ST. PETERSBURG — When beginning Paralympians and Special Olympians train at North Shore Aquatic Complex on Tuesday and Thursday nights, they are encouraged to stop at the plaque honoring Brad Snyder.
If they can’t see it, that’s fine. Neither can Snyder. The inscription is also in braille.
Snyder, who lost his eyesight to a buried bomb in Afghanistan in 2011, has won gold at three straight Paralympic Games. He is chasing a fourth at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. The comeback started Aug. 28-30 at the Para Pan Pacific Championships at Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, California. Among fully blind swimmers, he holds the world record in the 100-meter freestyle at 57.18 seconds.
“He swam faster blind than he did when he could see,” said Fred Lewis, who coached him at St. Petersburg Aquatics.
Snyder calls North Shore his favorite place on earth.
“I can imagine in my transition to heaven, I’d be on the pool deck by the layout chair or chaise lounges,” he said.
He probably wouldn’t sit long. Lewis would be barking corrections about stroke technique — and Snyder would happily take them.
That was what Lewis gave him after the blast: normalcy. Swimming, which Snyder had done since childhood, gave him purpose.
Less than a year after the injury, he won two golds and a silver at the 2012 Paralympics in London. Four years later, he won three golds and a silver in Rio de Janeiro. He won another gold at the pandemic-delayed 2020 Games in Tokyo.
Along the way, he wrote a book, married and became a father.
From Bradenton to Annapolis
Snyder started swimming after his family moved from Nevada to Florida. When a Bradenton club folded in 1998, the family found St. Petersburg Aquatics. He enrolled at Northeast High School for his junior and senior seasons.
“Coaching has changed a lot, but Fred was the right kind of coach for me,” he said. “He knew how to push my buttons.”
Lewis saw a swimmer who was mature, focused and relentless. In a recommendation letter to the Naval Academy, Lewis wrote that if he had a daughter, he would want her dating Snyder, calling him honest, a great citizen and an extremely hard worker who doesn’t stop until the job is done.
The academy accepted him immediately.
As a freshman against Army, Snyder won the 1,000 freestyle, an early race that Lewis said “turned the tide” in a Navy upset.
Snyder felt he leveled off after that and thought about quitting. He stuck it out and was elected a captain.
“I didn’t feel I was ready for any team captain,” he said. “The other captains were big, tall and strapping and an avatar of military leadership. I felt small and unprepared. I stepped into big shoes, but I learned through the process. Once I started doing it, I felt OK.”
Snyder graduated with a degree in naval architecture and chose explosive ordnance disposal over the SEAL teams.
“I was torn but liked the ethics of removing something that could hurt people,” he said.
He deployed to Iraq in 2008 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, then to Afghanistan in 2011 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. He found the culture fascinating, the mission frightening and the Taliban active.
‘I must be dead’
On the day his life changed, Snyder and about 40 others walked into a valley where grapes grew on vines.
“I remember all of it,” he said. “My perception is that I don’t remember losing any time, although doctors said, ‘You lost consciousness.’
“The last thing I remember is that there was this field that was likely buried so long ago that grass had grown over the top of it for weeks, if not months. I thought it would be safe on the grass, so I jumped on the field, but an IED was buried and it knocked me back.
“There was this boom and I woke up. … I don’t know. I woke up and said, ‘Oh, I must be dead.’ There was no sound, I felt isolated and I could barely see out of my left eye.”
Another officer brought him back to reality: “Your face looks pretty bad. Can you stand up and walk?”
Walking toward a ravine, Snyder realized he couldn’t tell where he was putting his feet. A second officer picked him up and carried him to the helicopter.
“The Air Force medic said, ‘If you’re talking, we can’t give you meds,’” Snyder recalled. “And he said, ‘We can’t suture your wounds unless you’re passed out.’”
After a short flight to Kandahar, medics kept him under for 60 hours. He was intubated so fragments could be removed from his esophagus. Along with his eyesight, he lost part of his hearing to a ruptured eardrum and sustained deep cuts, burns to his right arm and a broken metatarsal.
Physical, mental recovery begins
When Lewis heard, he reached out to a former swimmer, John “Sandy” Pigeon, a Navy SEAL, whose wife helped get Snyder and his family settled at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
There, Snyder found himself facing a revolving door of well-meaning Navy officials offering grants, services and jobs.
“I was very grateful, but I told them, ‘I need to go to sleep, I can’t absorb all of this,’” he said.
