An Elite Twelvathlete

It’s hard to believe that Pavol Nezmysel is an elite athlete. He spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage in his native Slovakia. His biological parents abandoned him there as an infant because he was born deaf and blind and without any legs. He also has chronic eczema and is clinically depressed. Hell, with all that shit going on, who wouldn’t be depressed?

But Nezmysel was adopted by a Canadian couple, John and Mary Bland, who raised him to believe that in spite of his crippledness he could still achieve his dreams. And so he went on to become Canada’s most highly-decorated crippled athlete. But now, 20 years after arriving in Canada, Nezmysel is about to embark on a quest to accomplish what no other crippled athlete has ever accomplished before. And all the citizens of Canada are stoked with excitement and rooting hard for his success, because they know when a Canadian tries to do something big it usually doesn’t work out too well. Exhibit A: Look how they fucked up bacon.

But the biggest challenge Nezmysel faces is that it has become very hard to find something to do that no crippled athlete has done. These days cripples are even competing in the Iron Man Triathlon, where contestants swim 2.4 miles and then ride a bike 112 miles before running a 26.2-mile marathon, all within about 17 hours.

So Nezmysel has created the ultimate grueling athletic challenge known as the twelvathlon. After finishing all that wussy triathlon stuff, contestants must then dunk a basketball, kick a 40-yard field goal, jump on a horse and play a round of polo, perform figure skating and gymnastic routines, ski a grand slalom while singing the aria Ritorna vincitor! from the opera Aida and then wrestle an alligator. All this must be done within 12 hours. And in the twelfth and final event, which is perhaps the most brutal of all, contestants have five minutes to consume 50 hot dogs.

The Canadian government has announced that the first official twelvathlon will be held August 8, which is a national holiday in Canada known as “summer.” Nezmysel plans to be the first and only person to successfully complete the competition, or for that matter to even sign up for it. Right now he is relentlessly training.

But Nezmysel knows some day other cripples will successfully complete the twelvathlon and he’ll have to find a way to one-up them. That’s when he intends to become the world’s first reverse twelvathlete, which means he’ll eat the 50 hot dogs first and then go do all that other stuff.


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