"They said that I would not be able to walk anymore and I have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar swimming"

Barcelona"If you can walk again, come back and I'll eat my tie," a doctor told Zach Washington-Young when, after a serious accident, he lost mobility from the waist down. "I've never gone back to tell him, although I assume he knows he was wrong," explains Zach as he sits down to speak with ARA at a hotel in the center of Barcelona, where this Englishman who lives in Ibiza, his new home, is visiting. He apologizes for arriving five minutes late: "I was at the pool with my son, who never stops moving," he says. He doesn't stop moving either. Almost 15 years after the accident that seemed to condemn him to a wheelchair for life, Zach has run a marathon and this summer he swam across the Strait of Gibraltar, the latest of his milestones.

Zach has lived for many years in Catalonia and now resides in Ibiza, where he was looking for a corner of the world close to nature to raise his son with his partner. He moves nimbly with the help of two crutches and takes as many steps as he wants. Many doctors are amazed, as they believed he would never walk again. "My parents are heroes. There was a moment when I accepted that I wouldn't be able to walk again, but my mother wouldn't stop looking for solutions and she contacted specialists in Cambridge who had a different way of working. And my father took me there. My father drove miles and miles to take me to recovery sessions and to bring me back home. Sometimes he would fall asleep inside the car while I was inside, in the middle of winter, tired, waiting for me," recalls this emotional fan of Liverpool, his home city's team.

In fact, for many years he played at the academy of "Everton, the other team in the city," he explains. He was a good footballer, although seeing that he might not make it to the Premier League he began studying law. Everything was going well until that summer of 2012 when he went to Bestival, a music festival on the Isle of Wight. When he was returning by bus to Liverpool, a tire on the vehicle blew out, the driver lost control and they crashed "into a giant 400-year-old tree." "Three people died. The three who were in the front, by the window. I was in the aisle and since I wasn't wearing a seatbelt I went flying. My best friend, Michael Molloy, was by the window. He died," he remembers.

A before and after in Cambridge

Zach suffered a severe spinal injury, with a ruptured spinal cord. He went through many doctors and specialists. "They told me I would never walk again. I told them I wanted to leave that chair, but I seemed doomed. I ended up giving up and accepting what was dealt to me. I tried not to think about it much, and I went to festivals, went out partying, and I jumped out of a plane with a parachute," he says. That was until his mother found the PrimePhysio center in Cambridge, a year after the accident. Zach, resigned, almost skipped the first appointment set with the center, as he had gone out partying the night before. "My father kept calling me and didn't stop until he found me. And he accompanied me there," he recalls.

And his life changed completely. "They worked with good specialists, exoskeletons... and I kept improving," he asserts. At that time, he had gained too much weight and had thin legs, without much muscle mass. But the results arrived. For almost five years, he would make progress. "Seeing a muscle react was a success," he says while showing on his social media profile a video that shows the summary of the process: the first step with the exoskeleton, the first day he walked with crutches, the first time he went out on the street... and all with a background song that his friend Michael Molloy, a great music lover, had recorded. "He was very talented," he recalls emotionally.

"I felt alive again. And I looked for new challenges," he says. And not just any challenge. He decided that he would walk the London Marathon, and that he would start a fundraising campaign for spinal cord injury research. Training hard, with his father always nearby, he was able to do 10 km. Afterwards, a half marathon. And finally, the marathon, after almost 12 hours of titanic effort. Zach had surprised everyone. Never had someone with a spinal injury like his managed to walk a marathon. "But once you complete a challenge, you feel empty. It was necessary to find another one," he reasons.

"Since I like music, I decided to come to the Sónar festival in Barcelona. One of the doctors from Cambridge told me that, since I was coming, I should go see the Guttmann Foundation to see how they work and not stop doing physical work. I fell in love with the place and the way of life here. It was while talking to them that I took the step into the pool. I needed a new sport and they told me about wheelchair basketball, but I wanted more movement." And that was when Maria Folgado, a swimming coach, came into action and opened the doors of the pools to him. Zach would end up training at the Club Natació de Mataró and would discover that he felt even freer in the water. "Mataró has its headquarters facing the sea. I fell in love with the place and would even end up buying an apartment there," he explains. His next challenge was to join the British Paralympic team and represent his country at the Paralympic Games. Furthermore, in 2020 he hiked to the highest peak in the United Kingdom and in 2021 he swam from Formentera to Ibiza.

Inside the pool, Zach moves with ease. He does not need his crutches. "Since I am always looking for challenges, I found out that you could ask for permission to swim across the Strait of Gibraltar, and I signed up via email. They told me they would get back to me... and I forgot about it. I continued competing in swimming, giving motivational talks all over the world, and I also became a father. And this year, when I didn't even remember it, they told me that if I wanted to, I could go this August," he says with a laugh. "So I started training hard. By then I was already living in Ibiza and I joined a club, where at first they saw me out of shape. But I started to recover, I trained in open water and I did a 10 km race in Formentera. Then a longer one in Sant Feliu de Guíxols. And I saw that I was ready," he says.

A few weeks ago, accompanied by his family, Zach went to Tarifa. But in one of the previous training sessions, upon getting out of the water, he started to shake. "Hypothermia. The Atlantic water is colder. It was sunny, I saw a beautiful sea and I didn't even think about the temperature," he recalls. That scare almost left him unable to do the crossing, but he recovered in time. "Besides, the organizers told me that the water is freezing when you leave Tarifa, but as you head towards Morocco the temperature rises," he explains. So he jumped into the water and became the first person with a spinal cord injury to cross the Strait. In about four hours he had achieved a new challenge. It will not be the last. The next one: creating his foundation to help people who have gone through experiences similar to his.