Andrew Kooger’s world turned upside down four years ago after he experienced a life-altering mountain bike injury.
But he has endured and fought back and now shares his story as a public speaker and as author of his own autobiography, all while developing a career in banking and competing as a para athlete.
Earlier in life there was barely a sport in which Kooger wasn’t involved. There was Brazilian jiu-jitsu, tennis, weightlifting, he trained for a marathon and there was mountain biking, something he rediscovered after a bad breakup. When the pandemic hit in 2020, many sports became inaccessible, but he could still hit the trails with his bike.
And that led to competitions for Kooger who hails from Hamilton but lives in East Gwillimbury, on Newmarket's border.
“One of the last races of the season I was training for I crashed, I don’t remember the crash at all, it was a trial system I had ridden dozens of times,” he says.
He looks back at his Strava app that he used to record his ride and still sees the footprints of the paramedics working to get him out of a ravine. He required surgery at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre that night to decompress the spinal cord, but the brain bleeds threatened his ability to survive the surgery.
In addition to the brain bleeds, which led to a traumatic brain injury, Kooger had suffered a C6 neck fracture, 12 broken ribs, as well as internal injuries and other spine fractures that sent bone fragments into his spinal cord.
“The surgery was 13 hours long, then they kept me in a medically induced coma for nine days” and on day six his family learned he would likely pull through, he says. “The three months in the hospital… they really focused on just learning how to live with it.
“For me being an athlete, who had had everything stripped from them, I didn’t really buy into it.”
His diagnosis of a T7 injury meant that he was paralyzed below the lower chest.
But he wanted to push the recovery. He went to physiotherapy, of course, but also examined alternatives. He was ultimately able to develop his abdominal muscles and lower back.
Then came the task of re-building his life.
Prior to the crash, he had started a supplements company with his riding partner but Health Canada had put a halt on issuing product licences during the pandemic. After putting the business on pause, they were able to finally get their first product launched last year, followed with the introduction of a protein powder this year.
Meanwhile, Kooger went back to work at the bank in asset management.
“I love working on Bay Street, I do that full time,” he says, adding that the hybrid working model sees him commuting twice a week in a hand-controlled car.
He is becoming well known in Newmarket and Aurora, doing public speaking to school groups and and now paid corporate presentations, although he tries to keep presenting to students at schools and smaller groups. He says he enjoys encouraging people to take control of their lives to pursue positive paths.
Those presentations and writing about his experiences left him felling somewhat vulnerable. He then decided to write a book. Defy the Odds was launched last month and is being distributed on Amazon.
Through his company, Kooger and his business partner have decided to help at-risk youth access sports, which has been such an important part of his world. So they created a non-profit organization called Defy the Odds Foundation, which they are currently building with the help of their network of contacts.
“I’ve worked hard over the last four years since my accident with this vision of what I want to do and build,” he says. “Beyond that, I was able to return to the trails last year with an adaptive (electric assist) mountain bike and I was able to return to the trails that changed my life forever.”
Since then he’s become involved in hand cycling, allowing him to compete again. The sensation of have the motion of a self-propelled bike again felt great, he says. He is now a sponsored adaptive athlete with the High Fives Foundation.
Kooger enjoys sharing the lessons he has learned the past four years rebuilding his life and tells his audience to live every day by being in control, no matter the chaos that may surround them in the world. But living in isolation doesn’t work.
“Most of the pillars I’ve built a network I can trust and lean into,” he says. “You can go fast alone, but you can’t go far.”
