track competitors run with sighted guides, and in the case of Wanyoike, a world record-holder in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races for the blind who runs the mile in under 5 minutes, the challenge faced by race organizers was obvious.

"We had a hard time finding someone to keep up with him," said Robin Frazier, director of development for VIPS. "He ran with Nick Crider, an excellent runner from Louisville. And as far as I know, we're the only local race that recognizes visually impaired athletes. We have a visually impaired division. We give prize money, and some of our sponsors wanted their money designated for that division."

Blind runners in this year's Stampede Aug. 20 included Nebraska-based track star Kurt Fiene, who placed ninth in a field of 309, and Jamie Weedman, a local standout featured in the September/October issue of Kentuckiana HealthFitness.

Instrumental in establishing the race was Jim Vargo, assistant athletics director at Bellarmine University and head track and cross-country coach for the U.S. Association of Blind Athletes.
He's worked with blind runners since the early 1990s and has regard for disabled sportsmen bordering on hero-worship: "At the Paralympic Games in Barcelona in 1992, it was just amazing to watch all these athletes from across the world, who had what most of us would perceive as significant disabilities, performing unbelievable athlete feats.

Running the mile in 4 minutes and 29 seconds. Somebody who only has one leg doing the high jump. Watching the speed and power of wheelchair racers. And in my 15 years working with blind athletes from all walks for life, from all over the world, I cannot recall one instance where any of those individuals felt sorry for themselves or were looking for a handout. They are some of the most genuine and courageous people I know."

The Paralympics Vargo referred to is the international, Olympic-style sports competition for athletes with disabilities, always held in the same year and venue as the International Olympic Games.

The United States Association of Blind Athletes, USABA, is a Colorado-based organization of the U.S. Olympic Committee that trains blind athletes across the country for competition and recreation and promotes their abilities.

It sponsors track and field events -- distance, sprint and relay racing, shot put, discus throw, long jump and high jump -- and coaches blind individuals in most sports, including judo.

But its signature is goalball, the rough-and-tumble team sport specifically developed for the blind, where players wearing blacked-out goggles and body pads throw at or defend goals at each end of a 10-by-20-yard court.

The 3-pound ball is filled with bells, and players track it by sound as it's hurled up and down the court at 45 mph.

Nickie Priddy, a Louisville homemaker who plays left wing on the Kentucky Phillies team (there's also the Kentucky Thoroughbreds for men), scored a point and blocked a penalty shot against the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind at the USABA Midwest Regional Goalball Championships in Kalamazoo, Mich., in February.

"I got in the center's position, and heard it coming," said Priddy. "Usually, when I'm defending, I'll crouch like a catcher. But this time I was on my toes, and it was coming crosscourt toward my left side. Basically all I had to do was move a little and catch it with my hands."

Now 30 and a mother of two, Priddy was born with cataracts but had functioning vision until she was 25. She played team sports while attending Iroquois High School, lettering in softball and achieving an all-district honor her junior year.

"Both my parents are legally blind," she said. Her fiancé, Kevin Pearl, heads the Kentucky Association of Blind Athletes.

"My father, Reni Jackson, played goalball, and I grew up around blind people and sports. So I didn't think that losing my sight was the end of it all, and I'm proud that as a blind adult, I can still play. My kids were also born visually impaired, and I can expose them to sports, which is wonderful to me."