Constant Reinvention Has Blake Haxton Competing in Paris, Ready To Race His Canoe To History

Blake Haxton enjoys his job as a high yield research analyst at an investment fund in Columbus, Ohio. He also knows what typically happens when he starts talking about work.

“It’s usually a real conversation killer,” said Haxton.

Thankfully for Haxton, his other life as a two-sport Paralympic athlete is compelling enough to fill an anthology.

Haxton, 33, has been living a life of reinvention since 2009, when the star high school rower somehow contracted necrotizing fasciitis — better known as the flesh-eating disease. Surgeries to save his life eventually left him without legs, but Haxton ultimately found his way back to sports, making the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games as a rower, the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games as a rower and sprint canoeist, and now the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games as a sprint canoe specialist.

Coming off a third-place finish at the world championships in May, Haxton heads into the Paris Games with big expectations.

“I think the ceiling is a gold medal,” he said at the Team USA Media Summit in April.

That Haxton is competing at all is a miracle in of itself.

Back in March of 2009, he was the captain of the rowing team at Upper Arlington High School just outside Columbus and fielding Division I offers when his right calf became infected. The only way to stop the infection, Haxton said, was to amputate the tissue. So doctors removed his right leg below the knee, as well as the skin on his right triceps.

“That was it,” Haxton said. “That was it for the infection.”

His medical problems were only beginning, though.

While on the operating table to remove that tissue, his heart stopped. His kidney and liver failed too.

“Like, nothing worked,” he said.

Doctors used a bypass machine to force blood into Haxton’s vital organs, a process that saved his life but caused the rest of his right leg and his entire left leg to die from a lack of oxygen.

Ultimately Haxton went under the knife 20 times in about six weeks, and barely remembers any of it. He also still has no idea how he contracted the disease, which he says is common.

The entire experience, he said, was “very disorienting.”

And thus began his first reinvention.

No longer able to row, Haxton enrolled at Ohio State University and began an academic journey that saw him earn a B.S. in finance and then a law degree from the hometown school.

Along the way, he rediscovered rowing.

Early on, Haxton wanted nothing to do with his former sport. If he couldn’t feel that intense full-body exertion, it wasn’t really rowing, he reasoned. Eventually, needing to get in shape, Haxton tried arm-and-shoulders rowing on a machine. It turned out he kind of liked it, and his times on the machine were nearing the national team standard. That gave Haxton a goal, and by 2016 he was racing the arms-and-shoulders single sculls event at the Rio Paralympics, finishing fourth.

Rowing served as a natural gateway into Para sports. Canoe then proved to be the right fit.

It began when Haxton witnessed a paracanoe race in Rio.

The all-out 200-meter sprint immediately piqued his interest, giving the sport a much different dynamic than the 2,000-meter rowing races he was used to. Deb Page, the American Canoe Association’s paracanoe chair, seized on that interest and got him to a training camp.

“It was just so fun. I just had a blast doing it,” Haxton said. “Canoe is a way more laidback culture than rowing. And I love rowing, but it’s a little more buttoned up, a little more formal, a little more all that stuff.”

If rowing is a small sport, canoe is “a fraction of that,” Haxton said. And that close-knit culture appealed to him.

After racing for a while in both sports, his next reinvention began to take shape at the 2019 rowing world championships. Changes to his classification had made it more difficult for athletes without lower limbs to compete, so he planned to transition fully to the canoe after Tokyo 2020. When the pandemic postponed the Tokyo Games, he ended up qualifying to race in both sports.

As Team USA’s only two-sport athlete in Tokyo, Haxton won a silver medal in the canoe men’s va’a event and finished fourth in the B final in rowing. He hasn’t rowed again since.

Canoe is perfect for Haxton. He enjoys the shorter races — and the shorter training sessions, which are primarily off the water on a machine similar to a rowing machine. The training fits in nicely after long days crunching numbers at Brandywine Global Investment Management in Columbus.

“I don't do much else but work and train,” Haxton said.

At some point, Haxton envisions himself getting back on the water the way most of us experience it — paddling a canoe for pleasure, or cruising around on a pontoon with some tunes on. In the meantime, he’s embracing the competitive side of sprint canoe.

Haxton has now earned bronze medals at consecutive world championships — each time behind a pair of Brazilian paddlers — and with each race he sees himself making progress.

“In Tokyo, I don't think there was anything I could have done to get gold,” Haxton said. “(The winner) had to make a mistake for me to get past him. … I’m not sure it’s that way anymore. My best race, his best race, we’ll see. He probably wins more often than not, but I think I’ve got a shot.”