Fighter bicycles his way back back to ring from freak car accident

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The Biking Boxer
When a freak car accident left boxer Danny Musico unable to walk, he returned to a friend - his bike.

Lying in a hospital bed watching the ’92 Olympics, boxer Danny Musico couldn’t decide which was worse: The pain in his shattered body – struck by a speeding taxicab on a New Jersey street – or the pain in his heart, knowing that his one chance at winning a gold medal was gone forever. But Musico knew one thing: No matter what his doctors said, he was going to walk again.

Hit from behind by a cab chasing two fare beaters (the cab was driving on the sidewalk), the boxer was thrown headfirst though a Plexiglas bus kiosk and into a metal retaining wall. Two spinal disks ruptured, his leg nearly shorn from his body, Musico felt nothing from the waist down. "I could lift up my head and see that my left leg was missing," he recalls. In fact, he was lying on top of it. The boxer was hospitalized for the next five months, completely bedridden for the first three.

The goal of rehabilitation was simple: Make Musico walk again. Musico’s only exercise option once he was out of bed was a stationary bike. "When I started riding the bike I realized I was going to get better. My leg muscles had atrophied: my quad was shrunken, my calf was like a pea. With the stationary bike, I started to see some muscle tone returning. But the rehab I was getting in the hospital wasn’t enough. I needed to start rehabbing on my own.

"I knew I couldn’t just lie there: So I called my dad and said, "Dad, buy me a bike." His father presented him with a Diamondback, and within seven months of his accident, Musico started thinking wild thoughts about boxing again.

Musico started an intensely demanding workout program that he continues today. In addition to three traditional boxing workouts each weekday, Musico rides a bike 50 or 60 miles on both Saturday and Sunday, mostly on hills to maximize his leg burn. Or he’ll go mountain biking. The workouts paid off: In March 1993, Danny Musico made his professional boxing debut. Five years later, he had the middleweight championship belt.

"I remember lying on that hospital bed back in ’92, watching the Olympics, thinking, Here is something I trained for that would have brought me instant glory, instant bucks – and suddenly, it was gone." Rediscovering the bicycle helped him get it all back.

-Steve Perrine

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