Nui Bartlett (centre) with the gold on the podium at the end of the Adaptive CrossFit Games in Las Vegas on September 14. Left is runner-up Mat Hotho (US) and at right 3rd place-getter Kyle Harper (South Africa).
A once-rising Hawke’s Bay rugby star whose playing career ended at the age of just 23 with a paralysing injury 19 years ago has won a world title at CrossFit.
It’s the icing on the cake for the now 42-year-old Nui Bartlett, and at the same time a test of the personal mantra: “The fear of being inadequate provides us with the tools to be adequate.”
Once asked by his wife where that came from, he told her, his strongest supporter of all, it just came to him.
Now, he hopes that qualifying for the Neuromuscular Moderate division of the Adaptive CrossFit Games in Las Vegas on September 11-14 and ascending the podium for the gold medal will motivate others.
He wanted to show his four kids what could be achieved.
“Everything happens for a reason,” he says. ”I don’t know what the reason was, but perhaps I just wasn’t supposed to be a professional rugby player.“
Bartlett was a second-half Magpies replacement against Canterbury at McLean Park on the night of July 28, 2006, playing the first game in the new semi-professional era of the NPC.
When a maul collapsed he suffered a devastating spinal cord injury - a fractured dislocation of his C5-C6 veterbrae.
He underwent emergency surgery in Hawke’s Bay Hospital and was flown to the Burwood Spinal Unit in Christchurch to start the rehabilitation.
“When I woke up I was totally paralysed,” he says, relating that there was only very limited movement in one arm, very little else, and he was told he had no more than a 20% chance of walking again.
“But I refused to accept those odds as my future.”
He learned to walk again, and was able to embark on the stages that led him to CrossFit, in which he now runs classes at Evolution Fitness, run by brother and sister-in-law Anaru and Jeda Bartlett.
CrossFit, and its community, he says, have given him everything he would have wanted out of rugby.
He was too big to play weight-restricted Ross Shield at primary school, but did play in the Hastings Boys’ High School first XV, at No 8.
He had a growing national reputation in Sevens and touch before he finished school, and laughs when he thinks of missing out on what would have been a third year in the Hawke’s Bay Secondary Schools rugby team, yet achieving the dream of playing for the Magpies 12 months later.
In 2003, his club, Tamatea, was beaten 40-29 by Taradale in Hawke’s Bay’s Maddison Trophy semi-finals, and Bartlett hadn’t thought of the possibility he might be playing for the Magpies any time soon.
“Mum rang up and said it was in the paper - I was in the Magpies. I said, what does that mean? She said, ‘you go to training on Monday’”.
For a time he became one of Hawke’s Bay’s more versatile players, his first “ever” match at open-side flanker being for the Magpies, for whom he also played centre in his 23 matches of Kahungunu loyalty to Hawke’s Bay over three seasons of Division 2 NPC rugby, and the one game up top.
His achievements over the years since the injury multiplied.
He lived and worked in Brisbane for about five years, and came home about the time of “the Covid”, after being unable to continue the job, amid what he says is still 58% mobility impairment.
It was not enough to stop him returning to rugby, and his favourite Touch, and he became a coach at Outkasts in Touch, and the Tamatea premier rugby side, and plans to now coach the kids through their grades.
He found CrossFit to be one of the “safest places” to be, training 8-10 times, over 6 days a week, knowing that each day he has to get in and do the mahi, before the chronic fatigue sets in.
The road to Las Vegas started in January as he prepared for the online stages, of one workout a week for three weeks.
He made the top 20 qualifying for the semi-finals, where there were five workouts in five days, finishing third among the 10 qualifying for the finals in Las Vegas, where second and third places respectively went to cerebral palsy victims Mat Hotho, from the US, and Kyle Harper, from South Africa.
Bartlett was humbled by the support he got, needing about $20,000 to finance the project. He was the only New Zealand entry among the original 40 aiming at the title.
The sponsors and supporters included Dr David Lawson, who was at the game in 2006, left to follow Bartlett to hospital and did the initial surgery, before the flight to Christchurch.
As he and friends sought help for the trip he told them of his injury and the fight-back over the years.
“What followed were years of rehab, grit, setbacks, and breakthroughs.
“Through it all I discovered a new purpose and passion in adaptive fitness - proving not only to myself, but to others, that the human spirit is far stronger than circumstance.”
Doug Laing has more than 50 years’ experience as a journalist and has been a senior reporter in Napier for 38 years, with The Daily Telegraph and for Hawke’s Bay Today, covering most aspects of news and sports.