Topping our list is “Dancing With The Stars,” which this season has a contestant, Amy Purdy, who performs amazing dance routines—on artificial legs!
Aside from making viewers’ jaws drop and scoring extra points with the tilt’s judges for her courage and determination against all odds, Amy must be inspiring many other physically challenged people to never lose hope and find ways to regain the movement and locomotion they’ve lost.
In addition, her amazing performance should give inventors and medical innovators a psychic surge and make them work even harder to come up with even more versatile artificial limbs to enable them to become truly able—and free!
Our next item involves a Fil-Am contestant, Emil de Leon, who has proven to be unusually prescient as a contestant on the long-running “Wheel of Fortune” game show. His moment of glory came recently when he initially got only two letters right (N and E), but was still able to use them to guess the long answer to his jackpot question—“new baby buggy.”
How do you get from just “NE” to that complete phrase? Even Emil was stunned by the amazing prescience of his achievement, and US TV-magazine shows featured his story for days. —Coincidentally, the interview we caught was by another Fil-Am, Victoria Recaño, who was obviously proud of her kababayan and his once-in-a-lifetime feat.
More on “Dancing with the Stars” sensation Amy Purdy: At age 14, she contracted a form of bacterial meningitis that affected her circulatory system, and both of her legs had to be amputated below the knee.
Instead of giving up the fight to regain her mobility, however, Amy showed that she was made of much sterner stuff when, only seven months after she received her prosthetic legs, she finished third in a snow-boarding competition!
Disabled people
She then became a spokesperson of the Challenged Athletes Foundation and cofounded her own organization, Adaptive Action Sports, for disabled people who want to get involved in action sports.
In 2012, Amy enhanced her visibility and popularity when she participated in “The Amazing Race.” This year, she has been most successful as an “amazingly inspiring” contestant on “Dancing with the Stars,” partnered by five-time champion David Hough, who says he “had to do this—we are going to defy the odds!”
Even if Amy and her partner don’t “go the distance” on the popular celebrity dance competition, they’ve already achieved a lot because they’ve shown that “legless” achievers like Amy can’t only walk and run—they can dance!