Bob Molinatti could spin a heart-coddling tale about how he grew up in Colchester as a school runner, only to injure his spinal cord and become a pioneering wheelchair racer and, this coming weekend, the first para-athlete inducted into the Vermont Sports Hall of Fame.
Then again, cancel the swelling music and stock-video montage. Molinatti may joke that his early professional headshots make him look like “Hollywood Bob,” but the man who now lives in sunny California would rather toss the script and tell it like it is.
The 64-year-old rewinds back four decades to when he won the Los Angeles Marathon’s wheelchair division in 1986 and 1988, only to finish off the podium at the 1988 Paralympics in Seoul, South Korea.
“I recognized I couldn’t go on racing forever,” he says today. “We were starting to see many, many more alternative sports, but I felt we weren’t getting the right kind of coverage.”
Molinatti remembers the media reporting how professional athletes sweated and strategized, but summed up para-events as “a nice day, and everybody had a good time.”
As the nation’s onetime fastest wheelchair marathoner, he knew otherwise.
“It’s a lot of hard work, a lot of dedication, a lot of pain, a lot of strife. I wanted people to see and feel that.”
And so Molinatti went to work as a television commentator for several big-city stations as well as for ESPN, where co-hosted the first series to feature elite athletes with disabilities.
Log onto his website, bobmolinatti.com, and you can hear him call the 1999 Carlsbad 5000 race in California. South African Krige Schabort was rocketing to the finish when Canadian Jeff Adams caught up with mere inches between their wheelchairs, the curb, a potential crash and a $10,000 world record.
“They’re going 23 miles an hour downhill, full-bore sprint,” Molinatti recalls of the race Adams won. “For me, I don’t feel like I’m talking about disabled sports, I feel like I’m talking about sports. Great sports.”
But before the hall of famer continues, he offers a disclaimer.
“One of the things you need to know about me is I am not an ‘ah, shucks,’ kick-the-can-down-the-road kind of disabled guy. I refused to settle back into that role. You can’t expect me to be humble just because I’m in a wheelchair. There’s a story here, and I’m going to tell the frickin’ story.”
‘A heartwarming story of overcoming adversity.’ Not.
Molinatti’s website mixes past recordings with present reflections, such as his irritation that Paralympic coverage too often favors how athletes reach the games rather than how they compete in them.
“If you’ve gotten to the point where, after you lost a leg, you’re running 100 meters in 10 seconds, I want to talk about that,” he says. “But the big TV producers know what we like as a public, and it is a heartwarming story of overcoming adversity.”
With apologies, here’s his:
Molinatti grew up as a track-running member of the Colchester High School class of 1976, only to be kicked off the team for violating its code of conduct.
“I thought I was the big superstar and didn’t have a standard to adhere to like everyone else,” he recalls. “My coach gave me my walking papers and held me accountable.”
Turning a 180, Molinatti enlisted in the U.S. Army. One Friday night in 1978, he joined a couple of friends for a car ride.
“I was so tired, I went to sleep in the backseat.”
The 19-year-old woke to discover he’d been in an accident that paralyzed him from the waist down.
“When my parents came into the ICU with me on the fringe of dying, every cliché thing you’ve ever seen in a Hallmark movie was there.”
But again, Molinatti isn’t one for sentimentality. Returning home, he struggled to roll his new wheelchair about the wintry campus of the University of Vermont, spurring him to transfer to the endless summer of California State University in Long Beach.
A broadcast journalism major nicknamed “Ironside,” Molinatti watched several classmates use their own wheelchairs to race.
“I was a decent cross-country runner in high school, so I understood the nature of training,” he recently told Chris Waddell, a Middlebury College alumnus and fellow Paralympian, in a podcast interview. “But I had no real knowledge of the mechanics of the machine.”
As other students tinkered with hot rods, Molinatti built his first racing chair, a spray-painted “hunk-a-junk four-wheeler” light-years behind today’s aerodynamically advanced three-wheel models.
“I was hooked,” he says, “but I still didn’t know what I was doing.”
‘Stop focusing on our so-called disabilities’
With help, Molinatti started his first race in 1985. He finished last. Yet a year later, he won the inaugural Los Angeles Marathon and went on to compete in more than 100 events worldwide, including two Paralympics and “seven or eight, I lost count” Boston Marathons.
