GRANADA (COLOMBIA) – Maimed in a horrific bombing, Colombian athlete Juan Jose Florian emerged from South America’s longest conflict with three missing limbs and one clear goal — to win gold at next year’s Paralympic Games in Tokyo.
Florian has fought on both sides of the Colombia’s 50-year conflict, first for the Marxist FARC rebels when still a child soldier, and then for the regular army.
Now he is on the cusp of realizing his biggest dream, competing in next year’s Paralympics in Japan despite losing both his arms and a leg, blown off when he picked up a booby trapped package.
“I never imagined myself as an athlete,” he told AFP. “My childhood dream was to be a soldier.”
Soldiering was…