Sam Schmidt on Finding Purpose After the Finish Line
Former racer channels resilience into recovery centers and a new memoir.
Sam Schmidt on Finding Purpose After Paralysis Scott Robinson Sam Schmidt embraces his curiously contented – seemingly counter-intuitively contented – life at age 61 with gusto. The former open-wheel racer always is game for a defiantly impossible feat, figuring, “What could go wrong? Break my neck?
Been there, done that. ” Yes, he has. And Sam Schmidt never has done anything halfway.
His 2000 crash at Walt Disney World Speedway at Orlando had maximum impact, literally and figuratively. He hit a bump on the track and lost control of the car, spinning and smashing backward into the unforgiving concrete wall at about 180 miles an hour. The accident immediately left Schmidt—“hell-bent on winning, 35 years old, and convinced I was in my prime”—a quadriplegic.
That’s where his racing career ended but where his mission began. His foundation Conquer Paralysis Now, designed to fund global research to find cures and treatments for paralysis, has spun off two DRIVEN Neuro Recovery Centers, the original at Las Vegas, the other, barely year-old 114,000-square-foot sister facility in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Indiana. DRIVEN NeuroRecovery Center “Racing is my passion.
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