Because Walter Reed does not specialize in treating blindness, officials transferred him to James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, part of the Department of Veterans Affairs. He stayed about five weeks.
Allowed to sleep at his parents’ house on weekends, Snyder reunited with old friends and swimming teammates before Christmas. They hugged him and honored him at a First Friday event, and he could hear the sorrow in their voices.
Lewis had a different approach.
“We gotta do something,” he said. “We gotta do something.”
“He was, ‘Great to see you. We’re having practice tomorrow. Why don’t you come over?’” Snyder recalled.
He showed up with no plan, no agenda and no swimsuit. Lewis handed him a new pair of trunks, a scuba mask and a pool noodle tied to a rope.
“I thought, ‘How do I get him to go back and forth and get everyone else on the team going?’” Lewis said. “So I gave him a lane. Instead of four swimmers in a lane, we had five. Nobody complained — because it was Brad.
“I told him to get in the water and stand an arm length from the wall with your arm straight.”
Listening to the instructions, Snyder felt normal and confident for the first time since the blast.
“Coach said, ‘When you get a foot-and-a-half from the wall, the noodle will touch the wall, which allows you to swim back and forth. You can do a bucket turn and go. It’ll be a piece of cake.’ As he explained it, it was as though he had done it,” Snyder said.
“What made it so natural was that it was North Shore. I knew the locker room, the stands, the lanes, the bubbles on the bottom. When he threw that apparatus in there, I felt, ‘Yeah, this is totally normal.’
“The move to blindness is scary. This was nice and natural, even magical.”
Off and swimming
A transfer to Augusta, Georgia, taught Snyder life skills such as walking with a cane. It also introduced him to Rich Cardillo, a retired Army colonel who had looked over his athletic background.
“Do you realize how fortunate you are to be injured in a Paralympic year?” Cardillo asked.
Snyder was wary — he had watched former teammate Robert Margalis grind toward the Olympics — but he went ahead and got classified.
At the Warrior Games in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in May 2012, he won four gold medals in swimming. A month later, at the U.S. Paralympic swimming trials in Bismarck, North Dakota, he won the 400-meter freestyle in 4:35.62, a time that made him the world leader among blind swimmers.
“They give swimmers sleeves so they don’t bloody their arms by getting them scraped by the lane ropes,” Lewis said. “He got the feeling that he had to have the perfect stroke. If your arms or legs are crooked, you move to the side. Brad self-corrected.”
Just like that, Snyder was off and swimming.
He has rebuilt his life since — and he wants a fourth Paralympics in part so his daughter, Rooney, can watch it.
“I’m happy to be alive. I’m in a fun state of life,” he said. “The Navy prepares you to mitigate fear, uncertainty and nerves. Playing on the pool deck permitted me to succeed.
“At first, I had big concerns. I can’t be a man. I can’t drive, I may or may not be employed, I can’t play catch. Relationships. I was a single guy. Paralympics gave me a space. It gave me purpose. I have the capacity to inspire others while overcoming adversities.
“Rooney will be in the stands. What’s her story going to be? And I hope the outcome is great. It’ll be a good story, one way or another.”
Did you know?
• St. Petersburg Aquatics, St. Petersburg Masters Swimmers and the city combined to pay for Brad Snyder’s plaques at North Shore Aquatic Complex.
• The Florida High School Athletic Association has added adaptive swimming for athletes with disabilities.
• North Shore Aquatic Complex has been a training home for Bobby Finke (gold, 1,500-meter freestyle, and silver, 800 freestyle, 2024 Summer Olympics; gold, 800 and 1,500 freestyle, 2020 Summer Olympics); Melanie Margalis (gold, 800 freestyle relay, 2016 Summer Olympics); and Nicole Haislett (gold, 200 freestyle, 400 medley relay and 400 freestyle relay, 1992 Summer Olympics). Countless others have swum in the Pan American Games or earned college scholarships.
Snyder file
• Author, with Tom Sileo, of “Fire in My Eyes: An American Warrior’s Journey From Being Blinded on the Battlefield to Gold Medal Victory”
• Guest speaker at the 2013 Navy-Marine Corps Ball at the Washington Hilton
• Spokesman for the Bradley, a tactile timepiece named for him
• Endorser for Team Toyota
• Fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the Naval Academy and a leadership instructor for future naval officers
• Doctorate in public policy, with plans to teach
• Athlete representative on the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee board of directors
• Advisory board chairman for the Navy Special Operations Foundation
• Married to Sara Snyder; father of daughter Rooney