Just over a week ago the CrossFit Community was hit with the devastating news that Kevin Ogar, a Coach at CrossFit Unbroken in Colorado, had severed his spine and was left paralyzed from the waist down. The injury occurred while Kevin was snatching. You can click here to view the website that was created for Kevin.
I met Kevin at a competition last year and he is one of the better athletes in our sport. Very competitive and very driven, but more importantly, a great ambassador for our sport.
The community as a whole has already raised over $250,000 to help cover Kevin’s medical costs. Unfortunately, Kevin didn’t have any insurance at the time of his injury. I think with a community as strong as Vitality, we can come together and show him some love.
The plan is to do our normal Saturday multi-wod workout this weekend, but we will be taking donations for Kevin. It is not mandatory at all to donate and please DO NOT feel obligated. I fully understand that it may not be possible for you to donate and that is totally fine. Vitality will match whatever the Saturday total is for Donations. If anyone else is interested in matching our community total for Saturday, shoot me an email. I will total everything up and write one check from Vitality to Kevin.
The final piece that I want to briefly talk about is how this injury affects CrossFit. As with anything, the CrossFit haters have chimed in and have the “I told you so” stance with how dangerous CrossFit is and how irresponsible the workouts in which we program are. Let me be very clear to anyone who feels this way. This injury has absolutely nothing to do with irresponsible programming nor does it have anything to do with Kevin’s inability to properly execute a snatch. I am confident in saying that what happened to Kevin was a tragic accident. With anything, accidents happen. Injuries occur within all aspects of our life, sports or otherwise. Obviously we hate to see this and our hearts break for Kevin, but this was an incredibly unfortunate accident that is extremely in our sport.
Click the pic below to watch a video about Kevin’s injury and how it has affected his CrossFit Family in Inglewood, CO.
