Teen takes wheelchair to the extreme

LAS VEGAS — It's easy to spot Aaron Fotheringham spinning, "grinding" and stopping for a hesitating moment atop the rim of a half-pipe before plunging back into the mass of teenage boys zipping around the neighborhood skate park.

He's the one in the wheelchair, the one with the bright yellow helmet, the one who does the back flip that has made him an Internet and international celebrity.

His friends slap him high fives as they pass on their BMX bikes and skateboards. They call him "Wheels."

"It's cool what he does," says Cody Manring, 14, leaning both elbows on the handlebars of his red BMX bicycle. "He's inspiring other people."

Adults call Fotheringham, 15, one-of-a-kind, a pioneer carving a niche somewhere between BMX and skateboarding.

"The kid, not only the way he rides the park, but when you talk to him, he's positive, polite, levelheaded," says Joe Wichert, 36, xtreme sports coordinator for the city of Las Vegas, which has 19 public skate parks but only one extreme wheelchair rider.

"It's great to see someone like Aaron creating a whole new sport."

Fotheringham, a high school freshman whose mom calls him a very average student, talks about angles and slope, inertia and momentum as he tries to describe how he learned to do his signature back flip.

"Sometimes you have to be precise with speed. And you never want to go in backward."

He grins, a typical teen, tousled brown hair, green eyes and metal braces. He reaches for another slice of pizza during a break from what he calls "hard core sitting."

That's when you notice the scraped and calloused knuckles, the broad shoulders, the chiseled forearms. He's built from the waist up like a steelworker. He says his arm reach is about 5-foot-8, fingertip to fingertip, and figures he might be that tall if his legs weren't bad.

But they are bad. Fotheringham was born with spina bifida, a defect of the neural tubes that affects more than 70,000 people in the United States, according to the Spina Bifida Association, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., that features Fotheringham on its Web site.

Fotheringham, one of six adopted children, spent his first eight years using braces, but sometimes fooled around with a wheelchair when other children were on bicycles. He began using the chair full time at age 8, after his third painful hip operation.