Para-sports at the time didn’t receive much press. But when Molinatti bagged his second Los Angeles victory after one of his steering handles broke, he scored a television interview.
“Bob had that kind of personality that jumped off the screen,” producer Phil Olsman went on to tell the Los Angeles Times.
Olsman suggested Molinatti join his station’s commentating team. Instead, the athlete flew halfway around the world to the 1988 Seoul Paralympics.
“All it had to do was not rain,” Molinatti recalls of the South Korean marathon. “We got 13 miles in, and it rained. My grip went away. I beat my hand rims until I bled. I mean, like Rocky. I was hypothermic — and going home with no medal.”
Molinatti finished just off the podium, in fourth place.
“I said it was worse than ending up in a wheelchair,” he remembers telling reporters. “I’m very hell-bent on success; it’s just who I am. No matter how good or bad I felt about my effort, I failed.”
Moving on to lose the 1989 Los Angeles Marathon by three seconds, Molinatti decided to try the broadcast booth the next year.
“It’s time the public stop focusing on our so-called disabilities,” he told the press at the time. “Wheelchair athletes are no different than other athletes. We’re competitive and we’re competent.”
Even so, Molinatti had things to learn. Olsman assigned him to call one race from a motorcycle sidecar. As the fledgling commentator shouted canned facts and figures over the roar of a speeding engine, a voice in his earpiece screamed louder.
“Bob, shut the f— up,” he recalls hearing. “Put your notes away. Talk about what you know.”
Lesson learned, Molinatti moved on to cover the Boston and New York City marathons and Atlanta’s Peachtree Road Race, as well as the Paralympics in Atlanta in 1996, Sydney in 2000, Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012. He also co-hosted ESPN’s pioneering shows “Breakaway” and “In Pursuit,” in which athletes with disabilities tackled everything from the heights of skiing to the depths of scuba diving.
‘I’m going to take this right to the end’
Paralympic coverage has exploded in the streaming era, with NBC airing a record 1,200 hours from the pandemic-postponed 2021 Tokyo games. But Molinatti, who left that job a decade ago, sums up what he saw with such adjectives as “repetitive,” “packaged” and “unimaginative.”
“The mainstream gets one idea in its head and just keeps running with it,” he says. “Sometimes you wish you could say something a little differently or be a little more aggressive, but when you’re working for NBC, you’re working for NBC. They have a standard and we have to conform.”
Molinatti recalls a conversation with someone who feared the possibility of watching racers collide.
“What is better than seeing someone want it so bad that they will risk life and limb rounding a corner in a pack, only to end up laying upside down in a crumpled chair?” the athlete responded. “That would have been the best thing ever.”
Anything but retired, Molinatti is producing online projects from a home studio when he’s not helping younger peers in the Paralyzed Veterans of America program.
“I felt like I had made these tremendous strides on TV to kick our sport into a different gear, and they kept wanting to force it back into the box,” he says. “Maybe the next generation won’t have to have that conversation about ‘inspiration’ all the time.”
The Vermont Sports Hall of Fame is set to induct Molinatti on Saturday alongside skiers Suzi Chaffee and Doug Lewis, snowboarder Kelly Clark, mountain biker Lea Davison, college football player Jake Eaton, soccer player John Koerner, basketball coach David Fredrickson and players Jasmyn Huntington Fletcher and Morgan Valley.
A public dinner will raise funds for Prevent Child Abuse Vermont.
Molinatti will be there, ready with a short speech to thank his Vermont friends. If he was ever to follow up with an autobiography, his colleagues joke he should title it, “Confessions of a Wheelchair Gigolo.” The subject, for his part, favors “Inadvertent Inspiration.”
“Because I never meant to be one, but I somehow ended up one,” he explains. “My life has exceeded all expectations. I’ve raced around the world, broadcast for ESPN, NBC … everything but CBS. I’ve been to the proverbial mountaintop.”
Happy ending? Hardly.
“There’s this piece of me at 64 going on 65 that’s still a little malcontent,” he concludes. “I want more. To the best of my knowledge, this is a one-shot ride. I’m going to take this right to the end.”
