Brad Cobb doesn’t want to be inspirational.

He simply wants to be an athlete — just like he was when sprinting for Kansas University during the 1980s.

Never mind that Cobb is missing one of the legs that carried him as a Jayhawk in the 200- and 400-meter races and in the mile relay. Or that doctors expected him to die seven years ago.

When he races with the United States cycling team in the Paralympics later this month in Greece, Cobb, 38, will be carrying on the competitive spirit he’s kept since Billy Mills, the Olympian and fellow American Indian, inspired him to run track at KU.

“Physically, he’s not the same person,” says Bob Timmons, Cobb’s former KU track coach and longtime friend. “But psychologically and mentally, he has the same enthusiasm for competition he had before the handicap. It doesn’t seem to have, in any way, set him back.”

The accident

Cobb says, half-jokingly, that he always thought cycling was for guys who couldn’t run.

After his days of collegiate track, which resulted in four athletic letters from KU and a second-place relay finish at the 1986 Big 8 track meet, he continued running to stay in shape.

That changed suddenly on Aug. 21, 1997.

Cobb was driving near Pawhuska, Okla., about 25 miles from his hometown of Bartlesville, where he practiced optometry and lived with his wife, Kelly, and his newborn son, Dallas.

A 16-year-old who had just earned his driver’s license that morning swerved in front of Cobb and hit his car head-on. The boy died instantly. Cobb’s left leg was crushed.

“One of the paramedics was a Vietnam vet,” Cobb recalls. “He said it looked like I’d stepped on a land mine.”

But the leg was the least of Cobb’s problems. He had a torn aorta, collapsed lung, kidney failure and torn diaphragm. Doctors told Cobb’s wife he had a 5 percent chance of surviving.

During one of his surgeries in the days after the accident, doctors amputated Cobb’s left leg, which was infected.

“The doctor called me from the operating room and said, ‘We have to cut his leg or let him go,” Kelly Cobb says. “We had a baby at home.”

The comeback

Defying the odds given by his doctors, Cobb gradually recovered physically from the accident. He tried using a prosthetic leg but found it cumbersome and switched to walking with crutches.

The mental and emotional recoveries were more difficult.

“Brad had a hard time, because he was used to being athletic,” his wife says. “He lost all his muscle mass. He had to start all over. This wasn’t your normal Joe that came home every night and watched TV. Brad was always running or playing basketball or something.”

It was a discussion with a cousin living in the mountain-biking mecca of Colorado that sparked Cobb’s interest in cycling. Cobb traveled in 1998 to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs during a national Paralympic cycling event to meet with a fellow above-the-knee amputee to talk about getting involved.

“I saw something then that I had not seen since the accident,” Kelly Cobb recalls. “It was that look of ‘I’ve found something.’ We went out the next day to our local bike shop and looked at a mountain bike. The guy just looks at us like we’re crazy — like, ‘This bike’s for who?'”

‘Don’t feel sorry’

Cobb quickly fell in love with cycling, to the point that he set an ambitious goal late in 1998 of competing in the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, Australia.

He not only qualified, his team took bronze in the team sprint, a 750-meter, three-member team race.

The nearly instant success might seem improbable, but it didn’t come as a surprise to John Creighton, a former KU teammate. Creighton remembers Cobb as a hard worker with a positive attitude who encouraged his teammates.

“We were always real competitive,” says Creighton, who lives in Overland Park. “He always thought if you practice hard, you would compete hard. Not many people could handle what Brad went through. But he always just says, ‘Don’t feel sorry for me.'”

Riding a bicycle isn’t much different for Cobb than it is for anyone else. In fact, he regularly competes in races against men with two legs. He zips around tracks at 45 mph and averages 25 miles an hour when he’s road racing.

The only modification he made to his bike was removing the left pedal and crank.

Cobb holds the U.S. record in the 1-kilometer sprint in his category, which includes other above-the-knee amputees.

“The bottom line,” Cobb says, “is once a jock, always a jock.”

‘Pure sport’

Cobb spends six weeks a year training at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., and six weeks training in Colorado Springs, where he has spent the weeks leading up to this year’s Paralympic Games. He’s spending at least four or five hours on his bike every day.

Cobb says he enjoys the camaraderie and support from others who compete despite their disabilities.

“The Paralympics are as close to pure sport as you can get,” Cobb says. “It’s like those stories of baseball back in the 1920s or before. They’re not getting paid that much money, and everybody loved to watch people play because they love to play ball.”

Cobb leaves this week for the Athens games, which begin Sept. 17 and are staged at the same sites where the Summer Olympics were held last month. He’s hoping the games will draw as much attention as they did in Australia, where they drew 1.1 million spectators.

He’ll be the only American male above-the-knee amputee competing. He’s entered in two track races and two road races, and his father, mother-in-law, wife and two sons, ages 5 and 7, will be there rooting for him.

Cobb used to get nervous when he settled into the blocks before a race in college. He doesn’t get nervous anymore before big races. He says the accident made him realize there are things — such as his family — that are more important than racing.

But that doesn’t mean that competitive spirit that brought him to KU has stopped burning.

“I remember being a freshman and walking into Allen Fieldhouse, to the KU Hall of Fame, and seeing guys like Jim Ryun and Billy Mills,” Cobb says. “I remember praying and saying I’d do whatever it takes to get to the Olympics like them. Now I will have been to two Olympic Games. It’s not exactly the way I wanted to. But I am a two-time Olympian.”