No Handicap for Her : Karen Norris, Nation’s Top Female Disabled Swimmer, Disdains Heroics

Karen Norris describes herself to someone scheduled to meet her for the first time at a swimming workout.

“I have strawberry blonde hair and I’ll be wearing a Team USA jacket,” she says.

It doesn’t occur to her that she may be easily identifiable because her left leg is amputated below the knee.

Norris, 29, is the nation’s best female disabled swimmer by several strokes, and in several strokes: breaststroke, backstroke, freestyle, individual medley--all of them basically. The Van Nuys resident has won a gold medal at the Paralympics and last month won a gold at the World Amputee Games in Malta.

She cherishes her records, but spare her a medal for “courageously overcoming a handicap.”

“What I do takes no courage in my book,” she says, “other than overcoming the fact that people might stare at me because I have one leg. Getting out there doing the activity takes no courage.”

The identity of Karen Norris is crystal clear in her mind. She is an athlete, period.

Five days a week, she leaves work at a research and development company in Van Nuys and puts in two hours of training at Pierce College, often joining a youth club team called the Stingrays.

“She motivates my kids, tells them they haven’t really worked out until they throw up,” says Lloyd (Chooch) Petoscia, the Stingrays’ coach.

But Norris wants no mistake made about what motivates her.

“I’m not aggressive and competitive because I need to prove something,” she says. “I happen to really enjoy being active, having my body work for me.”

She pauses, watching the Stingrays shiver and gingerly test the pool before diving in on a cold, windy December evening.

“But I also enjoy knowing I can inspire people,” she says.

She might not agree, but Norris is inspirational in great part because of courage. Fortitude and determination also come to mind.

Few other words adequately describe an 11-year-old who lifts the sheet while being wheeled into the operating room and says, almost cheerily, “Goodby leg.”

Few other words adequately describe a 15-year-old who removes a cosmetically pleasing prosthesis and prefers to maneuver around Calabasas High on crutches because “with crutches I can fly.”

Few other words adequately describe a 27-year-old who takes up competitive swimming for the first time in 17 years and in six months finds herself in Barcelona for the 1992 Paralympic Games.

Norris had Olympic dreams as a child growing up in Mountain View, Calif. She was a top swimmer until contracting a rare form of nerve cancer in her leg that required the amputation.

“I cried for one day, then I was fine,” she says. “That’s how I face any difficulty. I can’t dwell on anything.”

Doctors attached a prosthesis but said she would need to walk with one crutch for a year and with a cane for several years. Norris told her parents, “This is really absurd,” and discarded the crutch after a day, the cane after a week.

Chemotherapy treatments lasted more than a year to ensure that all cancer cells were destroyed. Norris lost her hair, dropped 20 pounds and became extremely ill.

At 13 she was well enough to try swimming again.

“I was swimming against a ghost, comparing my times against the ones from when I had two legs,” she says. “I got very discouraged and quit.”

Her family moved to Agoura Hills and in high school she filled her need to compete athletically by taking up a new sport: skiing. She quickly became the best teen-ager on the Far West Disabled Ski Team, competing against adults.

The only thing that dampened her drive was marriage. After earning a degree at UCLA in mathematics, Norris married and “became a slug.” She divorced four years ago and began skiing competitively again.

In early 1992, she learned of the Paralympics from her skiing coach. After only 10 swimming workouts she won five gold medals at the Far West Regional Games in Cupertino, Calif., qualifying her for the National Summer Amputee Games in Atlanta.

There, she won eight gold medals, becoming the nation’s top female disabled swimmer and qualifying for the Paralympics.

At Barcelona, Norris won a gold medal in the 4 x 100 freestyle relay and a bronze in the 50 freestyle.

Her improvement, at first dramatic, has continued in nearly every event. Norris dropped 15 seconds off her time in the 200 individual medley in the three months before the 1992 nationals and swam a personal best of 3:02.4.

That time has been whittled another 15 seconds to 2:47.4 over the past two years. At the World Games in Malta, she won a gold in the 100 backstroke, defeating the world-record holder, 17-year-old Sarah Bailey of Great Britain.

Bailey’s disability is the loss of fingers from one hand.

“Obviously mine is a more severe disability, but I don’t expect fairness when it comes to equating disabilities,” Norris says.

The Athletic Paralympic Organizing Committee categorizes all disabilities into 10 functional classifications. Missing a leg below the knee puts Norris in the least-disabled class along with people with relatively minor disabilities.

Missing a leg affects Norris’ swimming in several fundamental ways. In freestyle and backstroke races, it is difficult for her to maintain her position in the water.

“You’d think I’d just swim in circles,” Norris says, smiling.

Besides lacking the stability and balance of a two-legged swimmer, she also generates less propulsion.

“I tend to use more upper body in all my strokes (than an able-bodied swimmer),” she says. “I’m closest to able-bodied swimmers in longer distances because there is less kicking.”

The greatest handicap Norris may face in her quest to win gold medals in the 1996 Paralympics has nothing to do with her leg.

It is her age. Most swimmers peak in their early 20s.

“The kids I swim with don’t ask, ‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ They say, ‘How old are you?’ ” she says. “But I am better now than ever. I am finally beating the times I had when I was 10 years old.”

The improvement does not surprise Fred Shaw, the Pierce College swimming coach. He has watched Norris work out in his pool for two years, and he designed her workouts for more than a year.

“Rain or shine, middle of winter, 30 degrees, she’s always here,” he says. “When you see that, you know she’s going places.”

One destination looms large: Atlanta, site of the 1996 Paralympic Games, which will be held a few weeks after the Olympics.

A short-term goal is to shave half a second off her time and become the world-record holder in the 100 backstroke.

Norris spends leisure time rock climbing and in-line skating. But swimming, her first love, is also her latest. All those years spent out of the water have kept her desire to swim from drying up.

“I love swimming so much now, I love being in the water,” she says.