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The Toy's Main Game
Paul Gains
Steven Toyoji took up wheelchair racing six years ago. Now he is knocking on the door of world class performances, and realises it’s time to focus entirely on his chosen sport.
“I am on the wheelchair basketball team here at the University of Arizona,” he explains. “A lot of my time goes to sport. I definitely will be talking to the coach and the athletics coordinator at the end of the season, because there’s going to be a lot happening in the next couple of years and I really want to focus on wheelchair racing. So I am going to talk to them about moving my scholarship to track.”
Last summer Toyoji joined the US Paralympic team at the European Open Championships where his eyes were opened by not only watching and competing against some of the world’s elite athletes but also by talking with them.
“I got to meet other T52’s in my class like a lot of the best T52’s are not in the US. So when I get a chance to race against those guys it’s always nice to see where I am at. I got to talk a lot with Santiago Sanz (Spain) and it was nice to see what he would do. He was really, really helpful.”
Not only did they exchange technical knowledge but simple things that up-and-coming athletes might do well to incorporate into their regimen, things that a young athlete must hear from a seasoned pro.
“It’s more like the preparation for the races,” Toyoji explains. “I had always gone out there and raced. I didn’t realise how much of it was preparation before the race, like “imaging” how the race is going to happen, imaging basically everything that could happen in the race and preparing yourself mentally for the different scenarios. I had never given any consideration to any of that stuff before but going to Finland I think I realised how much I still have to learn about sport and that I can improve my preparation.”
An undergraduate in Arizona’s business school Toyoji’s hometown is Seattle, Washington, and it was there he first got a taste of wheelchair sports. His mother picked up a flier promoting a local wheelchair basketball team and when he went out for the team he discovered many were also involved in track and field.
But he credits fellow racer Jacob Heilveil as the one who introduced him to serious wheelchair racing and who instilled a strong work ethic, which he hopes will pay dividends this coming summer. Heilveil, a T54 who was 4th in the European Open Championships over 5,000m, is Toyoji’s coach.
“I am hoping to make the Worlds this summer in the 800m and 1,500m and 5,000m,” the 20-year-old admits. Two years ago he broke four minutes in the 1,500m and that he says was a major milestone in his career.
“And I’d like to make it to the Paralympics in 2008 and hopefully bring back a medal. Definitely over the past couple of years I have realised where I am on the pecking order. It’s an eye opener.”